89Heidegger’s Parmenides

Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 19, 2001.

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Heidegger’s Parmenides: GreekModernity and the Classical Legacy

William V. Spanos

Abstract

One of Heidegger’s most insistent assertions about the identity of modernEurope is that its origins are not Greek, as has been assumed in discourses ofWestern modernity since the Englightenment, but Roman, the epochal conse-quence of the Roman reduction of the classical Greek understanding of truth,as a-letheia (un-concealment), to veritas (the correspondence of mind andthing). In the Parmenides lectures of 1942–43, Heidegger amplifies thisgenealogy of European identity by showing that this Roman concept of truth—and thus the very idea of Europe—is also indissolubly imperial. Heidegger’sgenealogy has been virtually neglected by Western historical scholarship,including classical. Even though restricted to the generalized site of language,this genealogy is persuasive and bears significantly on the conflicted nationalidentity of modern, post-Ottoman Greece. It suggests that the obsessive pursuitof the unitary cultural ideals of the European Enlightenment, in the name ofthis movement’s assumed origins in classical Greece, constitutes a misguidedeffort to accommodate Greek identity to the polyvalent, imperial, Roman modelof the polity that informs European colonial practice. Put positively, Heidegger’sgenealogy suggests a radically different way of dealing with the question ofGreek national identity, one more consonant with the actual philosophical,cultural, ethnic, and political heterogeneity of ancient Greece (what MartinBernal has called the “Ancient Model”) and, thus, one less susceptible tocolonization by “Europe.”

The Greek pseudos, by being translated into theLatin falsum, is transported into the Roman-imperial domain of bringing to a downfall. Pseudos,dissembling and concealing, now becomes whatfells, the false. Thus it is clear that Roman experi-ence and thinking, organizing and expanding[. . .] never moved within the region of aletheiaand pseudos. As a kind of historiographical contes-tation, it has been known for a long time nowthat the Romans took over from the Greeks many

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ways and that this appropriation was also a recast-ing. One day we must consider in what regions ofessence and out of what background this Roman-izing of Greece came to pass.

—Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (1992:41–42)

Throughout his entire life, Martin Heidegger was profoundly attractedto ancient Greece. This would seem to place him within the context ofthe well-known Philhellenic initiative that began with the EuropeanEnlightenment in France and England and reached its fullest articula-tion in Germany, with the revival of classical studies in philology, literarycriticism, and philosophy. But, to see Heidegger’s abiding interest inGreece within the framework of what is now a banal tradition, as somany commentators of Heidegger have, is a serious mistake. Hisrelationship to the Greek topos and culture was not historicist—anostalgia for a once vibrant geographical space inhabited by a historicalpeople. It was genealogical, a matter of a language, history, culture, andpractice of political life that resonated with the conditions of thecontemporary “European” occasion. Indeed, as I will suggest, Heidegger’slife-long meditation on the meaning of Greek antiquity was not acontinuation of the Enlightenment tradition; it was, in fact, an effort toposition Greek antiquity against the grain of the Enlightenment’srepresentation of it as the origin of the idea of Europe. And, althoughhe had, as far as I know, little to say about modern Greece as such, hisinterrogation of this Enlightenment interpretation of classical Greeceprovides provocative directives, not only for contemporary intellectualsengaged in debates over the “identity” of ancient Greeks, but forcontemporary Greeks as well. These people are, like it or not, compelledby recent global events—not least the economic and linguistic Ameri-canization of the planet in the wake of the Cold War and the establish-ment of the European Union—to decide whether to become “Euro-pean” or not, which in effect means becoming either a neocolonialappendage of Euro-America or a truly postcolonial polity.

By way of shedding light on these anti-Enlightenment “Heideg-gerian” directives, it might be useful to invoke the controversial thesis ofMartin Bernal’s book Black Athena (1987), which claims that the ac-cepted scholarly and popular assumption about the identity of ancientGreeks was an invention of the German Enlightenment and wasintended to endow Caucasian Europe’s emergent global aspirations withhistorical legitimacy. As Bernal puts it, “For 18th- and 19th-centuryRomantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which wasseen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood,to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and

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colonizing Africans and Semitics” (Bernal 1987:2). The “Aryan Model,”according to Bernal, thus had to “overthrow” the “Ancient Model,” “theconventional view of the Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages[according to which] Greek culture had arisen as the result of coloniza-tion, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilizedthe native inhabitants” (Bernal 1987:10).

There is a kernel of truth in Bernal’s symptomatic claim, onewhich, as I will suggest, affiliates his insights about classical Greekculture with Heidegger’s, despite their quite different disciplinaryregisters. The evidence he brings to bear on the origins and character ofancient Greek culture through his reading of original texts of thatperiod as well as those following its decline make it clear that it was, infact, a hybrid culture, i.e., multicultural. Certainly ancient Greece wasnot as racially pure as Western historiography under the aegis of theAryan Model has assumed, and several recent classical scholars, despitetheir qualifications, continue to argue. But I also think the truth ofBernal’s argument, and its heuristic value for the contemporary occa-sion, is limited due to Bernal’s overdetermination of the race issue. Histendency to articulate the question of the origins of classical Greekculture in terms of a racial binary—the Hellenic and Semitic—reduceshis valuable insight into the heterogeneous character of classical Greekcivilization and its complex history of representation to a disablingidentitarian framework that reinscribes the very problematic he exposesin his interrogation of the Enlightenment’s Aryan Model. Furthermore,this framework has also determined the parameters of the debate thathas followed Bernal: not only the arguments of the scholars (mostlypostcolonialist) who find his thesis enabling, but also those humanistclassical scholars like Mary Lefkowitz, who vehemently disagree withBernal’s conclusions (Lefkowitz 1996; Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996).Indeed, it determines the scholarship of even those postmodernistscholars, like Vassilis Lambropoulos (1993), who are strongly critical ofthe humanist tradition of classical scholarship that has reduced thepolitical essence of ancient Greek culture to an aesthetic category(Lambropoulos 1993).

What is tellingly overlooked in Bernal’s race-oriented revisionaryhistory of the origins of modern Western civilization—and in thosehistories, pro and con, that his history has instigated—is precisely whatHeidegger, working on a different (philosophical) register, makesabsolutely central in his “de-struction” of the European (“ontotheo-logical”) tradition: the role that Rome—or, rather, the Roman reinter-pretation of classical Greek philosophy, culture, and politics—has playedin the codification of Europe’s cultural identity. It is an oversight, Isuggest, of enormous and disabling consequence. Bernal’s identitarian

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historiography fails to interrogate the accepted idea of cultural continu-ity between Greece and Rome (as in the ubiquitous cliche, “Greco-Roman civilization”), precisely because it fails to entertain the possibilitythat they were, in fact, radically different cultures. One is a cultureoriented by the principle of difference, the other, by the principle ofidentity; one is committed to an agonistic polis, the other (even in itsrepublican phase), to an imperial state. These are the differencesHeidegger discloses by way of his destructive genealogy of the Westerntradition.

