Should we continue to consider Heidegger, to teach him, to think of his philosophy, and its impact? This is a question I have seen offered up for discussion frequently. Answers, as could be expected, represent a range of approaches. An unqualified reply of yes, I would” is not all that infrequent, though in the minority, while a total “no, I would not” is also a common response. However, probably most frequently I see one of qualified “yes, I would, but with strong caveats, or in conjunction with his critics.” The latter of these is normally accompanied with the particular qualification that the shadow cast by Heidegger, both by him the individual and by his philosophy, is difficult to easily skirt when trekking across the development of euro-western philosophy, especially that of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

It is also not infrequent for these discussions to range still farther afield, moving to encompass certain theorists and philosophers deeply influenced by Heidegger. Should we teach or consider them as well? Here an additional concern is raised: what if by teaching them, citing them, thinking with them, we are ourselves aiding and abetting the continued relevance of Heidegger? What are we to make, this extension of the original question asks, not just of Heidegger himself, but of those that the American intellectual historian Richard Wolin refers to as “Heidegger’s Children” (2015)? Here though appreciation or opposition often begins to divide along lines demarcated by political, theoretical, and philosophical affiliation or commitment. I have seen, for example, comparatively few statements that we should refuse to read, think with, or consider the continued relevance of figures such as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, or Herbert Marcuse. This, of course, is not to ignore what criticisms there are of them, but rather to note that such opposition only rarely seems to take the explicit form of a critique of their Heideggerianism, or Heideggerian indebtedness.

However, the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has become a figure of significant criticism within certain sectors of contemporary left-critical theory. While recent ire has been, quite justly I would say, directed at Agamben on account of his rather demonstrable descent into conspiracy tinged writing during 2020 and 2021 regarding the COVID-19 pandemic (2020; 2021), criticism of him within this sector of theoretical and philosophical debate also predates this. Indeed, I have quite often seen recent critiques of Agamben taken as affirming previous critique. While those who comment on him frequently also consider his indebtedness to Carl Schmitt, a figure of whom questions similar to those regarding Heidegger could also be asked, and their notions of sovereignty and the state of exception, Agamben’s intellectual lineage to Heidegger, including pupillage under him through his seminars, is frequently centred (Kotsko 2020).

But still, what do we make of any of them, of Arendt, of Marcuse, of Derrida, of Agamben? Does their indebtedness, which may express greater or lesser degrees of fidelity or closeness, taint their own theoretical and philosophical productions? What if they critiqued Heidegger, as Arendt, Marcuse, and Derrida did, though all in their own ways? What do we make of that? Should we, or can we, consider them without also considering them in relationship to Heidegger?

However, while this secondary questioning may concern some, I do I do not wish to dwell too much on Heidegger’s intellectual children, as to do so would almost certainly add great length to this essay and move us well beyond my intended scope. So, let us return to the original question: should we continue to consider Heidegger?

A Humanistic Social Scientist’s Philosophical Considerations

Before continuing though it is perhaps necessary to preface what I wish to say by way of centring my own positioning in the discussion. I am not a philosopher. My disciplinary training is in anthropology and sociology. In terms of my own work, I would primarily situate it within the realm of what we could broadly call theory (political theory, cultural theory, critical theory, etc.). However, I have long maintained a strong interest in philosophy and in philosophical questions and concerns, in particular those emerging from within what is sometimes still referred to as the “continental” tradition[1] though it is more accurate to refer to my positions as aligning with what Nelson Maldonado-Torres identifies as the “post-continental,” or “post-continentality”[2]. This interest has always been a factor in my thinking because I have long recognized that there is a strong link between philosophy and theory, in particular with metatheory (theory about theory), and from there, between philosophy and methodology, and, thus, ultimately between philosophy and the kind of work that one produces. Indeed, when theory reaches its highest levels of abstraction, the distinction between it and philosophy begins to blur and breakdown.

In my own experience, within what I am inclined to follow the late Immanuel Wallerstein in referring to as the “historical social sciences” (sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, and history) (2007, 7) this relationship—between theory and philosophy—can be at times quite unclear, though not always. It also tends to be further occluded, where and when it occurs, when one considers as well as the long-standing Methodenstreit between those who approach these disciplines through means more scientistic and those inclined towards the humanistic, and their concurrent epistemological divide between largely nomothetic pursuits (the search for explanatory laws of social development) and more idiographic approaches (understanding through interpretation and scepticism towards the pursuit of laws) (Wallerstein 2007, 94).

However, while the ongoing persistence of this intra-disciplinary (and sometimes inter-disciplinary) debate between scientism and humanism is, at the very least, gestured towards in most introductory sociological and anthropological courses, I would be remiss to not recognize that its construction is always already unstable. While I would not deny that it has largely been my experience that those who tend towards the humanistic “culture” are those more likely to be philosophically introspective about their approaches, this is certainly not to deny that those within the disciplines who pursue a more scientific or nomothetic model are less capable of engaging in metatheoretical and philosophical reflection; I have known many scientistic practitioners who reflect often and deeply on the epistemological and metaphysical groundings of their methodologies.

Regardless, such introspection is something that I hold to be important, as, again, there is a direct chain from one’s ontological or metaphysical assumptions about social beings or social objects, to one’s epistemological positions regarding how to come to knowledge of such things, through to one’s direct methodological practices for gaining such understanding. For example, the Anglo-American analytic tradition in philosophy can, though certainly does not always, lead one towards practices centred on methodological individualism and empiricism, while the continental tradition, again certainly not universally, tends to engender more holistic concerns[3].

