reiner schurmann an-archy as an end to m

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No Peace Beyond the Line

On Infrapolit ical An Archy

The Work of Reiner Schürmann

University of Texas A&M

January 11-12, 2016

Reiner Schürmann. Anarchy as an End to Metaphysics

Preliminary observations

In what follows I shall attempt to do three different things.

1) A short presentation of the main lines worked by Reiner

Schürmann’s confrontation with western philosophy. 2) A brief

commentary on how Schürmann reads Heidegger and why this

reading seems relevant today. 3) An interrogation related to our

specific occasion or why reading Schürmann today could be a

decisive intellectual initiative for us -and who is this “us” that seems

so natural, anyways? Of course, the complexity and richness of

Schürmann’s thinking could not be reduced to a single

presentation, because what is at stake is not just a particular idea or

system of ideas, concepts, formulations, hypotheses, but a reading of

the whole philosophical tradition in order to make possible, even

logical, his particular intervention. To read Schürmann is to read,

through him, the western philosophical tradition and to punctuate

this tradition, its history, according to his emphases.

I would say that here we have already a first problem: how

the history of western philosophy, as the constant forgetting of

being (and this is already an interpretation we have consented to

even if not actively), reaches its own “realization” and how thisrealization allows us to ask again the question of being in a non-

traditional way? Furthermore, how, in its most radical moment, the



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history of metaphysics opens itself, through its realization that is alsoits exhaustion (a withering away of principles) to being? In other

words, what is the logic of this apparent paradox and what are its

mechanisms? Do these mechanisms belong to reason and its

strategies, critical practices, “subjects”? Finally, what does it mean

that metaphysic reaches its own finality in and as modern techné, not

only technology to be sure, but the Cartesian constitution of

philosophy and subjectivity as the kernel of modern thinking? Let

me proceed then according to my plan.

* * * * *

Reiner Schürmann is a consistent thinker. Besides a series of

articles that have been incorporated into his main books -or are

waiting for a critical edition, we can consider five relevant books: his

memories (Les Origins 1976); Wondering Joy (1978); Heidegger. On

Being and Acting. From Principles to Anarchy (1982), his posthumously

published Broken Hegemonies (1996), and the recently published

volume entitled On Heidegger’s Being and Time (2008), which

corresponds to an unfinished manuscript on Heidegger’s Sein undZeit and two complementary pieces by Simon Critchley that attempt

to “en-frame” Schürmann’s interpretation of Heidegger’s main

book.

It is a fact, therefore, that the main reference in his works is

Martin Heidegger. But, it wouldn’t be fair to reduce Schürmann to

the condition of a “Heideggerian scholar”, even if one of the most

important in the 20th century. His engagement with western

philosophy moves from Aristotle to Aquinas, from Meister Eckhart

to Luther, From Plotinus to Shelling, from German Idealism to

Heidegger, and from Nietzsche to Foucault, Derrida, and Hanna Arendt. From his first publication to Broken Hegemonies, we perceive



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a double movement of deepening and expansion of his particularunderstanding of philosophy as an epochal organization of the

history of being; where a philosophical epoch is organized around a

series of first principles that work as nomic injunctions or

hegemonic configurations of meaning, articulated by a fantasmatic

referent (The One, Nature, Consciousness). Most important than

these historical-transcendental referents is the very mechanic of the

hegemonic articulation of meaning which reduces the history of

being to a sort of “logic of recognition” that bring to presence the

heterogeneity of being through the hermeneutical and normative

force of those referents. For Schürmann, the force of the referents

consist in their ability to give sense, to give reason if you like, to a

particular historical reality; but this donation is also a translation of

the diversity -even, the radical heterogeneity- of being to the

principial economy that norms such an epoch. This is the force of the

principle of reason, the labor of professional philosophy. But here lays

also the tragic component of philosophy, which is the sacrifice of

the singularity of what it is to the condition of “a case”, that is to

say, the conversion of the singular to the particular that is already

meaningful thanks to its constitutive relationship with the universal.