The Roman provenance of European modernity: truth and pedagogy

Contrary to virtually all modern accounts of the provenance of the West,Heidegger claims that the idea of Europe, as we have come to know itthrough Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Humboldt, Arnold, andso on, was inaugurated, not by the classical Greeks, but by the Romans.The conventional history of the Western symbolic order—its thought,languages, representation of the polis, and global politics—does nothave its provenance in the existential actualities of the Greek experi-ence, but in the Roman re-presentation of them. Specifically, its prov-enance is “unstable” (but profoundly creative) Greek culture filteredthrough the eyes of a metropolitan Roman culture that saw itself not asthe heir of Greek civilization, but as an imperial culture that would“correct” the “fatal flaws” of its errant predecessor.1 This history ofrectification, according to Heidegger, begins with the Roman’s transfor-mation of the destabilizing Greek understanding of truth as a-letheia(“unconcealment” or “un-forgetting”) into veritas (“the adequation ofmind and thing”)(Heidegger 1993:116–120). This was an epochaltransformation that reduced an uncentered and originative, or open-ended (“errant”), thinking to a centered and derivative, or end-oriented,one. That is to say, it was a transformation that reduced an existentialmode of inquiry characterized by dialogic strife (polemos)—Auseinander-setzung 2—to a calculative, teleological method committed in advance tocorrectness and certainty (Heidegger 1959). In short, whereas theGreeks, not only the Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus, Anaximander, Par-menides), but even Plato and Aristotle (Heidegger 1962:2), thought thebe-ing (the temporal differentiations) of being as beings-in -the world,the Romans, committed to the imperative of the adequaetio, thought theanxiety-provoking differential dynamics of being metaphysically: fromthe distanced vantage point of the end (meta ta physika). In this way, theywere able to reduce temporality and the differences that temporalityalways disseminates to a totalized, spatial, or reified image that could be“comprehended” (from the Latin, prehendere, “to take hold of”); that is,

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to see and master the be-ing of being in its totality at any given immediatemoment in time (the volatile realm of “appearances”). This Romanreduction of the temporality of being to a spatial/reified form, whichalso posits Identity (the Whole, the One) as the condition for thepossibility of difference (the partial, the many), according to Heidegger,constitutes the founding moment of the cultural identity of the Occi-dent. What must be underscored is that this Roman mode of inquiry,insofar as it produces knowledge meta ta physika, is informed by the willto power over the be-ing of being, that is, over alterity. It is in this sensethat the Roman reduction of the Greek’s a-letheia to veritas is imperial inessence.

Nonetheless, we must not restrict Heidegger’s insight into thisfounding moment of European identity to the site of philosophy, i.e.,ontological representation. Though Heidegger obviously overdeterminedthis site in his thinking (and erred catastrophically when he did ventureinto politics), his discourse makes it clear that, despite the abstractnessof his articulations, he understood being as an indissoluble continuumthat, besides ontology as such, included epistemology (the subject),ecology, knowledge and cultural production, gender, race, and (na-tional and international) politics. Thus, for example, his crucial distinc-tion between Greek and Roman thinking finds a necessary analogy atthe site of education, which is to say, knowledge production. In anunreasonably neglected passage of his famous essay, “Letter on Human-ism,” Heidegger writes:

Humanitas, explicitly so called, was first considered and striven for in theage of the Roman Republic. Homo Humanus was opposed to homo barbarus.Homo humanus here means the Romans, who exalted and honored Romanvirtus through the “embodiment” of the paideia taken over from theGreeks. These were the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, whose culture wasacquired in the schools of philosophy. It was concerned with eruditio etinstitutio in bonas artes [scholarship and training in good conduct]. Paideiathus understood was translated as humanitas. The genuine romanitas ofhomo romanus consisted in such humanitas. We encounter the first human-ism in Rome: it therefore remains in essence a specifically Romanphenomenon, which emerged from the encounter of Roman civilizationwith the culture of late Greek civilization. (Heidegger 1993:224)

Like thinking, Heidegger implies that the Greek paideia was, insome fundamental degree, “errant”—a matter of prioritizing the par-ticular over the whole (what the humanist tradition came to conclusivelyidentify as the [merely] “apparent” over the “real”)—not in the sense ofa binary opposition between them, but of a belongingness, the imperativeof which was antagonistic dialogue (Auseinandersetzung) (Heidegger

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1959:62,105–106). If inquiry into the phenomena was never presupposi-tionless for the Greeks, the presuppositions they brought to bear wereput at risk, that is, understood as “forestructures” subject to the destruc-tive resistance of the singularity of events (Heidegger 1962:188–92).(This is what Heidegger means by the “hermeneutical circle” of theexistential analytic, which he opposes to the “vicious circularity” that lieshidden behind the “objectivity” or “disinterestedness”—the prejudiceagainst “presuppositions”—of modern humanistic and scientific inquiry[Heidegger 1962:315,363–364].) Fearing its destabilizing consequences,the Romans reduced this kind of radically dialogic—and peripatetic—education to a technological/disciplinary pedagogy: one, in otherwords, that transformed a way of learning committed to the instigationof questioning into one that would guarantee the production ofdependable citizens of the metropolis. To invoke Foucault’s biopoliticalextension of the meaning of Heidegger’s notion of the “disposablereserve” (Bestand), to which the modern (humanistic) “age of the worldpicture” threatens to reduce human beings, this “correction” of the“errant” Greek paideia was deployed to produce “useful and docilebodies” at the service of empire (Heidegger 1997; Foucault 1977:135–69): “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori ”(Horace Odes 3.2).

That the Roman empire, according to Heidegger, is at stake in thisreduction of the Greek paideia to eruditio et institutio in bonas artes is madeclear, not only by Heidegger’s assignment of the origins of the perennialWestern binary opposition between homo humanus and homo barbarus toRome, an assignment that implies that the Romans (rightly) read theGreek comportment towards the “barbaros”—“the one who does notspeak Greek”—as other than colonialist.3 It is also implicit in hisassertion that the end of Roman pedagogy is the “embodiment” of virtu(from vir, “man”). For, in suggesting that virtu is the biologistic essenceof homo romanus (the antithesis of homo barbarus), he is also suggestingthat the relay of positive qualities inhering in this honored Latin word—”man as animal rationale” (the Roman translation of zoon logon echon),“manliness,” “power deriving from piety and obedience to a highercause,” and “goodness”—were understood by the Romans as the binaryopposites of the effects of the Greek paideia : man as ec-static/in-sistentbeing-in-the world, effeminateness, errancy, and irresponsibility, if notexactly barbarism. This anthropo-logical and imperialist reading isconsonant with the common Roman attitude towards Greek learning(especially philosophy). “In an effort to turn his son against Greekculture,” Plutarch says of Cato the Elder, this Roman sage “allowedhimself an utterance which was absurdly rash for an old man: hepronounced with all the solemnity of a prophet that if ever the Romans

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became infected with the literature of Greece, they would lose theirempire” (Plutarch 1965:146).

To reiterate, the history to which Heidegger is referring here—indeed, everywhere in his destructive readings of the ontotheologicaltradition—is not historicist, but, like Nietzsche’s history of modernmorals (and Foucault’s history of modern penology), genealogical; thatis, a history of the present occasion. Heidegger underscores thiscounter-mnemonic point by going on to implicate the entire history ofEurope—from the Medieval era through the Renaissance to the Enlight-enment or humanist period (the period, we should recall, that borewitness to the emergence of European Philhellenism)—with this Romanobliteration by colonization of the de-centered, originative, and radi-cally dialogic Greek culture in keeping with Rome’s polyvalent human-ist/“imperial” project:

The so-called Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries in Italyis a renascentia romanitatis. Because romanitas is what matters, it is concernedwith humanitas and therefore with Greek paideia. But Greek civilization isalways seen in its later form and this itself is seen from a Roman point ofview. The homo romanus of the Renaissance also stands in opposition tohomo barbarus. But now the in-humane is the supposed barbarism of gothicScholasticism in the Middle Ages. Therefore a studium humanitatis, whichin a certain way reaches back to the ancients and thus becomes a revival ofGreek civilization, always adheres to historically understood humanism.For Germans this is apparent in the humanism of the eighteenth centurysupported by Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schiller. On the other hand,Hölderlin does not belong to “humanism,” precisely because he thoughtthe destiny of man’s essence in a more original [i.e., Greek] way than“humanism” could.” (Heidegger 1993:125)

What needs to be underscored in this remarkably suggestive, if tantaliz-ingly brief, history is that Heidegger identifies Winckelmann, Goethe,and Schiller—and by implication the entire body of EnlightenmentGerman scholarship: Woolf, Schlegel, Herder, Hegel, Humboldt—asthose responsible for the revival and institutionalization of classicalGreek studies in modernity with the anthropo-logical Roman para-digm. This humanistic frame of reference (what Bernal calls “theAryan model”) is that which has determined the interpretation ofclassical Greek culture ever since. The names to which this scholarshiprefers—Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Plato,Aristotle—are Greek, but, Heidegger implies, they are Greeks medi-ated through imperial Roman eyes. This will become tellingly clear if,for example, the circular destinarian structure of Virgil’s Aeneid (andthe enormous popularity of this Latin epic in European history before

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the advent of the “Aryan model”) is recognized to be, as it should, theRoman “visionary’s” “correction” of the “adolescent” errancy of “blind”Homer’s Odyssey that was intended to justify the Roman imperium sinefine.