However, as I said, such binary intra-disciplinary constructions are always already unstable. My own work also tends to not so cleanly fall into one of these camps over the other. I have a strong appreciation for both the humanistic—through influences and interests in semiotics, narrative, alienation, fetishism, modes of self-writing, and ideology critique—as well as the more scientific (though I prefer the term “materialist”), in particular through a continuing relevance of political economy and its critique as a kind of necessary grounding upon which to understand the development of the former.

The important point here in stating all of this though is that while some philosophers, perhaps in a display of their own disciplinary decadence (Gordon 2007; Rabaka 2010) may consider me to little more than a non-specialist dabbler, my interjection into this conservation comes from a perspective of recognizing that such disciplinary boundaries are themselves largely constructs of the post-Enlightenment euro-western university, and, more so, that these are questions of importance to those not just within the specialist disciplines. We all, as they say, have a horse in this race.

The Heidegger Problem

So, to restate, again, but more fully, my original question: where do I, as a non-philosopher, a non-specialist, stand with regard to the question of Heidegger the philosopher and the continued teaching and relevance of his philosophy? In short? I would say, I think without causing much controversy, that we should all be at the very least weary of Heidegger’s presence in theory & philosophy. We all know why at this point in our shared historical development, and so nothing I could say on the matter would be particularly novel, or some new rendition of the narrative.

But, to briefly recall the facts, Heidegger, for all of his stature as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, if not the most influential, and indeed of much of the modernist period, was a Nazi in the 1930s and 1940s. And was he continued to be an active member of the national socialist movement all the way until the end of that regime with the raising of the Soviet flag in Berlin. The public record on the matter is unassailable. His actions during his time at the University of Freiburg, both during and after the period of his rectorship, is well known, where and when he lectured on die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung (the “inner truth and greatness” of national socialism) (2014, 222).

While some have attempted to disarm such statements from Heidegger, pointing to supposedly qualifying statements appended to the above regarding “nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen” (“namely, the encounter between planetary technology and modern humanity”) (2014, 222) critics have often remained unconvinced. The attempt to disarm such statements appear, Martin Gessmann suggests, to more resemble actions of self-defence than defence (2017, 115). Others, meanwhile, attempt to waive away these statements, and all other actions and utterances made by Heidegger during the Nazi period, as the half-hearted, naïve, selfish, or some combination thereof, political moves of someone attempting to survive the arrival of the Hitlerian movement to power, and that there was, otherwise, no meaningful connection between his philosophy and his movements during that time.

However, with the presentation of new evidence, the uncovering of new or previously unpublished writing, assessments should, and must, change. The more recent publication of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks), first in German and more recently in English (2016; 2017; 2017), and their clear indication by Heidegger himself as part of his broader philosophical œuvre, do much to indicate this his commitment to antisemitism, or anti-Judaism (which is the typological suggestion of David Nirenberg [2013] and Domenico Losurdo [2001][4]) was more than just a convenient public facing praxis meant to ride out the wave of the period of Nazi political power.

Further, while many commentators have noted that explicit antisemitism disappears from the post-War volumes of the Schwarze Hefte, it would be an expression of our own naivety to believe that this in itself is indicative of the disappearance of Heidegger’s personal antisemitism. And indeed, regardless of the lack of an actively present antisemitism in either the post-War Schwarze Hefte or the major philosophical work published during his lifetime, one can also not avoid the fact that, as Alain Badiou describes it, “his obstinate and thus decided silence” (2007, 481) with regards to the Shoah and other Nazi atrocities towards the Jewish people after the War rings out defiantly in its present absence.

Thus, while I find myself otherwise disinterested in much of his philosophical and theoretical project, for reasons that I will touch upon later in this essay, I am quite inclined to agree with Badiou in noting that Heidegger should only be approached with heightened caution, and “without obliterating the facts” (2007, 481) of his affiliations and affirmations. But, taking in all of that, and being quite mindful of it, I find myself at the same time consistently dissatisfied with the more well-known criticisms of Heidegger from the left-critical side of theory and philosophy. While I do grant that there are more or less advanced engagements, confrontations, and/or concerns with Heidegger emergent from left-critical theory in the past 70 years, ranging from Badiou (2007) to Adorno (2019), as well as Fredric Jameson (2009; 2016), each beginning from different starting points and arriving at, at times, startlingly different assessments, there are two principal, shared concerns with left-critical theoretical and philosophical critiques of Heidegger that I would like to explore: an endogenous dimension and an exogenous one. And, more so, in exploring these it is my desire to say something more about the content and form of left-critical theoretical and philosophical thought and production itself, and of Marxism in particular, than Heidegger, the latter of whom has already seen much ink spilt.

The Endogenous Dimension: Antisemitism

The first of what I am identifying in this essay as problematic left-critical moves in the critique of Heidegger is one that I have come to think of as the easy path: this is the attempt to simply relegate Heidegger and his thought to the rubbish pile of philosophy and the history of thought. It an easy path in the sense that it is the path that centres somewhat entirely on Heidegger’s antisemitism and his allegiance with the German national socialist movement. I note that this is easy because Heidegger himself makes it easy: the Hitlerian Nazi variant of fascism, and indeed all fascisms, is worthy of contempt, ridicule, and total opposition. Thus, to align oneself with such political movements is to offer oneself up to contempt, ridicule, and total opposition. This is to be expected. There is no leap in logic here present, nor complex moral quagmires to be waded through, only a recognition of history and of the nature of perhaps the most supremely industrially, annihilatory violent politics and political movements to have emerged within the heart of Europe.

Now, before I make myself misunderstood, or in case at some future point there is an attempt to misconstrue what I am saying, what I am not saying is that I think this path towards the critique of Heidegger is an easy one because fascism and antisemitism are things easy to deal with or that can be rather simply dismissed. I take both quite seriously, and thus agree with such moves to condemn, ridicule, and oppose. I also further recognize that within the left itself antisemitism is prevalent, though in ways that the left often does not deeply engage or seriously consider.