In fact, this universal is no other thing than the process of

universalization of the nomic injunction that articulates thehegemonic order of an epoch.

In that sense, Schürmann’s confrontation with the

philosophical tradition is in tone with the Heideggerian task of

destruction of metaphysics. This destruction then moves in the

following way: first, identifying the principles articulating a given

epochallity or moment in the history of being, say, the principles

that reduce being (its singularity) to a problem of meaning and

knowledge (to the relationship between particular and universal).

Second, understanding the way these principles work as productive

devices that give language to that epoch (in a way, these referents or



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fantasms work in Schürmann as the Kantian categories1

). Third,identifying the way in which professional philosophical discourses

work as translations and adjustments of the diversity of the sensible

experience, the world (facticity and thought), to the normative

configuration donated by the principles (the philosopher, and

Schürmann means the professional philosopher, bring to the fore

the principles as referents that enable the rationality of the real, its

legibility). In this sense, the work of the professional philosopher is

not just the corroboration of the hermeneutical force of the

principles, but also, and critically, the adjustment of reality to those

principles. Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics becomes in

Schürmann a crucial interrogation of philosophy as a professional

practice of power, the power of a “donation” that is always a

“reduction” of being to “meaning”.

Accordingly, his understanding of destruction or

deconstruction ( Abbau, and he tends to translate it as

deconstruction over dismantling) implies a new task for thinking, or

if you want, a new tension between philosophy and thinking (as a

practical activity an-archically articulated around the constellation of

being ). To put it in other words (and keeping in mind Heidegger’s

1966 piece entitled “The End of Philosophy and the Task ofThinking”), if the task of thinking is the deconstruction of

principial economies that capture normatively the being of be-ing, in

1 We should consider, however, that this is just an analogy since in Kant those

categories “mediate” between the noumena and the phenomena, producing the

synthesis of knowledge. In Schürmann the referents are constitutive or

configurative of the real, but do not respond to a transcendental eschematism,

which is already a hypothesis, a subjective hypothesis introduced by Kant. The

same thing should be said regarding Structuralism and Foucault’s epistemes, even if

there are some similarities, Schürmann claims that they refer to a particular

region of being and not to being as a permanent tension between concealment

and unconcealment.2 This is, in other words, the historical modulation of the ontological difference

that is problematic in Schürmann’s work. Not only the question of the ontic

status of this ontological an-archy is what matters here, but also the very

articulation between the ontic-ontological question and the problem of the co-



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order to access a sort of releasement of “being without a why”, thisthinking is not concerned with the history of thought or with the

meaning of that history, neither with a critical engagement or with

an exegetical readings of the main texts of the “tradition”. On the

contrary, thinking thinks being , and being is not an entity, neither the

first nor the more important referent, but a constellation of

presencing that unconceals or discloses itself in our confrontation

with the “world” (in effect, Schürmann’s destruction leads to a

topology of being). Thus, the world as the constellation of being

does not point toward a hidden structure, a final reason, a secret

teleology, but to its an-archic presencing to Dasein. The task of

thinking therefore is not the “clarification” of Dasein’s existential

conditions to access the transcendental site of a rational subjectivity

(the line that goes from Descartes to Hegel, and from Kant to

Husserl), and this would be the difference between the

phenomenological epoché and the destructive epoché. In Schürmann

the epoché opens to an-arché and this an-arché interrupts the pros hen as

a distinctive philosophical operation. This is possible, of course,

because Schürmann reads the Heideggerian epoché as an inversion of

the Husserlian epoché, an inversion of the parenthesis that was

meant, in the first case, as a suspension of the natural attitude. With

that inversion, the parenthesis now suspends the philosophicalsubjectivity and its transcendental intuitions, freeing the world from

the infinite tasks of the rational consciousness (translation and

adjustment) and freeing thinking from the subject (transcendental

consciousness).

In this sense, Schürmann dwells at the end of professional

philosophy which task was, among others, the elucidation of the

history of philosophical knowledge according to epochal principles.