Parmenides: the relation between the false (falsum) and imperialism

Though the question of who the ancient Greeks were is an abiding onein Heidegger’s discourse at large, his articulation of the distinctionbetween Greek and Roman thinking, Greek and Roman paideia, theGreek and Roman understanding of the polis, and the indissolublerelationship between the two, is always subordinated to the largerquestion of being (die Seinsfrage). As a result of this emphasis onontology—and a certain fatal antipathy for the political—both hissympathetic and critical commentators, following his overdeterminationof the bios theoretikos, have almost entirely overlooked the enabling rolethis crucial distinction and its polyvalence play, however symptomati-cally, in his effort to think the essence of the planetary triumph oftechnology, what Heidegger elsewhere calls “Americanism” (Heidegger1997:153), in modernity. The most serious consequence of this failure toadhere to one of Heidegger’s major contributions to postmoderninterpretive practice—the imperative to think what a text leaves unsaid(the margins)—has been the unfortunate neglect of the Parmenides, thelecture course on this enigmatic inaugural Greek thinker that Heideggergave at Freiburg University in the winter semester 1942–43. This text,not published until 1988 (English translation 1992), constituted, accord-ing to the French philosopher Éliane Escoubas (one of the few whorecognized its importance in Heidegger’s oeuvre), the “texte-charniére” ofHeidegger’s “explication avec” (his “reciprocal rejoinder to”) GermanNational Socialism (Escoubas 1988:173–88).

I cannot in this brief space do justice to Heidegger’s remarkablysuggestive, but neglected, meditation on this pre-Socratic philosopher’sthought concerning the question of being and its relationship to theidea of the polis. For the purpose of demonstrating its relevance for thepresent age, particularly for the contemporary Greek occasion, I restrictmy commentary to that resonant moment in his text that discloses theessential complicity of the truth discourse of the modern West withimperial power and traces that complicity back to the Romans’ “transla-tion” of the Greek a-letheia to veritas, or, more accurately, the Greekpseudos to falsum. By “the present age,” it is important to emphasize, Imean what Heidegger elsewhere calls “the Age of the World Picture” tosuggest the essentially imperial character of thinking at the “end” of theWestern philosophical tradition; that is, when the “benign” humanist

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(i.e., metaphysical/spatial) logic inaugurated by the Romans fulfills—and discloses—itself in the global triumph of technological or instru-mental thinking and the reduction of being, in all its manifestations, toa banalized disposable reserve. This, to bring Heidegger’s prolepticinsight up to date, is the age that the intellectual deputies of thetriumphant liberal capitalist democracy have, in the aftermath of theCold War, announced as “the end of history” and the advent of “the newworld order” (Fukuyama 1992; Haas 1997), the global order, notincidentally, to which the modern Greek state, by way of the pressure ofthe European Union (and NATO), is being compelled to accommodateits polity and culture.

Heidegger’s revisionary interpretation of the essential relationshipbetween Western knowledge production and imperial power has itspoint of departure in a genealogy of the concept of “truth” privileged byWestern modernity. (Significantly, it is this interpretation that antici-pates Michel Foucault’s analysis of the “repressive hypothesis” of thepost-monarchical “reformers,” his demonstration that the truth dis-course of post-Enlightenment modernity is not external to and theadversary of power, but internal to and complicitous with power.)

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negativeterms: it “excludes,” it “represses,” it “censors,” it “abstracts,” it “masks,” it“conceals.” In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it producesdomains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledgethat may be gained of him belong to this production. (Foucault 1977:194;1978:17–49)

This is the truth discourse that was produced in the name of certainty bythe Romans, when, according to the imperatives of metaphysical think-ing, they decisively split and hierarchized the earlier Greek understand-ing of truth as a-letheia (“un-concealment”) into the true and the false(veritas and falsum).

For the Greeks, the negative of a-letheia implied in the privativeprefix, pseudos (“dissembling”), belonged “positively” with the “positive”:

The essence of negativity is nothing negative, but neither is it something“positive.” The distinction between the positive and the negative [uncon-cealment and concealment] does not suffice to grasp what is essential [inthe Greek understanding of the truth] as a-letheia, to which the non-essence belongs. The essence of the false [for the Greeks] is not something“false.” (Heidegger 1992:44)

As the prefix of a-letheia suggests, unconcealment and concealment werealways already “related” in polemos (Auseinandersetzung). In their transla-tion of a-letheia, the Romans, on the other hand, severed and hierarchized

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this relatedness. They saw the negative—falsum—as the radically inferiorother of veritas, the correspondence of mind and thing. In so doing, theyreduced the unending antagonistic and productive relationship to a warto the end, to a relationship, that is, which enabled the Romans todemonize the radical other of truth and thus to justify its obliteration.

In the first phase of his inquiry into the relationship betweenmetaphysical perception and imperialism, Heidegger traces the originsof this Roman falsum back to the Greek sphallo—“to overthrow, bring toa downfall, fell, make totter”—which, according to the directive sug-gested by the stem following the privative prefix of a-letheia—was not thecounter-essence of the latter for the Greeks. By demonstrating that theRomans represented the ontological site as a domain or territory to bemastered, Heidegger suggests that their bypassing of the Greek pseudos,which is affiliated with lathos (concealment) or lethe (forgetting), wasintended to put the truth (of being) and its binary opposite, the false, atthe service not simply of certainty, but of the imperium:

The realm of essence decisive for the development of the Latin falsum isthe one of the imperium and the “imperial.” We will take these words intheir strict sense. . . . On the way through the French language [and here,Heidegger, is referring to its Roman origins], “commend” [“to entrust toprotection and sheltering cover”] became commandieren, i.e., more pre-cisely, the Latin imperare, im-parare = to arrange, to take measures, i.e., prae-cipere, to occupy in advance, and so to take possession of the occupiedterritory and to rule it. Imperium is the territory founded on command-ments [Gebot], in which the others are obedient [botmäsig]. Imperium is thecommand in the sense of commandment. Command, thus understood, isthe basis of the essence of domination, not the consequence of it andcertainly not just a way of exercising dominations. . . . In the essential realmof the “command” belongs the Roman “law” ius. This word is connectedwith jubeo: to enjoin [heissen] by injunction [Geheiss] to have somethingdone and to determine it through this doing and letting. The command isthe essential ground of domination and of iustum, as understood in Latin,“to-be-in-the-right” and “to have a right.” Accordingly, iustitia has a whollydifferent ground of essence than that of dike, which arises from aletheia.(Heidegger 1992:40)

In this remarkably resonant passage, Heidegger points to theaffiliation between prae-cipere and words like “concept,” “conceive,”“principle,” “precept,” “perception,” “capture,” (all from the Latin:capere, “to seize”), whose etymologies reveal the process of knowledgeproduction as a reification and grasping or mastering of the be-ing ofbeing and with “metaphysics,” the perception of the temporality ofbeing from the end or from above, i.e., “in advance,” which spatializeswhat it sees. It is an affiliation that reduces the Greek understanding of

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being as radically temporal in essence (and the paedeia it calls for) intoa territory to be “occupied in advance” (my emphasis). It is no accidentthat, since the Romans, the West has referred to the being into whichone inquires as a “region” (from the Latin “regere”: “to rule”) or“domain” (from “domus/dominus”: house/master, or “province” (“vincere”:to conquer) or “territory,” words referring to the production of knowl-edge that are foreign to ancient Greek inquiry. Heidegger writes,