Rather though, in calling attention to the path of critique which I have signified as the “easy” one, I am calling it easy precisely because opposition to fascism is, to the extent to which we may speak of such a thing, “common sense.” Outside of fascist movements themselves, both traditional and alt-right, as well as their self-serving platformers, opposition to fascism should be the default stance, though, I will admit, the right-ward turn in mainstream european and euro-american politics in recent years does give me pause with regards to the normative nature of such a statement. Regardless though, while we can and should stand on guard against left-right (so-called “red-brown”) alliances, which are presently a much more significant problem than much of the left is willing to admit to, the left has, since the inter-War period of the 1920s and 1930s, often identified itself strongly with the anti-fascist impulse. Thus, to bring this back around to my point, this path to critiquing Heidegger is one we might call “easy” because it activates common political positions and allegiances without necessitating much in regard to critical thought.

Further, what I am also attempting to draw out by gesturing towards the general lack of critical thought that makes this path enticing, and which I alluded to above, is my actual point regarding the endogenous—that is, internal to—problem of the critique. Here by endogenous I mean that I generally feel that much of the left lacks what we might be inclined to refer to as the moral or ethical footing from which to critique Heidegger’s antisemitism due to very real, and quite often unconfronted, problems internal to its own historical development vis-à-vis antisemitism. Again, so as not be misunderstood or misconstrued, this is not to say that critiquing Heidegger’s antisemitism is not warranted from the left, or that it should not be done, but rather that the nature of such critiques from the left generally evoke a profound lack of inner-looking self-reflectiveness and self-reflexiveness with regards to its own historic and contemporaneous antisemitism. This should be taken to be the problem that it is given that the fact that form taken by the easy rejection of Heidegger is generally a moral or ethical opposition, rather than simply, or strictly, a political, philosophical, or theoretical one.

It would be easier here to dwell on something like the notable antisemitism of the Soviet government under the central leadership of Joseph Stalin, and of particular events like the Delo Vrachey (“Doctor’s Plot”) of the late Stalin period, but, as Stalin is generally not upheld by those claiming the mantle of Marxism other than committed Marxist-Leninists and Maoists, then it is not one that generally troubles the left and is thus easily critiqued as one of the many Stalinist “excesses” or crimes. As such, perhaps then the most unsettling moment of Marxian antisemitism was Marx’s own, best displayed in his inarguably antisemitic tract “On the Jewish Question” (1978). This text, where Marx was responding to the work of a fellow Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, in its second movement makes several arguments which are, to all but his more dyed in the wool apologists, unquestionably antisemitic. Marx in this text speaks of a supposed “real Jew” for whom their “worldly cult” is “huckstering,” and their “worldly god” money (48). Marx speaks further of being able to discern within Judaism “a universal antisocial element” (48) and calls for the “emancipation of mankind from Judaism” (49).

Much as with those who offer up unqualified defences of Heidegger, the defenders of Marx tend to make one of two kinds of arguments. Firstly, there is the quantitative variety, which, similar to those made of Heidegger, and as noted by Peter Trawny and Andrew Mitchell (2017, xx-xxi), goes something like this: taken together, Marx’s remarks on Jewish people and Judaism make up only a small part of the entire corpus of his works, and thus to dwell on a text such as the one I mentioned is to make antisemitic mountains out of molehills. The second variety of moves to exonerate we might call a qualitative one, which, again similar to defences of Heidegger, attempt to essentially dissociate what might be considered the lamentable personal failings of Marx the person with the value and impact of his overall theoretical project (Trawny and Mitchel 2017, xxi).

To these two defences of Marx on this question we can add a third related move: Marx did not mean what he said, or Marx meant something different than how it is taken. In this regard, Marx, in calling for the emancipation of society from “Judaism” is actually said to have meant the emancipation of society from huckstering come capitalism. However, even if one is able to perhaps excavate some kernel of truth from such an argument, the parallels between Marx’s thought here—even if taken to be some deviation of his “young” period or placed within the genealogical context of his own Jewish heritage—and of the anti-Judaism identified by Losurdo and Nirenberg is difficult to avoid.

And indeed, in writing this I can already anticipate pained cries of disagreement that will manifest in ways that themselves indicate either the quantitative or qualitative forms of exoneration for Marx, particularly in light my drawing a parallel between the defences or excuses for Heideggerian antisemitism and the Marxian variety. “But Heidegger was an actual Nazi! Marx was not!” As if the inarguable fact of Heidegger’s throwing in of his lot with probably the most violently and annihilatory antisemitic regime this world has ever known excuses Marx’s own antisemitism. It does not.

The inevitable recourse to a claimed incommensurability of Marx’s antisemitic writings and Heidegger’s antisemitic political commitments is not particularly sound grounds from which to claim objection because implicit within such a claimed incommensurability is a qualitative stratification of forms of antisemitism, from less to more awful, less to more objectionable, less to more violent to Jewish people. But, as the Columbian decolonial philosopher and theorist Eduardo Mendieta notes in his own commentary on Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte, there is no such thing as a distinction between a crass or vulgar antisemitism, or any other form of racism, and a supposedly sophisticated or classy variety which can be rendered as, “more excusable, acceptable, or tolerable … because of its degree of ‘culture’” (2017, 41). As he continues, this would be a supreme folly, and nothing more than an act of self-defensive defence, as “All forms of racism and anti-Semitism are as culpable and undesirable as the virulent, pedestrian, and unthinking forms we have painfully learned to immediately reject and denounce” (2017, 41).