But to dwell at the end of philosophy is also to suspend its

professional task (elucidation), understanding that every new

moment in the philosophical history of being produces, through aparticular idiom, its own fantasmatic reverse. In fact, to dwell at this



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end is also to resist the temptation of transitioning to a new -mostmodern- language, to a new categorical institution, even if the

transition is done in the name of Humanity (reason, justice, peace,

etc.).

This is, therefore, his question: what is to be done at the end

of metaphysic? Which is not to be understood as a naïve question

that takes for granted this end as an empirical phenomenon. The

end of metaphysic is not a fact; it is, on the contrary, the historical

moment in which the modern principles articulating the hegemonic

order of thinking breaks away or, even better, withers away. This

sort of exhaustion of the hermeneutical and normative force of the

principles interrupts the ability of the philosophical discourse to

reproduce ad infinitum its meaningful configuration, and opens up

to an-archy as a new relationship with being. This is the moment

when thinking topologically the pre-sencing of being leads to a sort

of radicalization of Heidegger’s existential analytic, that is to say, to

the analytic of the ultimate quasi-principles (among them, the

principle of equivalence).2

On the other hand, before addressing the complex status of

this anarchy, it would be important to understand Schürmann’sproject as a very idiosyncratic confrontation with metaphysics that

2 This is, in other words, the historical modulation of the ontological difference

that is problematic in Schürmann’s work. Not only the question of the ontic

status of this ontological an-archy is what matters here, but also the very

articulation between the ontic-ontological question and the problem of the co-

belonging of being and its multiple “worldly” manifestations. If this an-archy were

to be read only at the ontological level, we would be re-introducing an ontological

hierarchy even if only to break away with it. But, if ontology as first philosophy is

deconstructed (which was the task of destruktion), then the homologation of an-

archy and politics needs more elaboration. This is attested by the tension between

Lefort-Castoriadis-Abensour’ssavage democracy

and the idea of an an-archic politicsone could read in Schürmann, but this is also the tension between biopolitics (as

a politics still articulated around the “given” condition of life and the self-

presencing of power) and infrapolitics.



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cannot be reduce to Heidegger’s destruction, Nietzsche’s genealogyor Foucault’s archeology. Schürmann himself makes clear his

resistance to the general endorsement Derrida’s deconstruction has

received in France and elsewhere, and of course, this is already a big

problem we need to address at some extent one day, particularly

because of their (Schürmann and Derrida’s) different relationship to

Heidegger and to Husserl. However, let me just quote him briefly

here:

To deconstruct hegemonic fantasms, one cannot trust in

interpretative throws of the dice, nor let this be produced by

a fortuitous collision of signifier and significance, nor attack

the texts from their margins. It is necessary to go straight

into the ticket-to the theses upon which a text as well as an

epoch rest, theses that get themselves twisted up as soon as

they are declared to be legislative. (BH 15)

Instead of entertaining oneself by playing with the flexibility of the

signifiers, with the polysemy of the text, the archi-writing and the

trace of meaning in the a-grammatical order of history, Schürmann

proposes to assume the almost impossible task of deconstructing the

hegemonic organization of metaphysic as history of thought. Andright here one might wonder up to what point this hegemonic

configuration is, itself, already a fantasmatic insemination necessary

to trigger the task of thinking. I am not only thinking in the

difference between différance and hegemony, between the fantasmatic

referent and the specter (as the incalculable or excessive remainder

of presence), but also in the way in which the hegemonic

configuration of metaphysic could be read as a retro-projection done

form the modern ontological anarchy as a strategy to justify a

historical-transcendental hypothesis about the realization of

metaphysics. This “realization”, not a vulgar teleology to be sure,

however, imposes itself as a particular economy of reading, aparticular reading of the tradition, the texts of the tradition,



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emphasizing in them the principial articulation of meaning and not what we might call the heterogeneous play of signification dwelling

at the absent center of every text. For this heterogeneity complicates

the principial organization of meaning, bringing to the fore the

counter-forces and resistances that are always working through the

text and its different interpretations. These resistances distort the

conventional identification of the text and the principles, perverting

the philosopher’s “donation” of meaning while opening the texts to

another donation, to another an-economic economy, which does

not take place in the continuum temporality of the tradition,

neither within the margins of professional philosophy.3

Let me dwell here for one more minute. The hegemonic

articulation of metaphysic would be itself nothing else than a

reading enabled from the post-hegemonic condition of anarchy.