For the Romans, the earth, tellus, terra, is the dry land, the land as distinctfrom the sea; this distinction differentiates that upon which construction,settlement, and installation are possible from those places where they areimpossible. Terra becomes territorium, land of settlements as realm ofcommand. In the Roman terra can be heard an imperial accent, completelyforeign to the Greek gaia and ge.” (Heidegger 1992:60)

In keeping with this insight into the complicity of knowledge andpower, the second phase of Heidegger’s analysis invokes the visualmetaphorics informing and privileged by meta-physical inquiry in orderto demonstrate that the Roman concept of the false, as a fundamentaldimension of commanding, is related to over-seeing. It also suggests thecontinuity between Heidegger’s ontological and Foucault’s politicalgenealogy of modern Western knowledge production, surveillance:

To commanding as the essential ground of domination belongs “being onhigh” [or “above,” Obensein]. That is only possible through constantsurmounting of others [Überhohung], which are thus the inferiors [Unteren].In this surmounting, in turn, there resides the constant ability to oversee[super-vise and dominate, Übersehen-können]. We say “to oversee some-thing,” which means “to dominate it” [beherrschen]. (Heidegger 1992:41)

This over-sight of an absolute subject, understood in Derrida’s terms asa “Transcendental Signified,” or “center elsewhere” that is “beyond thereach of [free] play” (Derrida 1978:279), is not, as it is understood inordinary discourse, a matter of the failure of seeing something that isactually there. It is, rather, the proper form of vision. Seeing, as it isunderstood in the Western tradition, is not passive reception of thatwhich it perceives. It is an action, a praxis: “To this commanding view,which includes surmounting, belongs a constant being-on-the-lookout(Auf-der-Lauer-liegen). That is the form of all action that oversees [domi-nates from the gaze], but that keeps to itself: in Roman, the actio of theactus” (Heidegger 1992:41). And it is this reifying oversight that, inputting everything/time in its “proper” place within the grid of theWhole, is an action which identifies it essentially with the imperialproject:

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The commanding overseeing is the dominating vision which is expressedin the often cited phrase of Caesar: veni, vedi, vici—I came, I oversaw[übersah], I conquered. Victory is only the effect of the Caesarian gaze thatdominates [Übersehens] and the seeing whose proper character is actio. Theessence of the imperium resides in the actus of constant “action.” Theimperial actio of the constant surmounting of others includes the sense thatthe others, should they rise to the same or even to a comparable level ofcommand, will be brought down—in Roman: fallere (participle: falsum).This bringing-to fall [das Zu-Fall-bringen: “the occasioning of an ac-cident”[from the Latin, cadere, “to fall or perish”] belongs necessarily to thedomain of the imperial. (Heidegger 1992:40)

After establishing the essential complicity of Roman metaphysicsand imperialism—the over-sight or sur-veillance, which is identical todomination of the “Other” (and is foreign to Greek thought)—Heideggergoes on to distinguish a primitive and implicitly wasteful and inefficient(resistible) imperial practice from a fully articulated (“proper”) andhighly economical, efficient, and virtually invulnerable imperial prac-tice. This distinction constitutes his most important contribution tocontemporary (postcolonial) analyses of imperialism and, I suggest, to arethinking of modern Greece’s relationship to Europe. It should not beoverlooked that the developed form of imperial practice to which hepoints is not only informed by the metaphorics of panoptic vision, but bythe affiliated figure of the circle, i.e., the center and the periphery:

The bringing-to-fall can be accomplished in a “direct” assault [Ansturm]and overthrowing [Niederwerfen, literally, “throwing down”]. But the othercan also be brought down by being outflanked [Umgehung] and “trippedup” from behind. The bringing-to-fall is now the way of deceptive circum-vention [Hinter–gehen]. . . Considered from the outside, going behind theback is the roundabout and therefore mediate bringing-to-fall as opposedto immediate overthrowing. Thereby, the fallen are not annihilated, butare in a certain way raised up again—within the boundaries [in denGrenzen] which is fixed by the dominators. (Heidegger 1992:41)

The distinction between these two forms of imperialism thatHeidegger traced back to the Roman revision of the Greek understand-ing of truth—a distinction that would immunize Rome from the fate ofthe Greek polity—can only be seen as proleptic of Michel Foucault’sdifferentiation between power relations in the ancien regime and in theEnlightenment and, more pertinently, to my argument of Edward Said’sappropriation of Foucault’s distinction in his critique of Orientalism:i.e., modern Western imperialism. More specifically, in thematizing thetextualization (mediation) of power in the appropriation of truth forpurposes of imperial domination, Heidegger anticipates Foucault’s andSaid’s disclosure of the complicity of the microcosmic table—the

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structural model of knowledge production of the modern West—withthe colonization and pacification of the “Other:”

This “staking out” and “fixing”[Abstecken] is called in Roman pango, whencethe word pax—peace. This is, thought imperially, the fixed situation of thefallen. In truth, the bringing-to-fall in the sense of deception [Hintergehens]and roundabout action [Umgehens] is not the mediate and derived imperialactio, but the truly genuine imperial actio. It is not in war, but in the fallereof deceptive circumvention [hintergehenden Umgehens] and its pressing-into-service for domination that the proper and “great” trait of the imperialreveals itself. The battles against the Italian cities and tribes, by means ofwhich Rome secured its territory and expansion, makes manifest theunmistakable procedure of roundabout action and encirclement throughtreaties with tribes lying further out. In the Roman fallere—to bring-to-fall—as a going around, there resides deceiving [Tauschen]; the falsum isthe insidiously deceptive: “the false.” (Heidegger 1992:41)4

The end of the pursuit of knowledge, according to this devel-oped—“postcolonial”—form of imperial practice, is to produce peace.But, this “peace” will be achieved only by the total colonization andpacification of the “Other.” To put it in terms of Foucault’s “repressivehypothesis”—a strategy that along with the appropriation of the “Romanmodel” was invented by the Enlightenment “reformers” to escape thefate of the ancien regime’s overt use of power—this duplicitous peace willonly come when those “others” upon whom power is practiced become,by way of the inscription of the “truth” (of the West) in the “other,” thebearers of their own incarceration:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumesresponsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontane-ously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which hesimultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his ownsubjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physicalweight; it tends to the non-corporeal; and, the more it approaches thislimit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is aperpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is alwaysdecided in advance. (Foucault 1977:202–203)

In other words, theory, understood as a mode of inquiry that privilegessight (theoria), and practice are coterminous. The Pax Metaphysica is thePax Romana. It is in this sense, according to Heidegger, that “the Latinfalsum [like the veritas, which is its binary opposite] is alien to the Greekpseudos [and the a-letheia to which its belongs]” (Heidegger 1992:42).