Yet, moves towards incommensurability are only the explicit form of objection to this critique of critique which attempts to diffuse the bomb of Marx and Marxism’s endogenous antisemitism. And this is worth noting because, outside direct attempts to either read out Marx’s antisemitism, as in Isaac Deutscher (2017) who reads Marx, alongside Freud, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Spinoza as essentially Jewish heretics who still belong to an essentially Jewish tradition; recontextualize it, as in Louis Althusser (2006a) who reads “On The Jewish Question” as an essentially ideological text attempting to apply the theory of alienation; or, as I already outlined, quantize it, as in Shlomo Avineri (1964) who contrasts the antisemitism of Marx’s text with Marx’s forceful support for Jewish emancipation as an immediate political goal, for the most part the Marxist tradition must face its own “obstinate and thus decided silence” on the question of its historical antisemitism, as well as where antisemitism has continued to this day.

Thus, to again make my point clear, this is not an attempt to defend Heidegger’s antisemitism by way of comparing it to the antisemitism of another well-known tendency within euro-western philosophy, but rather to state my point that other such tendencies lack the moral or ethical foregrounding from which to launch unqualified moves to condemnation. They will remain lacking in such a foregrounding until and as such serious movement is made to confront that inner ugly history.

Neither here am I making my own crude call to simply do away with Marx or Marxism, but rather this confrontation must be made explicitly manifest. Again, to draw yet another comparison with Heidegger, what I would claim here is that just as Derrida suggests opening up Nietzsche to the totality of the Heideggerian critique (2016, 162) and as Trawny and Mitchell in turn suggest for Heidegger, for Marx, rather than simply consign him and his thought to the ashcan of history, we should “offer him up completely” to the condemnatory antisemitic reading. Again, as Trawny and Mitchell note, “this is not exoneration so much as a crucible to see what is capable of withstanding or resisting the anti-Semitic interpretation as well as what is not” (xxiv). If Marxism is not able to survive such a surrendering than it is not worth salvaging. But if it is able to, then it, as a heterogenous tendency of thought, will have moved a step closer towards the kind of endogenous ethical footing that I am talking about.

The Exogenous Dimension: Coloniality

Considering then the what I have called the endogenous problem of the left-critical theoretical and philosophical approach to Heidegger, what then is the secondary problem? If the former was endogenous, then, to follow the same terminological practice, this second one is that which me might identify as the exogenous problem. This issue is that which relates to the left-critical theoretical and philosophical tendency’s historical and geopolitical situatedness, as point of emergence. Here I mean to address specifically the critique of Heidegger as a fundamentally anti-modernist thinker from the perspective of a left-critical theoretical and philosophical tendency which identifies itself, principally, with some form of modernity, the “Enlightenment,” rationality, science, and all similar such things, and specifically the entangled relationship between this kind of defence of modernity, whether implicit or explicit, with the geopolitical, epistemological, and metaphysical problem of colonialism, coloniality, and the political economy of the world-system.

Another way to put this then is the question of both the form and the content of the critique of a supposedly Heideggerian anti-modernity from the perspective of a left-critical modernity and its ineluctable entrapment within the colonial relations of force. The point here is to make clearly perceptible the ways in which such colonial relations of force and domination provide the prerequisite materialist underpinning for the emergence of both Heideggerian conservatism and Marxian critical theory.

In other words, what is in question here is the materialist historicization of euro-western modernity in toto, both its conservative and critical tendencies, within the exogenous emergence and formation of the colonial/capitalist world-system. How then though does this impact the critique of Heidegger from the left-critical perspective?

First though a clarification: coloniality is different from colonialism. The latter, if were to attempt to sketch out an abstract metacategory, and thus necessarily occluding for the sake of such an undertaking the specificities of settler colonialism[5], refers to the development of relations of domination in which the political and economic power of a nation or group of people is rendered subordinate to that of another. This, I suspect, will not arouse much suspicion or objection. Coloniality, oftentimes referred to as the “colonial matrix of power,” refers to something different. What it denotes is the long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, and thus it is often remarked that coloniality survives colonialism. In this sense the liveliness and present structuring of coloniality is maintained in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self etc.

Further, following the work of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2008; 2010), colonialism and coloniality are increasingly taken to be understood as constitutive of modernity, or, as Enrique Dussel puts it, is the underside of modernity (1996), leading to an often referred to compound object of analysis of modernity/coloniality. Coloniality understood in this way, as constitutive of modernity broadly construed, is prefigurative of those pillars and interrelated spheres that define culture, amongst other things, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production/epistemology and ontological questions and concepts such as the nature of the human and the naturalization of life and the permanent regeneration of the living (e.g. the invention of the concept of “nature” etc.) well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations (Maldonado-Torres 2010; Mignolo & Walsh 2018).

With this then establish we can begin to consider a figure such as the German Marxist critical theorist Theodor Adorno, who was one of Heidegger’s most trenchant critics from the left-critical philosophical and theoretical perspective. Adorno’s critique, while spanning several decades as part of he and Walter Benjamin’s shared project to “annihilate Heidegger” (Benjamin 1994, 365), pivots quite a bit on a plea for an alternative rationality that is different from the instrumental reason which characterized the illiberal rise of fascism. While there are antecedents to this in Adorno’s work, co-authored with fellow Frankfurt critical theorist Max Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (2016), this tendency within Adorno as it regards the specific critique of Heidegger’s philosophy is best noted within his lectures from the period of 1960-61 (2019). Adorno, while he may be taken in some way as a precursor to the later poststructural and postmodernist critique, as can the Frankfurt School in general, and while being critical of a certain kind of rationality and Enlightenment thinking is largely unable, or unwilling, to situate the development of such thought broadly within the development of the capitalist world-system.

