Two ways of being a left-Heideggerian

Abstract

This article is concerned with the question of the relative priority between political and social ontology within left-Heideggerianism, a tradition recently reconstructed by Oliver Marchart (2007). Although the title seems to imply that this question is an open and live one within left-Heideggerianism – that the two paths at the crossroads have been clearly delineated when, in fact, the current predicament of left-Heideggerianism resembles more a one-way street – this is somewhat misleading: the identification of left-Heideggerianism with a post-foundationalist political ontology that enjoys systematic priority over the social has contributed to the suppression of the question of the Being of the social and, therefore, prevented a critical re-examination of its relationship to the political. The aim of this article is both modest and ambitious: modest, in that it merely seeks to pose and motivate the question of the social within left-Heideggerianism both at an exegetical and at a systematic level; ambitious, in that the upshot of thematizing the question of the social is to indicate an alternative path or ‘social paradigm’ within left-Heideggerianism that begins with a different (social ontological) reading of Heidegger and ultimately leads to a different model of Gesellschaftskritik with wide-ranging implications. Otherwise put, the article follows the path initially taken by the early Marcuse’s ‘Heideggerian Marxism’ and attempts to see it through to its final destination by clearing some obstacles along the way, i.e. by correcting some important misunderstandings of fundamental ontology by Marchart and Marcuse.