INTELLIGENT DASEIN
on “Heidegger and Poetry,” for New
Jersey College English
Association Conference, Seton
Hall University, March 18,
2006
Heidegger’s
different philosophers, one
pre-, one post-3rd Reich, Derrida says. Okay,
alright,
whatever,
language, poetry,
and sha na na,
though
continuities
are important too. Initially,
Nazis seem to
the left—being so
oppositional yet
turn so
anti-Communist—Nazis
compete with Communists after all, and,
likewise, Martin
Heidegger
adapts left,
adapts right.
His bud of being slips through anyone’s lapel.
Let be BE the elephant in the room
easily lending itself to
showing
it IS
the room thru
gently deconstructive feats
or BE the water in the air we breathe
steaming
FOR-ITSELF
out
of IN-ITSELF
like salt from water
and drinking
the good clean
existence with all
nominally frothy
preconscious being
on the side—
I mean on the left,
but, on the right, man
criticism sure fails us, so
we could do with a good poet like Hitler.
Hey, for 5 secs I’m curious
about supply side economics, which after all play
off a 60s “everything will
be ok w/o the govt” ‘tude.
Reagan never calls me, thank God.
Point being left and right work
on a continuum
and Heidegger is the bridge,
Being
overarches. As
traditional right and
left fail,
paths cross over them.
Heidegger “surfs electromagnetic waves,” Marshall
McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy says, and
his late sixties Playboy
interview foresees one
genocide after another. He’s sorry,
he says, it’s not inevitable, he’s just calling
it as he sees it likely to happen and it did happen and is happening.
Goodbye enlightened constitutional
guarantees:
our electromagnetic body is goin’
all tribal on us. Sounds hokey but
a place to start. I want to thank this poem/talk for
making me think of McLuhan,
and is it farfetched to think
Heidegger knows Mac’s early media work when
in some of MH’s last important work, he writes that
technology needs to
touch a poetry embedded
in it—not
that influence matters much, but
Martin at least stylistically I
think influences Marshall, and
Joyce/Heidegger/McLuhan
is a course we
all
take & teach.
McLuhan opposes Heidegger to Cartisian rationalism.
Hedegger fits for McLuhan because Mac
feels the rational as ratios—pentagonal
interactive sense-goo, not hard logic or
truth as we know it, though
Neocon “we’re cooler than truth” or
Nazi “we are truth” frames also might—I
mean do—reference at least one Heidegger,
and what am I standing on?
I’m too New Left by
half to
work for Humphrey and root
for Nixon and I’m kinda right—things get
bad & Carter’s
someone way outside and
that last weekend I work so
hard I
push
him over the top
by just a little
in NY state,
deciding the election, but then let the nation down,
and, in 1980, go 3rd party,
courting disaster, but disaster doesn’t work. It’s
boring AND
it sucks.
There’s something
Nazi/Heidegger in it
in that little is leftover except maybe
Dasein, being there. That sounds good to this
New Leftist
but inevitably we
don’t flourish; is
it any wonder, is
what we need FAME (from
Indo-European for SPEAK)? Better
be
cool,
be good,
as E.T. tells
Drew Barrymore. Be light. Be “all inside”
as J. C. Penny’s mall campaign asserts.
Be light inside. It’s all good in so many ways, so
fully Left—not priggish or Weatherman Left. I
mean cultural left, Sgt. Pepper left.
Uh, er, like, er, as right wing politicians
tweak the consensus, the Beatles
lead audiences culturally left,
how Bobby Kennedy explains why he’s
so lovingly
mobbed: “Oh, I’m the Beatles.”
He’s willing to take his audience somewhere new,
though
the Beatles weren’t always in black people’s radar so
say black pepper left or
Bobby left,
which might include Bill
Clinton, in that Bill takes
a lot from Bob’s 68 speeches
cuz the two Kennedys don’t
trust entrenched
government
programs
so just ad hoc making things possible, providing
opportunity, the conditions of being,
dasein, always
figures in for
Bob and Bill
so there’s at least one Heidegger in them but
could Bob have solved anything that way?