Or one can look more recently towards the writings and contributions of a figure such as Badiou, whose philosophical criticism of Heidegger I alluded to in the opening paragraphs of this essay. Badiou, in order to defeat Heidegger in ontology and metaphysics most immediately falls deeply into his own project of mathematical metaphysics, set theory, and the evental consideration of Being, which I am neither qualified nor terribly inclined to engage (as I am neither a pure mathematician nor a philosopher of mathematics). However, less immediately, and in political and epistemological terms, he pairs his maxim that “mathematics is ontology” with a proffering up of a reconfigured strong form of a european particularism disguised as globally modernist universalism (Badiou 2012; 2013). That is to say, Badiou does not question the validity of certain abstract universals which both his philosophical and political projects find their essential grounding in (Ciccariello-Maher 2017, 3). However, as scholars as diverse as the Argentinian decolonial theorist and semiotician Walter Mignolo (2012) and the Indian scholar of subaltern studies Partha Chatterjee (1993) are keen to point out, the problem with abstract universals proper to such is that, when offered up from the uncritical perspective of euro-western modernity, intrinsically epistemologically colonial. As Andy McLaverty-Robinson describes it, this is a problem that Badiou, and here we could also add Adorno, does not “seem to have thought much about, because on some level he believes in global designs, he believes in the progressive power of modernity, the subtraction of the particular and so on” (2014).

Additionally, while seemingly miles apart on multiple philosophical and theoretical points, both Badiou and Adorno, and many other left critics of Heidegger, while concerned with Heidegger’s overt fascistic political commitments might rather be argued to be more deeply concerned with his essential conservatism and nostalgia for a pre-lapsarian peasant life. That there is a certain path to be charted between this and his political moves in the ’30s and ’40s should not be ignored. It is also quite likely the same sentiment that saw the late Althusser’s annoyed description of Heidegger as possessing the aura of a “country priest” (2006b, 237) even as he attempted to assimilate Heidegger, along with Derrida, Wittgenstein, Marx, Spinoza, Machiavelli, and others to his late philosophical project of ‘aleatory materialism.’

 But I—attempting my best effort to view this in a parallactic way, moving from a perspective within the halls of euro-western modernity to one outside of it, rooted in the subaltern, the Native, and the decolonial—see Heidegger less as an essentially anti-modernist, anti-enlightenment figure than being one who followed a different path through the various twists and turns of modernity and the enlightenment. In essence what I mean to say here is that I find there to be no fundamental difference in form or emergence, even if actual content may differ, between conservative, liberal, or critical tendencies are they are manifested within a broader euro-western modernist project.

Placing him then within, rather than counter to, or external to, modernism, the fact that Heidegger’s point of divergence from others before and contemporaneous to him was in the shifting from an epistemological weighting in the Cartesian ego cogito (I think) to a supposedly neglected ontological one (I am) is also quite well documented, least of all within his own philosophical writing (2008). So again, another long exposition is not needed regarding what is already soundly established. However, the fundamental lacuna in not only Heideggerian thought, but also in his several left-wing critics is that very exogenous question that I have already attempted to draw attention to; that of the fundamental constitution of the entire modernist philosophical project (and in this I would include postmodernist also[6]). And specifically, what I mean here is the emergence of a certain kind of modernity as what I have already been readily throughout this writing signifying with the prefix of euro-, or eurowestern modernity, and how this emergence of such a particular modernity has been taken as a stand-in for a kind of abstract metacategorical notion of modernity unmoored from the specific origins of the particular.

This is a point worth taking the time to belabour because, as the Argentine decolonial theorist, ethicist, and close reader of Marx Enrique Dussel aptly points out, modernity, as the disguised universalism of the euro-modern particular, did not emerge from Europe as an independent system, but rather from Europe constituting itself as centre of the present world-system (1998). The point here being that, following Dussel, the euro-western modernist project, including its conservative wing (Heidegger, but also Nietzsche and others), while it may exist in diachrony with its own premodern past (antiquity to the renaissance) is not wholly an autopoietic, self-referential emergence out of such historical developments, but in fact finds its sine qua non in Europe’s development as the centre of the world-system in dialectical synchrony with the development of the rest of the world as periphery, with the casting of other people as non-humans or less-than-humans, with the signifying of other knowledges as primitivism or mysticism etc. From this Dussel posits a figure which her refers to as the ego conquiro (“I conquer”) as the practical prefigurate self-conception that not only antedates the emergence of the Cartesian thinking subject, but as the necessary grounding for such european self-reflection on subjectivity as such (1996, 33).

For Dussel, the ego cogito can only arise from within a context in which one thinks of themselves as the centre of the world, precisely because they have in fact already conquered the world. To the degree to which the coloniality of power distorts this relationship—between colonialism and modernity—it obscures the actual nature of the Cartesian perspective itself, and all others that would come to follow it (the Kantian Rational-I, the Heideggerian Daesein etc.) This is why Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez describes Cartesian philosophy as operating from a kind of “zero-point epistemology”: that is, Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophy is a point-of-view that does not see itself as a point-of-view (2010). The hubris of the zero point, in this instance, and to borrow a phrase from Mignolo, is quintessential eurocentrism (2011, 22).