Heidegger’s account of the Roman translation of ancient Greek’saletheia and pseudos to veritas and falsum should not, therefore, be seen assimply an exercise in historical philology. Rather, it should be read as thedisclosure of an epochal event in the history of the West, an event that

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laid the foundations on which the edifice of the collective identity of theOccident has been built: its essential way of thinking and its vision of thehuman polity. This is the point he makes at the end of his meditation onthe Roman translation of the Greek pseudos to falsum. Against theprevailing post-Enlightenment (i.e., humanist) historiographical viewthat posits classical Greece as the origin of European civilization—a view,it should be remembered, that was held by those exiled Greek intellec-tuals, like Korais, who were committed to constituting the identity ofpost-Ottoman Greece after the War of Independence—Heidegger prof-fers the view that the Romans’ “transformation of Hellenism” was notlimited to “individual institutions of the Greek world or to singleattitudes and ‘modes of expression’ of Greek humanity.” On thecontrary, this “Latinization” [of the Greek world] was a “transformation ofthe essence of truth and Being within the essence of the Greco-Romandomain of history” and thus “the genuine event of history” (1992:42). Itwas, further, not Roman imperial practice that was the basis of theessential transformation of aletheia into veritas, as rectitudo (correctness);it was, rather, the transformation of the aletheia into veritas that gave riseto imperialism. And it is this genealogy of the origins of the West, againstthe prevailing Enlightenment representation, that we now must retrieveif we are to gain a truer understanding of the essence of ancient Greeceand of modernity, by which Heidegger means both their thought andtheir politics:

That is why the historical state of the world we call the modern age,following historiographical chronology, is also founded on the event of theRomanizing of Greece. The “Renaissance” of the ancient world accompa-nying the outset of the modern period is unequivocal proof of this. A moreremote, but by no means indifferent, consequence of the Romanizing ofGreece and of the Roman rebirth of antiquity is the fact that we today [andthis “we,” I would add emphatically, includes contemporary Greeks] stillsee the Greek world with Roman eyes—and indeed not solely withinhistoriographical research into ancient Greece but also, and this is the onlydecisive thing, within the historical metaphysical dialogue of the modernworld with that of the ancients. . . . [W]e still think the Greek polis and the“political” in a totally un-Greek fashion. We think the “political” asRomans, i.e. imperially. The essence of the Greek polis will never begrasped within the horizon of the political as understood in the Romanway. As soon as we consider the simple unavoidable essential domains,which are for the historiographer naturally of no consequence, since theyare inconspicuous and noiseless, then, but only then, do we see that ourusual basic ideas, i.e., Roman, Christian, modern ones [those of the onto-theo-logical tradition], miserably fail to grasp the primordial essence ofancient Greece. (Heidegger 1992:42–43)

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Parmenides: directives for thinking Greek modernity

What, then, does Heidegger’s destruction of the post-Enlightenment’sinterpretation of the relationship between Greek antiquity and Euro-pean modernity provide for understanding anew and rethinking thecontemporary Greek occasion? The post–Cold War occasion (includingthe United State’s “humanitarian wars” against Iraq and Serbia) hasborne witness to the global “triumph” and “peace” and “justice” ofliberal capitalist democracy (and its discursive medium, AmericanEnglish)—a democracy, peace, and justice that attributes its historicalorigins to Greek antiquity—and on the European continent has mani-fested itself in the form of the inclusive “visionary” authority of NATOand the European Community.

To begin with, Heidegger’s counter-mnemonic reading of thishistory compels not only a rethinking of the representation of the ideaof Europe handed down to us by the Enlightenment. It also, morespecifically, demands that we rethink this representation as it hasimpinged on the establishment of modern Greece as a nation-state atthe turn of the nineteenth century and on the subsequent history of thislinguistically, culturally, politically, and geographically ambiguous “Euro-pean” nation. This relationship is, of course, a very complex andcontested matter, one exacerbated by the seemingly irreconcilableclaims that have historically been made by the Christian/Roman Byzan-tine tradition (epitomized by the popular epithet of Greek identityRomios/Romiosini), the Classical Greek tradition, and the late Hellenistic(Macedonian) tradition, not to say the Ottoman tradition itself, on thepsyche of the diverse indigenous population of post-RevolutionaryGreece. Yet, I do not profess adequate scholarly expertise to speak withauthority about it. My justification in intervening in the debate derivesfrom the estranging effect—the shock value—incumbent on its forcefuldislocation out of the sedimented and unproductive discursive contextin which it has been imbedded (mired, I would say) since the rise ofGerman classical scholarship (Altertumswissenschaft) at the end of theeighteenth century and its reconstellation into the general culturalhistory of Europe which Heidegger thematizes, especially in his Parmenideslectures.

Such a reconstellation, as I have shown, suggests that the hege-monic Enlightenment historiography on which European modernityhas based its claim to its classical Greek origins was not Greek at all, but“Roman”—and essentially imperial—insofar as it thought being in all itsmanifestations “in advance” (meta-ta-physika) rather than, like the an-cient Greeks, existentially or originatively. In other words, Heidegger’sreading of this history, though it makes no reference to modern Greece,

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suggests nevertheless that the Enlightenment nations’ interpretation ofclassical Greek thought and culture—Britain’s, France’s, and Germany’s—and their vocal “Philhellenism”—their “sympathy” for the Greek revolu-tion against what they represented as the Ottoman imperial “despo-tism”—was, whatever the particular political orientation of each towardsthe emergent nation, ultimately an ideologically motivated invention—an “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s apt phrase. Theyinvoked modern Europe’s filial relationship with classical Greece—Hegel, for example, makes this eminently clear in his Philosophy of History(1956)—for the purpose of constructing or, rather, reconstructing andempowering a European identity that was antithetical to the “despotic”and “decadent” cultures of the Orient, the Eastern Mediterranean,India, China, and especially the Ottoman Empire, and to the “barbar-ian” or “prehistoric” cultures of Africa and the “New World.” (We mustresist the disciplinary perspective inscribed in our consciousness by theEnlightenment’s rigorous compartmentalization and classification ofknowledge that blinds us to the indissoluble relationship betweenEurope’s invention of modern Greece and the rapacity of France’s andEngland’s colonial projects in Africa, and the Near and Far East at thattime.)

Intent on recuperating or producing a continuous Europeantradition in the face of the crisis of identity precipitated by the globaliza-tion of their emergent imperial projects, the European nations, whetherin their capacity as individual states or as members of a collectiveEurope, were indifferent, if not blind to, the ethnic, cultural, religious,and political realities of Greek society at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury. Inscribed by their panoptic orientation towards history, the“enlightened” European nations (over)saw their “Philhellenism” in away remarkably similar to the way, according to Heidegger, the Romans(over)saw their colonial project. They re-presented the newly “liber-ated”—but from the perspective of their binarist logic, hopelessly“benighted” and “underdeveloped,” i.e., peripheral—Greek nation, whichwas emerging from the yoke of imperial Ottoman rule, as a “free nation”taking its “rightful place” within the family of free European nations, thebetter to harness its strategic geopolitical location to an emergent “humane,” i.e.,neo-colonial Europe. I mean an Enlightenment Europe that, analogous toits synchronous metamorphosis from a monarchical to a liberal capital-ist, bourgeois polity (what Foucault has called the disciplinary society)under the aegis of “the Roman reference,”5 was in the process oftransforming an older, overtly violent—and thus politically vulnerable—form of imperialism into a kind of imperialism that would render itsmetropolitan center—its exploitative colonialist motives—invisible, a“center elsewhere,” “beyond the reach of [the] free play [of criticism]”

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into a “progressive” humanist/technological discursive practice whoseorigin, though Roman, allegedly lay in the “benign” and “enlightened”democracy of the classical Greek polis.

Following the directives of Heidegger’s Parmenides, we can say thatfor all practical purposes—and despite its heterogeneous and conflictedcultural identity—the Greece imagined as a nation-state by European“Philhellenism” in the wake of the Revolution of 1821, after 400 years ofOttoman rule, was, in reality, as its imposition of a patronizing German-born king testifies, a Greece whose cultural and political identity was notGreek and democratic, but essentially Roman and imperial. This isborne witness to, not only by the European Philhellenes, theoreticianslike the Schlegels, Schiller, Humboldt, and Hegel, by treasure hunterslike Lord Elgin, C. R. Cockerell, Louis-Sebastièn Fauvel, Baron Hallervon Hallerstein, and Baron Otto Magnus von Stackeberg, and by travelwriters like Chateaubriand, Abbé Barthelemy, and Byron, but also bymany ventriloquized Greek intellectual exiles who from abroad wereimagining the cultural, social, and political structure of the future Greeknation. I am, of course, referring to such Neo-hellenic thinkers asIosipos Moisiodax, Rhigas Pheraios-Velestinlis, and Adamantios Korais,all of whom, despite their nomadic status and localization of thespeculative horizon of European Enlightenment thinking, were pro-foundly influenced by the liberal discourses of such Enlightenmentthinkers (some of whom Heidegger identifies as essentially “Roman”) asCondillac, Locke, Winckelmann, Schiller, Hegel, Herder, and Humboldt.