But, if the texts themselves are always something else than just the

economy of principles that articulates them, if the texts present

resistance to the main law of interpretation that articulate them,

wouldn’t this then imply that post-hegemony is nothing else than an

a hypothesis formulated to control, to conjure, to exorcise another

fantasm, the specter of différance?

To be sure, I am not claiming that philosophy is an open-

ended battle of interpretation, a battle that implies leaders and

3 Wouldn’t this be the defining relationship deconstruction establishes with the

tradition and its texts? Not an exegetical or critical reading, neither a reading in

which the text becomes monumentalized and homogenized according to a

principial economy, since in each text, in each occasion of reading, a singular an-

economy of forces, resistances, significations and counter-significations would

always take place. Deconstruction seems to differ, and to defer, from the

principial reading of the tradition while also differ and defer from “disciplinary”

criticism (from the conversion of deconstruction itself in a practice of liturgical

criticism). Nonetheless, Schürmann’s critique of the principial economy ofmetaphysics and deconstruction seem to converge in the same post-hegemonic (or

an-hegemonic) topology, which is, of course, something that we need to explore to

a greater extent.



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generals, caudillos and pastors of being, since this is, precisely, thehistory of metaphysic from which Schürmann, through Heidegger,

wants to depart. But, what I am questioning is the very relationship

between the finality, the realization of metaphysic, its temporal

status, and the notion of “post-hegemony” that produce the idea of

an “after” hegemony. I would even dare to say that the way out of

this problem lays in the problematization of the question of an-archy

and its relationship to techné. Since it is in the technical (not only

the technological) subsumption of life where we also find its

disarticulation from principles. Technic as the realization of metaphysic

already contain an indomitable anarchy. Therefore, when Schürmann

reads the tradition, there is always a double register , a double reading:

one pointing to the way in which principles work through the texts,

enabling them, giving them language; the other reading, performed

from anarchy, always reads the suffering of the texts, the way the

principles extort and conjure texts and thoughts according to their

laws of constitution and interpretation. If destruktion’s positive

aspect is always more important than its negative one, then in

Schürmann’s double register what matters most is not the critique of

the principial economy that works as an hegemonic articulation of

metaphysics, but the releasement of that reading into a Gelassenheit or

serenidad, which implies a relation to being other than themetaphysical (being without a why).

Clearly, I have just presented this problem without giving a

convincing solution, but I did so on purpose. Instead, I just wanted

to show how the reading of the so-called tradition is already a crucial

issue in Schürmann’s works. This leads me to my second point, his

reading of Heidegger.

* * * * *



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Of course, his backward reading of Heidegger is totallyconsistent with his reading of the whole philosophical tradition. But

not just consistent, it is a distinctive characteristic of his operation.

In fact, one could organize a reading of Schürmann in the same

way, and more than one of his colleagues have done so. It does not

matter, what actually matters for me here is what I would call a

prismatic reading of his works, a reading articulated in three main

centers or circles from which it disseminates everywhere. 1) His

reading of Being and Time (On Heidegger’s Being and Time). 2) His

reading of Heidegger’s oeuvre (Heidegger. On Being and Acting ). 3) His

Heideggerian reading of the western metaphysic (Wondering Joy, Broken

Hegemonies). Whether you move from the general to the specific

contents of his works, or from the punctual to the widest reach of

his elaborations, the circles seem to overlap each other. At the same

time, one should be attentive to the decisions enabling such

readings, since Schürmann is not an exegete neither a historian of

philosophy. In this sense, he brings to the fore a new relation with

the tradition, from Aristotle to Hanna Arendt, a relation expurgated

from lineal narratives and away form the idea of progress. For the

sake of time, I will contain myself here with making three points

regarding his reading of Heidegger. Regardless, it should be clear

that when Schürmann interrogates the tradition of westernphilosophy he is not just reading it backwards, but he is also