Bobby argues that
without the war
they could try: where
I’m now: we need
government
not working against us thru
voter fraud, war, governmental negligence, aggressive
environmental
disregard, incestuous hiring, and criminal
payoffs….Now I’m crazed
if I New Left it,
fuzzy if I don’t.
FDR changed “progressive”
to “liberal” because
progressive’s Repub big cousin Ted’s faction
or maybe progressive just sounds too Red.
And then, McLuhan says, Franklin & Hitler need radio
to heat their respective nation-state’s oral
imagination
and get people into
the program and
talk radio still seems to set the agenda.
Heidegger may have wanted a show. He wanted to be
Nazi philosopher king or Nazi philosopher Larry King or
anyway SOMETHING. But no one ever answers
his letters.
So Derrida has a point
that at that point the Nazis
themselves
aren’t
hot for Martin H. and he writes more
of philosophy as over. The way’s not through Mein Kampf—
the camp, the clearing
is through poetry and art,
even marginally discredited
semi-modern art
and there’s definitely a lefty
way to take all of H.
Let’s beeeeeee; Babe, Heidegger’s hip, though
temporarily in a weird cult called “the Nazis,” but
forgive him
that; “We on the left don’t blacklist”
famously explains
Zero Mostel as why
it’s fine
if
name-dropper
Jerome Robbins helps with Funny
Thing on the Way to, since,
as Heidegger
says, How
we think is more important than what. Let
us be cool, coolly Jerome
Robbins West Side Story cool cool.
The left hinges on Heideggerian Dasein,
but Intelligent Dasein,
cuz we’re
not smooth Cartesian operators.
Heidegger’s master
move is to turn the primacy
Husserl gives the turn of
perception into the turn
of being—where you
flow more than take in—think
more than drink, make more than take,
everything thought from the ground up,
the less enframed and frozen and always already,
the better, so no wonder he takes a shine to Hitler—
Heidegger’s a weird mystic rad brother—or
anyway family,
and Hannah makes this point. Arendt
feels it unfortunate
Heidegger is
where and when
Nazis dupe him.
Poor baby!!!
She LOVES her mentor.
But Heidegger really is Nazi.
Even if his wife Elfride, who
conceives Marty’s oldest son with another man—
a mutual
friend she loves—before Martin makes love with
Hannah—is
more a good Nazi than her philosopher husband,
Heidegger rats out who knows how many
professors’ ethnic
and/or political orientations. You
chalk up some stuff to
ordinary enthusiastic Nazi service,
but the personal
betrayals
go on till war’s end AND after it
you want to wring his neck
for sucky apologies about that
whole Nazi thing.
Horrors? Nazis? Am I missing the
connection?
Heidegger might
know all about genocide from friends closer to it
but it’s a matter of proportion,
priorities, what one cherishes—
some of my best Jewish friends are fantastic, but
what’s best big picture?
Let not a little holocaust impede our Nazi union.
Plus I as Heidegger take credit for where
Husserl leaves me, removing my Being and
Time dedication to
the Jewish Husserl from its wartime edition,
and otherwise
dissing the poor guy.
If language is the house of being, can it be used to build itself?
Martin puts
his foot down. “Poetry
is the letting go of language.” The greatest
proponent
of poetry’s
worldly, even meta-worldly, import,
Martin Heidegger,
says that.
Point is in some fashion the language we let go of is
the bureaucratic nation-state
that loses credibility
in Germany post-WWII
and the US post-Vietnam.
Wired totalitarianism is one replacement,
but what’s the other?
It doesn’t have to be the anticipated
everything-all-at-once
universe-pulsing
mode. Wherever
supplely strong and gentle intuitive light
fills reason and poetry suffuses politics,
Heidegger will say he’s sorry.
—Stephen Paul Miller