We can additionally further relate this point to other concepts, with a particularly salient point being the notion of epistemicide—referring to the death of subaltern knowledge systems, in particular what we might be inclined to call their murder as an epistemological impact of the condition of european expansion and colonial genocide—from Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014, 92). Building on the thought and insights of both Santos and Dussel, Ramón Grosfoguel further introduces into this equation of the modern/colonial great chain of Being the historical metaphysical figure of the ego extermino (“I exterminate”). The presence of this figure, founded upon the genocide of colonized peoples and concurrent epistemicide of their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies, is what Grosfoguel argues gives rise to the fundamentally epistemically racialized and racist ego cogito of Descartes. Considering the relationship between the conquiro, the cogito, and the extermino, for Grosfoguel, “the ego extermino is the socio-historical structural condition that makes possible the link of the ego conquiro with the ego cogito” (2013:77). Thinking again of the emergence of euro-western modernity, and its triune figure of genocidal self-reflexive, self-reflective subjectivity as a process of dialectical synchrony, Grosfoguel places this emergence within the historical moment of what he refers to as the four genocides/epistemicides of the long sixteenth century: 1) against Muslims and Jews in the Catholic Reconquista of Iberia, 2) against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas following the Colombian contact event, 3) against African people via the trans-Atlantic slave trade and 4) against Indo-European women accused of witchcraft (2013:77).

But to attempt to return to my original point, about the exogenous problem of most left-wing critiques of Heidegger, this is a not insignificant reason as to why they fail in my perspective: they fail to think, or to consider, the root of the problem, of how colonialism and coloniality provide the necessary materialist, in the form of the world-system as is, prefiguration for the emergence of not only the Heideggerian project, but of their own as well. To think of these questions in a line similar to the late Patrick Wolfe’s discussion of settler colonialism, we might be persuaded to say that they forget to think of how colonialism and coloniality continue to structure not just historical development, but present thought and practice. Or, alternatively, to think in terms evoking the spirits of both Marx and Derrida, we might say that there is a spectre haunting the development of the broad modernist project: colonialism.

Given this haunted present absence of colonialism within much of euro-western left-critical consideration, if not the completely unproductive and defensive casting out of it from serious consideration[7], it can this be said, I think without much of a leap in logic, if any, that in as much as the conservative philosophical wing of euro-modernism represented by the figure of Heidegger is a eurocentric critique of euro-western modernity, so is the Marxian critique and the poststructural/postmodern critique as well (lest we fail to consider our Derridas, our Deleuzes, our Foucaults) (Grosfoguel 2008). Here, the canadian Maoist philosopher J. Moufawad-Paul, in his project of defending the claim to Marxism’s scientific status, gets us somewhat half-way there; They describe the Marxist come Maoist project as a “modernity critical of modernity” (2018) but what they fail to append is the specificity of a euro-western modernity attempting to launch a criticism of itself.

While Moufawad-Paul is certainly a significant step forward from the arch-eurocentrism of Badiou and Zizek, this is also why I have specifically little faith in the supposed “scientific” nature of the Marxian critique (in particular vis-a-vis other critical european [post]modernities). My critique of Moufawad-Paul’s philosophy in particular is something I have established elsewhere (Robinson, 2019), but in essence this particular problem grows from the same shared root: the Marxian claim to a scientific nature, and thus the political and theoretical attempt to marshal the authoritative force of science’s cultural cache in post-enlightenment euro-modernity, is rooted in a particular conception of science inseparable from the dialectical, synchronic development of euro-modernity as the centre of a global political economy of knowledge, with the colony as its underside, which subalternizes other knowledges as primitive, traditional, unscientific etc.

Though I tend to share certain concerns and critiques with Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukács, but also in particular Moishe Postone based in beliefs about historicism and methods of immanent critique, rather than more Althusserian, Marxist-Leninist, and Maoist conceptions of an “immortal science” of historical and dialectical materialism which is transhistorical and universally valid (Postone 1993, 143-144) I do not reject the idea that Marxism is scientific per say. However, I am at the same time not inclined to follow the younger Jameson’s Sartrean exhortation that Marxism represents an “untranscendable horizon” of thought, able to totally absorb within its own semantically rich metanarrative all other critical theories, both assigning them a sectoral validity while also cancelling them (1981, 10).

Indeed, the recourse to the claimed scientific nature of Marxism is often its own kind of qualitative defence of Marxism’s colonial lacunae, as if, ipso facto, science, or a scientific nature, undoes colonialism or colonial commitments and emergences. Again, I have drawn attention to this specific issue elsewhere, but one can witness this operation quite decidedly in effect through Moufwad-Paul’s attempted circumvention of the Black critical theorist Alexander G. Weheliye’s criticism of all theoretical traditions of european origin as “white European thinkers [who] are granted a carte blanche” (2014, 6), wherein he moves to claim that “it is only the Marxist tendency that can account for and surmount this carte blanche, thus necessarily generating theoretical offspring critical of its erroneous aspects, because of what it is: a science” (2019). Here science, and Marxism in particular, is taken to be sufficient for the overcoming of global coloniality and antiblackness by sheer circular virtue of its claim to being a science.

Of course, though, following a certain Derridean reading that maintains that texts contain just as much that is unsaid as is said; things signified by their absence, through lacunae, which may pull against the author of a text’s stated meaning or outward commitments (2016; 2017). Considering that then, what might be said to be implied here in Moufawad-Paul? One reading might be that, since Marxism is the only “tendency that can account for and surmount” the problems raised by Black, Native, decolonial, and subaltern scholars, then it is necessarily the case that scholars such as these must be being ungenerous in their readings such that they would move to include Marxism within the zone of white european carte blanche. Or, perhaps, that they have simply misread, or not properly internalized and comprehended the analytical power of Marxist science.