bringing the whole tradition to a place in which the conventional or

“vulgar” conception of temporality is suspended. Reading Heidegger

in that way is like reading the eventful condition of thinking once

this thinking reappears, de-articulated or re-activated, beyond the

normative nomos of the professional history of philosophy, in a time

other than the time of metaphysics.

I have used this term, re-activation, intentionally, to refer to

Schürmann’s emphatic break with a transcendental phenomenology

and with the infinite task of a rational subjectivity that is able todecipher the sense of the world. This is the insuperable distinction



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between his reading and Simon Critchley’s reading of Heidegger.For Schürmann Heidegger parted waters with Edmond Husserl by

the publication of Being and Time, and his existential analytic, more

than just a continuation of Husserl’s phenomenology, is rather a

radical reorientation of philosophy. This is a reorientation that goes

from phenomenological investigation to what he calls a

fundamental ontology -fundamental in the sense of the founding

economy of principles and not in the sense of the classical question

about the fundament. Thus, it is this displacement from the infinite

task of the transcendental subjectivity (from Descartes and Kant to

Husserl) that Schürmann emphasizes in Heidegger’s finitude, which

makes it possible to move from the question of being to the

question about the meaning (truth) of being, where the meaning of

being not longer lays with the subject’s critical abilities. At this point

Schürmann introduces the idea of an ontology constituted by a

historical modality, a modality of presencing that cannot be reduced

to transcendental syntheses and subjective operations. Obviously,

Schürmann is able to read Being and Time in this way because of his

emphasis in the turn and the radical reorganization of Heidegger’s

work after Being and Time.4 In other words, Schürmann somehow is

de-emphasizing the influence that Husserl, Dilthey, neo-Kantism

and historicism has had on Heidegger in the 1920s. (I would justadd here the need to consider Derrida’s initial reading of Husserl as

a matter of interest for our discussion).

Thanks to all of this, Being and Time does not appear as a

failed attempt to break away from metaphysic, an attempt that

Heidegger would later abandon in the name of The poem of Being ,

4 I would dare to say that for him Heidegger’s turn (die Kehre) is not associated

with a particular moment or text, but is something that, in his backward reading

of the Heidegger’s oeuvre seems to be always taking place, right after the mid-1930.

This explains the emphasis and the contrast Schürmann attempts to do in regard with the first reception of Heidegger in America, headed by William J.

Richardson and his seminal book, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought

(1974).



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On the contrary, this idiosyncratic reading makes it possible tounderstand the condition of that seminal book (Being and Time) not

by the logic of the evolution and development, but as a book which

questions would be ever present in Heidegger’s thoughts. Of course,

what is at stake here is the status of the “meaning” of Dasein’s

existence. Not the meaning in itself, but its status, whether it comes

from the infinite task of phenomenology or, alternatively, from the

worldly confrontation of Dasein with the historical conditions

defining its existence.

In this sense, the whole metaphysical tradition appears as a

permanent attempt to reduce the radical historicity of being to a

normative injunction emanated from the principles that organize

the epochs of being’s history. It is a history that is subsumed to an

ongoing spacialization of temporality that would have reached its

realization in the modern age. What this realization means is

precisely the point here, since the full spacialization of temporality is

also the moment in which the very principial economy that

organizes metaphysics seems to wither away. The epoch of the

realization of metaphysics, the age of the image of the world, is not

the epoch of its overcoming in a naive, analytical way, but it is the

epoch in which that very epochality enters into a radical crisis, ademonic disjunction between the granted relationship of theory and

practice. Actually, the demonic crisis of principles is an-archy, and

this an-archy is not a state that happens at the end of metaphysics,

but something that happens to the whole history of being, bringing

it to presence. Of course, we are talking about a presence that is not

the illusory aspiration for plenitude, but a presence (beyond the

metaphysics of presence) in which the world, the being of the world,

happens without a reason, without a why. By the same token, this

demonic crisis, this interregnum, does not lead either point towards a

new economy of principles, a sort of reconfiguration of a even better

hegemony, attuned to the modern “being”; on the contrary, thisdemonic crisis is the very suspension of the transitional logic that



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put together the history of being as an evolving process. Thedemonic condition of history is a topology of radical immanence

where there are no gods or salvation.