Ultimately, if not immediately, indifferent to the actual historicalrealities of Ottoman Greece, the dream of these exilic Greek intellectu-als was a Eurocentric dream precipitated, perhaps unwittingly, in thepurifying (dedifferentiating) alembic of European Orientalism (Gour-gouris 1996:128–40) and in its vision of modernization—which meant inthe end the Europeanization—of the “unimproved”6 and recalcitrantlycentrifugal hybrid structure of the new society according to the Euro-pean nationalist (imperial) model (sometimes accommodating andsometimes resisting the tradition of Roman/Byzantine/Christian ortho-doxy). However local and contemporary their rhetoric, the “Neohellen-ism” of these thinkers was essentially nostalgic. Their pedagogical effortswere thus oriented towards imposing a highly abstract, elitist language—a not too pure katharevousa that was a combination of classical andByzantine Greek—and a nationalist culture and politics on a heteroge-neous population that had spoken a highly “impure” (“unimproved”)demotic Greek, had lived their lives outside the European orbit forcenturies, had referred to themselves as Romoii as much as Ellenii, andwere more attuned to Athanasios Diakos and the Bridge of Alammanathan to Leonidas and the Pass of Thermopolae.7 These linguistic,

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cultural, and political purifications they hoped, along with theirPhilhellenic masters, would re-weave the historical thread—cut once bythe Peloponnesian Wars (and the Macedonian conquest), by Romancolonization, again by the advent of Roman/Byzantine Christianity, andfinally and most decisively by the Turkokratia—that bound ancientGreece to modern Greece.8 Despite the genuineness of the Europeannations’ Philhellenism, their interest in the nascent Greek nation-statewas informed by a fundamental Eurocentrism. It undoubtedly had lessto do with the amelioration of the Greek condition than with using theWar of Independence for purposes of reestablishing once and for all theHistory-ordained primacy of Europe in relationship to the rest of theworld, that is, its metropolitan hegemony on a global scale sanctioned byits own interpretation of the truth of Universal History. To put itsuccinctly, the modern Greece fabricated by the Enlightenment’s gaze,on the analogy of the latter’s monumentalist representation of classicalGreece, was in fact a “Romanized Greece.” It was a differential Greeceaccommodated to a Europe that, despite its alleged classical Greek origins,was in fact founded on and represented itself in terms of the Romanmodel. This Greece, in short, was conceived to assure its status as asatellite of Europe: a Europeanized Greece that was at the same time ametaphysical Greece, a humanist Greece, a nationalist Greece, a racistGreece, and, ultimately, as its astonishingly unfilial—and disastrous—commitment to the Megali Idea (the “Great Idea”) makes clear, whateverits proponents’ interpretation of its ends, an imperialist Greece. Like theclassical Greece invented by the Enlightenment custodians of theEuropean Cultural Memory, it was a phantasmic Greece that hadvirtually obliterated the anxiety-provoking but also potentially productive “reality”of an originally far more complex and diversified culture.

It is true, of course, that the historical realities—internal andexternal to the Greek state—thwarted the immediate fulfillment incultural and political practice of this monumentalist Enlightenmentvision of a Europeanized, which is to say, Roman/humanist, Greece. Butnot the ideal. However unnourished, that Roman ideal, masquerading inthe resonant names of Greek antiquity, was nevertheless planted in theGreek national consciousness in the period of the Revolution. And sincethen, as Vassilis Lambropoulos has shown so persuasively at the synec-dochical site of modern Greek literature and literary criticism (though itis the mask of European Romanticism, not that of European Romanismhe exposes) (Lambropoulos 1988),9 it has increasingly been at itsmonumentalizing nationalist/imperial work, representing the polyva-lent heterogeneity and plurality of Greek culture in the pejorativebinarist terms inaugurated by the Romans when they translated a-letheiato veritas and reduced its positive potential to the European Identity.

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This ambivalent heterogeneity, which was precluded by its willedaccommodation to the Enlightenment’s “Romanization” of classical andmodern Greece, is, I suggest, the second directive to the present ageinstigated by Heidegger’s disclosure of the perennial complicity ofmetaphysics and the politics of imperialism in the Parmenides. And it is adirective especially pertinent to a ventriloquized Greek dominant culturewhich, in the name of modernization (i.e., the release from the stigma of“underdevelopment”) and against a small minority, is bent on accommo-dating the Greek language, culture, economy, and public sphere to theAmerico-Eurocentric European Union. In his genealogy of Europeanmodernity, Heidegger does not go beyond his claim that the classicalGreeks, as opposed to the Romans, did not think metaphysically or, to putit positively, that they thought of being agonistically, according to theimperatives of their radically temporal/historical comportment towardsbeing. If, however, we grant this meaning of the ancient Greek’s conceptof truth, a-letheia, if, that is, we reconstellate his ontological disclosure ofthe always already openendedness—the unreifiability—of being at theindissolubly related sites of classical Greek cultural production (poetry,drama, history, travel writing, as well as philosophical discourse) andpolitical practice (the agonistic polis, according to Hannah Arendt’sbrilliant and persuasive but neglected account of the Greek public spherein The Human Condition [1958:192–207]), we encounter an “unwittinglychanged terrain” (Althusser 1979:23) in which the received metaphysicalassumption about the truths of these sites undergoes a startling estrange-ment. What modern classical scholarship—and the political, so-calledliberal democratic institutions that have founded themselves on it—hastaken to be a unified and identitarian culture, a culture subsumed underthe name of a metropolitan “Greece” that distinguished itself in aninaugural way from the barbarians at the periphery of its circumferentialfrontiers,10 suddenly metamorphoses. Classical Greece becomes some-thing resembling an “errant” multicultural society or, perhaps moreaccurately, a culture the essence of which was its unending contestation ofthe kind of hierarchical binaries—the One/Many, Identity/Difference,Truth/Falsehood, Male/Female, White/Black, Culture/Anarchy, Civi-lized Citizen/Barbarian, and so on—that were fundamental to theRoman imperial project and, however hidden behind the seductiverhetoric of modern democracy, continue to determine the thought,culture, and politics of European/American modernity.

This, I submit, is, in varying degrees, of course, the decisivetestimony—if we disengage ourselves from the visualist, binarist, and identitarianinterpretive frame of reference inscribed in us by the Cultural Memory ofRomanized Enlightenment—of Odysseus’s errancy in Homer’s Odyssey(which it was the Roman Virgil’s imperial project to “correct” in The

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Aeneid); of the agonistic belongingness of Heraclitus’s Logos (“Polemosand logos are the same”) (Heidegger 1962:62); of Parmenides’ conflictualaletheia (and even of Plato’s pharmakon, and Aristotle’s katholon); ofHerodotus’s “philobarbarian” sympathies in The Histories; of the Erynes(the finally acknowledged Angry Ones) in Aeschylus’ Oresteia; of theresonantly provocative silence of Antigone bereaved of a language in thename of language in Sophocles’ Antigone; of Iphigenia’s self -sacrifice inIphigenia at Aulis, which discloses the nationalist and imperial violencehidden in Agamemnon’s (and the assembled Greek host’s) claim; of the“barbarian” Media’s appalling murder of her children, which dislocatesJason’s ethnocentric racism in Euripides, Media; and of the errancy ofthe itinerant early Greek geographers that the Romanized Strabo“corrects” in behalf of Augustus’s imperial project.11 To encounter theseand other Greek texts produced before the “Hellenization” of Hellas(after the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars and its colonization by theRomans) from outside the Enlightenment problematic enables us to seewhat for those within the latter is necessarily invisible: that the ancientGreeks, whatever the limitations of their social organization, understoodthemselves not, like the Romans, as transcendental subjects, but as finitebeings, “in-sistent ex-sistents,” simultaneously and irremediably insideand outside the be-ing of being. Acknowledging this finiteness as thehuman condition, they, therefore, encountered being in all its manifes-tations, from this outside-in or in-between, that is, from the ambivalentperspective of a-partness, the imperative of which is not (as it is from themetaphysical perspective that perceives Being and appearance as aradical binary) mastery or even fabrication, but an unending and mobilecontestation—what Heidegger calls Auseinandersetzung, the belongingnessin strife of “opposites” that always already precipitates the extraordinaryin the ordinary, the difference (that makes a difference) in the same.