Again, I anticipate that certain readers of mine will take my reading of Moufawad-Paul and others to be, in its own right, ungenerous towards their intentions, but, following Patrick Wolfe (2012), I find myself significantly less concerned with questions of authorial intent than with the logical outcomes of following certain lines of thought to their ends. If though I were to then offer a perhaps more generous reading of Moufawad-Paul’s writings, but no less concerned with the problematic nature of their content, I might take his argument to say, in the Jamesonian sense, that Marxism, by virtue of being a science, is able to capture within itself the Black, decolonial, Native, or subaltern critique, cancelling them while still preserving their sectoral validity.

I am, however, credulous towards the claim of such a reading being unfair or ungenerous. If I were to contextualize my reading, the writings of Moufawad-Paul are hardly an aberration within the historical trajectory of the Marxist milieu. I have already mentioned the younger Jameson’s claim that Marxism represents an ultimate horizon of thought, but, more broadly than that, the claim amongst Marxists, in particular Leninists of all their fractious tendencies, that Marxism either can, or in fact already has, solved the problems bound up in consideration by Black, decolonial, Native, and subaltern critique (as well as feminist and queer critique) is hardly uncommon. Likewise, while the figures of Badiou and Žižek represent its most extreme poles, these same Marxist and left-critical theorists also tend to exclaim, in the final analysis, that the Black, decolonial, Native, and subaltern critique are ultimately form of identity-related struggle and theoretical production which serve, even if unintentionally, to undermine, to detract from, other supposedly more universal struggles (or, in the Maoist parlance “principal contradictions”) centred around class and capital[8]. However, to turn such a critique back in on itself, a perhaps even more cynical reading of this general position within Marxism is that it has historically been, even when paired with a stated concern for the particularity of struggles around colonialism (or gender, or sexuality, or antiblackness) little more than a concerted efforts to assimilate, tame, and neutralize the politics, theories, and philosophies that emerge from the autonomous experiences of those whose oppression places them within modernity’s underside.

Thus, science notwithstanding, Weheliye’s point for me remains. The general proposition that forms of the core of this particular qualitative defence of Marxism’s claims to a kind of scientific stature, as seen within the writings of people like Moufawad-Paul, is one that finds itself historically situated within, and emergent from, the general paradigm of modernity/coloniality. Thus, as much as one finds continuous recourse to a certain notion of science, and what particularly it signifies (cultural cache, objectivity, materialism, etc.), such arguments are troubled by the underside of that.

Ultimately none of this is to say that I do not think there is much to value in critiques emergent from Europe and the wider European world, whether Marxism, phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, or anything else. Rather, what is meant to be taken away from here is the belief that in so far as such critiques are wholly internal to Europe as centre, and thus implicitly treat the European philosophical project as wholly autonomous, autopoietic, and self-referential, disregarding the non-european underside of the world-system, they are significantly less helpful in elucidating the various problems of this or that (sometimes correctly) maligned philosophical or theoretical specificity, such as Heidegger, but one could say the same for others who are often the target of pillory like Agamben.

What is to Be Done?

And here, in closing, we come again, as I so often do in the process of my thought, to that question perhaps most famously raised by Lenin: “what is to be done?” In an attempt to bring together both the endogenous and the exogenous problems, I would say that the point should not be to consign Marxism to the “ashcan of history” (to borrow Jameson’s phrase [1981, 10]). Rather, as with the question of Marxism’s own antisemitism, Marxism, whether it be deemed a science or something else, should be surrendered fully to the decolonial critique, to the Black critique, the Native critique, and the subaltern critique. The goal here should not be to see whether or not Marxism can be saved in the face of the critique from the underside of modernity, the underside of history, but whether or not it survives. Or what of it survives.

For many Marxists it is enough to excoriate, and I would agree in this regard, those specific critiques of political economy which privilege a certain normatively white, industrial (or post-industrial) proletarian subject resident at the heart of the capitalist world-system (and to this we should without hesitation add the axes of gender and sexuality). This is perhaps best read in the work world-systems and dependency scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Zak Cope, and others, but, as Dussel notes in his critique of that school of thought, this is not enough to exorcise in its fullness that spectre that haunts Marxism, and that haunts all critical theoretical and philosophical projects of a european, euro-american, or euro-antipodean geopolitical emergence. While it may be correct to reorient the lens of economic analysis, it says little about the origins of the project itself, its epistemologies frameworks, and its metaphysical constructions.

What happens when we consider further reorientations? When we consider other critiques? Does the edifice of Marxism crumble into dust? Or will we be able to—perhaps similarly to the late Althusser’s project (2006b), though certainly with a different goal and orientation in mind—be left only with those parts of Marxism that work, and most importantly work for those who dwell within theory and philosophies underside? If Marxism, if critical theory, if left philosophy is troubled by this troubling of its historical foundations, then perhaps it should not even be part of the conversation to begin with. Yet, I do believe that there is hope. Yet it is a hope with caveats attached.

What Marxists and other left-critical theorists and philosophers must not be afraid to face is that, in all of this, they may find that the paragons of the euro-western philosophical and social scientific cannons—from the founding fathers of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud, through Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Althusser—do not hold within their various theoretical corpuses all the tools that are necessary for challenging the order of things of the modern/colonial/capitalist world-system (Harding 2008; Connell 2007). That they are not so precisely and readily able to capture within their own semantically rich metanarrative all other critiques.

Perhaps most simply, and as I often tell my students, they must be prepared to sit and meditate within their own intellectual discomfort. This, whether we are talking about antisemitism or coloniality, is what will be key. The left-critical theorist and philosopher, should they really wish to claim the mantle of “critical,” should expect to have their ideas and preconceived notions challenged from the underside of modernity, and the discomfort that some may feel is only a natural aspect of such challenges and of struggling to resolve cognitive dissonance.

In the end, one has to be unafraid to face one’s own ghosts and demons, because there is more to the world than Europe critiquing Europe because Europe is not the world.