Heidegger’s Parmenides and Bernal’s Black Athena:thinking the break between ancient and Modern Greece positively

Thus we come back, in the sense of a Heideggerian “repetition”(Wiederholung), to Martin Bernal’s provocative retrieval of the “AncientModel” of Greek antiquity from the oblivion to which it was relegated bythe German Enlightenment’s invention of the racist “Aryan Model,”more specifically to the question of this “Ancient Model’s” vaguecontent. By reconstellating Heidegger’s Parmenides into the context ofthe debates precipitated by Bernal’s Black Athena, by, that is, introducingthe Roman factor which he, as well as the classical scholarship he iscontesting, inexplicably represses, we are enabled to perceive, not onlyits limitations: its indifference to the ontological “ground” of classical

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Greek thinking and, above all, its blindness to the imperialist dimensionof the Enlightenment’s model incumbent on its focus on racism. Moreimportant, since destructive criticism is more interested in the liberationof what is closed off by metaphysical structure than in annihilating thelatter, this reconstellation of Heidegger’s Parmenides also enables us toperceive its positive contributions: its disclosure that the Enlightenment’suniversalist reading of classical Greece is, in fact, an ideological con-struction that has reduced the complex differential and always potentialplurality of ancient Greek culture to an unwarranted and disablingidentity or oneness. That is to say, Heidegger’s distinction betweenGreek and Roman thinking in the Parmenides allows us to see thatBernal’s extended account of the historical vicissitudes of the “AncientModel” goes far, if only in a certain symptomatic (i.e., unthought) way—and despite its “African/Semitic” bias—to demonstrate that, contrary tothe “Aryan Model” (which I am claiming is simply a late allotrope of theRoman model), the culture of Greek antiquity was pluralist, indeed,multicultural. That is, if we understand its truth in terms of Heidegger’sa-letheia and its notion of the polis as founded on the kind of agonisticdialogue he calls Auseinandersetzung. (This is more or less the idea of thepolis that constitutes the point of departure of Arendt’s diagnosis of themodern polity in The Human Condition, a book that, as far as I know, hasbeen entirely neglected by the classical scholars who are now debatingthe question of the identity of classical Greece.)12

Understood according to the imperatives of the genealogy of theEuropean identity disclosed by reconstellating Heidegger’s Parmenidesinto the debates precipitated by Bernal’s Black Athena, we need notlament, as so many contemporary Western, including Greek, intellectu-als do, the disintegration of the prevailing monumental/nationalistimage of classical Greek culture now irreversibly underway. On thecontrary, in locating the origins of Europe in metropolitan Rome, thisgenealogy enables us to see classical Greece—its un-centeredness, itsoriginative thinking, its agonistic multicultural polity, its ethnic hybrid-ity, and its distrust of, if not indifference to, the colonialist impulse—asa heuristic model of renewal in the American “Age of the WorldPicture.” By this I do not simply mean the age that has brought theimperial logical economy of Western metaphysical thinking to itsfulfillment in the planetary “triumph” of instrumental reason, technol-ogy, and its neo-imperialist global capitalist polity (what has been calledby Americans “the New World Order” or the Pax Americana). I also meanthe age that in thus “fulfilling” its essential imperial logic has come to itsend in another and less sanguine sense: namely, to its self-destructivelimit condition. It is the age, in other words, that has precipitated intostark visibility (as the “age of Creon” precipitates the expressive silence

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of Antigone) the finally uncontainable “other” as the specter that hauntsthe West’s global hegemony.

This genealogy, in other words, enables, indeed, compels us torethink the hitherto obscured positive possibilities of this spectral “other”of Western metaphysical/imperial thought and practice in all its manifes-tations: not only the ontological difference precipitated by the fulfillmentof thinking meta ta physika, but also, and not least (though the compart-mentalization of the indissoluble continuum of being has made thisconnection the most difficult of perceptions not impossible) the enor-mous population of displaced peoples unhomed by the fulfillment ofWestern imperialism in the name of the “white man’s burden” or“mission civilisatrice.” What this genealogy makes possible, in short, is thetransformation of the “other,” understood as a debilitating lack whenseen within the framework of the West, into a productive force ofdecolonization precisely in its not being any longer answerable to thattotalizing framework.

Finally, I suggest, this genealogy that discloses ancient Greece notas the decisive origin, but as an, if not the, “other” of the (Romanized)West, should not be interpreted by contemporary Greeks as anunwelcomed blow to their national pride. Such a response not onlybelies a misplaced nostalgia for a classical Greece that never existed, butalso a vestigial complicity with a Western colonialism—European andincreasingly American—that, from the War of Independence throughthe age of imperialism to the Greek Civil War of 1944–49, the militarydictatorship of 1967–74, the establishment of the European Union, andthe recent U.S. initiated “humanitarian” war against Serbia, has com-ported itself towards Greece as a provincial, “undeveloped,” and colo-nial Third World nation. More immediately, it also betrays a disablingblindness to the subaltern role that the European Union, by way of theseductions of the “common market” and the honorific aura of the word“European,” is compelling Greece to play in the post-Cold War era.

To put it positively, the genealogy I have all too briefly disclosed byway of Heidegger’s counter-mnemonic Parmenides enables us to retrieveand to rethink the forgotten legacy of classical Greece in a way thatovercomes the disabling restraints imposed by the Enlightenment’sRomanized representation of that legacy. It not only enables us toretrieve and think this legacy in behalf of asserting the differentialidentity of contemporary Greece against a powerful European “commu-nity” bent on ventriloquizing the culture of this marginal people. It alsoenables us to invoke this repressed legacy in behalf of harnessing whatEurope continues arrogantly to call its “underdeveloped” or “unim-proved” or “backward” status—its vestigial “barbarism,” as it were—to adiscourse and sociopolitical practice that, unlike those disastrous dis-

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courses and practices of the ethnic Balkan enclaves precipitated by thedisintegration of Yugoslavia, is attuned to the anti-nationalist andmulticultural imperatives of the present postcolonial context. Which isto say, to the renewal of a global “Europeanized” polity that, though itsdominating constituencies represent it eschatalogically as the coming of“good news”—the advent of a “new world order” (Fukuyama 1992:xiii)—has, in fact, come to its ossified, sterile, and impotent, i.e.,banalized, end.13 This imperative to rethink—to think anew—the veryidea of “civilization,” I suggest, is the subsuming directive that Heidegger’sdistinction between the ancient Greeks and Romans in the Parmenidesproffers, not least to that minority of contemporary Greeks who aretroubled (dislocated) by the increasing momentum in Greece towards“Europeanization” and would thus think their contemporary occasionoutside/in the Europe problematic. This too, to retrieve a modernGreek voice otherwise remote from Heidegger, is the directiveConstantine Cavafy proffers from outside/in the Greek problematic inhis great poem about the complicity of civilization and imperialism,“Waiting for the Barbarians”(1904):

“And now what will become of us without barbarians?Those people were a kind of solution.”

state university of new york at binghamton

NOTES

1 We must free ourselves once and for all from the flattering—and disabling—cliché,inaugurated by Horace in his “Epistle” to the emperor Augustus and repeated ad nauseumthroughout the centuries up to the present (see Beard and Henderson 1995), that theRoman conquest of Greece was in fact the Greek conquest of Rome in the sense that thecivilization of the latter—its literature, art, and culture—became utterly indebted to,indeed, parasitic on, the conquered country: “Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit.”

2 “The polemos named here is a conflict that prevailed prior to everything divine andhuman, not war in the human sense. This conflict, as Heraclitus thought it, first caused therealm of being to separate into opposites; it first gave rise to position and order and rank.In such separation cleavages, intervals, distances, and joints opened. In the conflict [Aus-einandersetzung, setting apart] a world comes into being. (Conflict does not split, muchless destroy unity. It constitutes unity, it is a binding-together, logos. Polemos and logos are thesame)” (Heidegger 1959:62). See also Heidegger (1993:174–75).

3 That the binary between civilized man and barbarian was for the Greeks a contestedone in a way that it was not for the Romans is borne witness by the telling example of

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Herodotus’s remarkable openness to the barbaros—and by the Romanized Plutarch’srepresentation of this openness as the malice of a “philobarbaros” in his long diatribe “Onthe Malice of Herodotus” (Bernal 1987:113–14). For a fuller development of myargument, see Spanos (2000:64–125).

4 Heidegger’s anticipation of Foucault’s and Said’s analysis and critique of modernpower relations is made even clearer in his “recapitulation” of this distinction later in theParmenides: “mere ‘felling’ in the sense of striking down is the coarsest way, but not thegenuinely essential imperial way, of bringing to a fall. The great and most inner core of theessence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not kept down, norsimply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory ofcommand, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination” (Heidegger1992:45).

5 Unlike Heidegger, Foucault does not focalize the decisive role that Rome played inpost-Revolutionary/Enlightenment Europe. But as his genealogy of the disciplinary societymakes clear, he is very much aware of the pervasive scope of this “Roman reference”:“Historians of ideas attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and juristof the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamentalreference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cog of amachine, not to the primal social contract but to permanent coercions, not to fundamen-tal rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but toautomatic docility. ‘Discipline must be national,’ said Guibert. ‘The state that I depict willhave a simple, reliable, easily controlled administration. It will resemble those hugemachines, which by quite uncomplicated means produce great effects. . . .’ TheNapoleonic regime was not far off and with it the from of state that was to survive it and,we must not forget, the foundations of which were laid not only by jurists, but also bysoldiers . . . not only the men of the courts, but also the men of the camps. The Romanreference that accompanied this formation certainly bears with it this double index:citizens and legionaries, law and manoeuvres” (Foucault 1977:169).

6 This adjective referring to the indigenous population of spaces identified as“desert,” “wilderness,” etc., by colonialist “planters”/“cultivators” pervaded the discourseof Western colonialism during period of exploration (especially of North and SouthAmerica). And it is based on that allotrope of metaphysics (the teleological interpretationof time) that assumes the becomingness of being to be informed by a teleological organicprocess: the seed that, by way of cultivation, matures to bear fruit. Later, in the post-imperialist era, this “white metaphor” of the “age of exploration” became the “whiter”metaphor, “undeveloped.” In thematizing this continuity, I am challenging the receivedgenealogy, adopted by Gourgouris (1996:67), of the binary “developed”/“undeveloped,”which traces its geopolitical use back to 1871 (“arguably the height of British colonialism”)and restricts its meaning to the matter of economism. Such a genealogy, like theFoucauldian tendency to perceive the Enlightenment as an epistemic rupture, obscuresthe metaphoricity of the terms and thus its origins in the Roman’s founding identificationof civilization and agriculture, planting and colonization (the planter was also a settler—Latin: colon, whose correlate is agricola: domesticator of the agros/agrios, the wilderness).For a fuller treatment of this genealogy, see Spanos (2000:41–44, 96–98, 238–40). See also(Waswo 1997).

7 As Gourgouris observes, “It is certainly unlikely that before the infiltration ofEuropean Philhellenism the inhabitants of Kastri knew (or cared much, for that matter)that they were indeed the inhabitants of Delphi” (1996:149).

8 For a persuasive view of the Greek Enlightenment discourse that claims a greaterautonomy from its European models, see the chapters entitled “The Formal Imagination,I: The Backroads of Development for Enlightenment to Bureaucracy,” and “The Formal

113Heidegger’s Parmenides

Imagination, II: Natural History and Natural Pedagogy,” in Gourgouris (1996:47–112). Inits appropriation of a postcolonial perspective that owes much to poststructuralist theory,Gourgouris’s book constitutes an important contribution to Modern Greek Studies. Onewonders, however, what would happen to his (ontological?) thesis of historical discontinu-ity had his problematic not prevented him from perceiving what I have been calling “theRoman reference” that haunts his text, not least in his account of the Byzantine factor.

9 “Contemporary Greece as a state and as a political entity and a historical experi-ence, remains the most spectacular and interesting construct of [Enlightenment] ideal-ism. Conceived by romantic Hellenism, established by the most intricate and paradoxicalinterplay of international political, economic, and ideological forces, and sublimatedconsistently by all subsequent quests for the true origins of Western civilization, itcontinues to exert an incessant fascination on our imagination, for it is presumed to be aunique case of historical, racial, and cultural continuity. . . . [The] inhabitants of theancient place, starting in the late eighteenth century and especially after the successfulrevolt against the four-century old Turkish domination, found themselves under immenseexternal pressure to respond adequately to the inflated expectations and to adjustproperly to the exalted demands of European and American romanticism which, fromGoethe to Beethoven and from Shelley to Delacroix, needed to affirm and satisfy itsclassical yearnings; This pressure to be true Hellenes was presented to the Greeks as theironly way or chance to define an acceptable identity and justify their political claims. Thechoices were limited and the time for reflection unavailable; after much hesitation, they,and especially those who considered themselves ‘victors,’ opted for cooperation”(Lambropoulos 1988:7–8).

10 The power of this interpretive framework is so great that even acutely discrimina-tory postcolonial critics like Edward Said adhere to it in the very process of calling its useinto question. Indeed, Said traces the very origins of Western “Orientalism” back to theGreek representation of the Persian War—Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Euripides. Inclassical Greek literature “A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful andarticulate; Asia is defeated and distant. Aeschylus [in the Persians, for example] representsAsia. . . . It is Europe that articulates the Orient. This articulation is the prerogative, not ofa puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates,constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries. There isan analogy between Aeschylus’s orchestra, which contains the Asiatic world as theplaywright conceives it, and the learned envelope of Orientalist scholarship, which also willhold in the vast amorphous Asiatic sprawl for sometimes sympathetic, but alwaysdominating scrutiny” (Said 1979:57). Given the retroactive power of this interpretiveframework, it becomes virtually impossible to think the relation between center andperiphery as the inverse of its traditional representation, that is, to think the strugglebetween Greece and Persia as an effort on the part of the Greek “other” to resist thecolonizing project of a metropolitan imperial power.

11 Space prohibits extended de-structive readings of the texts I have cited all toolaconically here. For fuller treatment of a number of them, see the chapter entitled“Culture and Colonization: The Imperial Imperatives of the Centered Circle,” in America’sShadow (Spanos 2000:64–125). See also “The Women of Apartness: Outside/In WesternImperialism,” the unpublished dissertation of Assimina Karavanta (1999). As the subtitlesuggests, this ground-breaking study offers radically novel readings of three Greektragedies involving women—Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, and Media—that call brilliantly and persuasively into question the sedimented post-Enlightenmentbinarist assumption that women (and the cultural values associated with them) wereabsolutely bereaved of a voice in a male dominated classical Greece that separated the oikosfrom the polis. The resonance of their silence, according to Karavanta, which is heard in

114 William V. Spanos

the theater of the polis, bears witness to the Greek tragedians’ consciousness of genderrelations as a contested political issue.

12 See especially the sections entitled “The Greek Solution” and “Power and the Spaceof Appearance” (Arendt 1958:192–207).

13 See Jacques Derrida’s critique of Fukuyama’s invocation of an eschatalogicalrhetoric to announce this “new world order” (Derrida 1994:56–65).

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