Endnotes

[1]. My sister, who is a philosopher trained in both the analytic tradition and the existential and phenomenological branches of the continental, and who has been an utterly invaluable grounding for my own understanding, is quick to point out not only the number of philosophers who cut across such attempts at traditional boundaries (such as Wittgenstein) but that the boundaries themselves, in general, mean little to anyone other than the true die-hards. Further, there is a point to be made also that even the concepts of these divisions themselves is something entirely internal to the euro-western tradition. The continent in “continental” is mainland Europe, which is then set against, in a binary fashion, by an alliance primarily of insular British and trans-Atlantic American analytics. As such the binary loses its grounding, and thus its meaning once one moves beyond the space of Europe. The autopoietic philosophies of Native North and Latin American, African, Islamic, Asian, Australasian, and Pacific peoples presents an externality, or an underside, to the presentation of the supposed analytic-continental binary which has been covered over, in the words of Enrique Dussel (1995), and subalternized. Indeed, I will take-up this subalternation and its relational meaning to the emergence of the euro-modernist philosophical project later in this essay. As such, my usage of terms like “analytic” and “continental” is primarily for simplicity’s sake and should not be taken as indicating any strong commitment to such euro-modern binary constructions.

[2]. The idea of post-continentality, as Maldonado-Torres describes it, refers to points I make in the above note: that the philosophizing and theorizing of subalternized peoples is neither readily nor easily captured within the dominant binary (or tripartite for Maldonado-Torres) division within the euro-west between Anglo-analytic/U.S. American and continental philosophies (2011, 4). The concept of the post-continental emerged alongside the decolonial turn in contemporary theory as, “an expression of the idea that continents are not natural spaces, but projects that rely on specific notions of spatiality. Instead of seeking a dialectic between Europe and other continents, post-continental philosophy suggests that the possibilities for generating and grounding theory and philosophy are multiple and include a variety of spatial and bodily references: the boat of the middle passage and the plantation, the black and the Chicana body, the island and the archipelago, the reservation and the boarding school, the prison and the camp” (2011, 4-5).

[3]. Within left-critical theory and those influenced by it, this difference is perhaps best demonstrated in the attempts by certain Marxists to reframe their Marxism(s) away from Hegelian perspectives towards analytic ones. Of those who would go on to refer to be referred to as analytic Marxists the late G.A. Cohen states in quite strong terms the implications of this shift, noting that not only is their project analytic in the broad sense of being opposed to dialectical thinking, but also analytic in the narrow sense of being opposed further to holism (2000, xvii). In particular, with regards to the think between philosophical perspectives and methodological considerations, Cohen notes the following regarding the “analytic” nature of analytic Marxism in the narrow sense: that it is a “disposition to explain molar phenomena by reference to micro-constituents and micro-mechanisms that respectively compose the entities that underlie the processes which occur at a grosser level of resolution” (2000, xxiii). Others would carry these commitments even further, giving rise to a so-called “rational choice” Marxist subvariant, which considers even Cohen’s thought to be far too methodologically holist and functionalist (Carver and Thomas 1995, 2). Much criticism from within Marxist thought has been levelled at analytic Marxism for these epistemological and methodological choices (see for example Burawoy (1995)).

[4]. For Nirenberg, anti-Judaism is a basal pathology of the western world which he defines as a “theoretical framework for making sense of the world in terms of Jews and Judaism” (2013, 464). For both Nirenberg and Losurdo, antisemitism, on the other hand, is the doctrine more specifically tied to the hatred of Jewish people on the basis of biological race (Losurdo 2001, 121). However, as Losurdo points out, while a distinction can perhaps be made between antisemitism and anti-Judaism, “we would be remiss not to add that the line between the two is not well-defined and is rather inconsistent” (2001, 123). And indeed, this is made quite visible in the everyday manifestation of what is popularly taken to be antisemitism, which dwells upon both opposition to a supposed “Jewish race” as well as peddles in totalizing conspiracy theories about Jewish people. As such, while I appreciate the distinction to be made between the two, considering these slippages I will be referring only to antisemitism within this essay. Further, I will be following the nomenclature of “antisemitism” rather than “anti-Semitism,” as there is no such thing as “Semitism” which a hyphenated “anti-Semitism” opposes.

[5]. While theoretical work on the subject has rapidly expanded in the past two decades, for an overview of the specificities of settler colonialism vis-à-vis colonialism as a general category, see Wolfe (2006), Veracini (2013), and Kauanui (2016)

[6]. This is why I include postmodernity here. While I find much to agree with in the American Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson’s theorization of the subject (1991), including the recognition of how postmodernity has signalled certain significant changes within the form and function of the capitalist world-system, I am also inclined to follow Dussel (1998) in thinking postmodernity as a “belated modernity,” indicating a certain continuity with the historical development of said world-system, rather than as an entirely new phenomenon, or perhaps a rupture, to put it back into a certain kind of Marxist phrasing.

[7]. For a particular egregious example of this one may consider the voluminous output of the Slovenian psychoanalyst and Hegelian Slavoj Žižek. Though Žižek’s career is replete with such examples, perhaps the two most salient ones are his earlier call for a left-wing defence of eurocentrism (1998) as well as his rather infantile response to Walter Mignolo, Hamid Dabashi, and other subaltern and decolonial thinkers’ dismissal of his relevance to those from the peripheries of global coloniality and the capitalist world-system (2013). For a critique of Žižek’s earlier call, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2005), and for a rather masterful reply to the latter see Dabashi (2015).

[8]. The Dene scholar Glen Coulthard, himself a close reader of Marx, as well as of the Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, deftly deals with this position, which he refers to as the “left-materialist challenge,” in his text Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014, 18-20).

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