This is certainly a delicate moment, as it has already been

argued, since with this reading Schürmann is proposing a

historicized version of the ontological difference, a version in which

the ontological status of an-archy does not seem to be sound to

understand the political. Is Schürmann actually supporting political

an-archy? What is the status of the auto-nomos injunction at the end

of metaphysics? Let me just say that I am not concerned with asking

from Schürmann what has been infinitely demanded form

Heidegger, an ethic that regulates the being in the world. My

concerns rest in the way in which this ontico-ontological anarchy,

this wither away of principles, this exhaustion of the philosophy of

history, relates itself to the question of the political in a non-

normative way. I am thinking in what Alberto Moreiras has called

post-hegemonic democracy and, in what John Krummel elaborates

in comparing Schürmann’s anarchic ontology and Cornelius

Castoriadis’s instituting imagination. I would just add that here lays

the relevance of Aristotle and the particular emphasis Schürmann

places on the Physic rather than the Metaphysics. But, I am in nocondition to further elaborate this point here, as it requires a

confrontation with the nomos in its autonomy and its heteronomy, a

radical problematization of sovereignty’s double-bind. In a way, this

is the task of infrapolitical deconstruction or, at least, this is the way

this task appeals to me.5

5 Because of this double-bind, sovereignty is not something we can break away

from once for all, an institutional order, a juridical discourse. The suspension of

sovereignty is not the result of a methodological operation, a willing action, a step

into the long way of infinite criticism. There is, to be sure, the factual suspension

of sovereignty, the configuration of a world order that obliterates the moderninstitutions and discourses of sovereignty, but sovereignty itself is always

something else than those institutions and discourses. The suspension of the factual

suspension of sovereignty leads us to dwell in its double-bind as a condition of



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* * * * *

I would like to close my comments with this idea of a task

that appeals to me. The “appealing” and the “me” of this sentence

needs to be questioned since I do not want to introduce

surreptitiously a new infinite task for us, neither to reproduce a

relationship with philosophy based on an equally infinite debt.

What matter the most is rather the eventual intervention that we

are attempting to do in our professional field. What is the occasion

allowing us to interrogate the work of Reiner Schürmann and what

is at stake in such an interrogation? As I am running out of time, I

would content myself with a simple enumeration. This bullet point

list under no circumstances should be read as a conclusion, it is a

shy and precarious first enunciation of a work to come:

• The first thing that comes to my mind is to say that

Schürmann, even if one can disagree in many aspects with

his thinking, is certainly worth studying as his works allow us

to question the archival, hegemonic, and metaphysicalconfiguration of our field, Humanities in general, and the

contemporary division of labor within the University.

• The second problem I want to state here is what should our

relationship with philosophy be? Once Schürmann departed

from professional philosophy and the philosopher as a

public servant of humanity, how are we supposed to deal

with the history of thought and the end of metaphysic, in a

possibility to interrogate politics after the disjunction between theory andpractice, when philosophy of history withers away, opening the present to a radical

contingency, a contingency that is not the categorical inversion of necessity, but a

new relation to being and time, to the world.



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way that does not reproduce the infinite destruction ofmetaphysic as the metaphysics of destruction?

• The third problem is related to the tension between

Schürmann and Derrida’s reading of the philosophical

tradition. This is something problematic and necessary to

deal with. One could even add Deleuze and his non-

principial, non-Heideggerian, and non-epochal relationship

to philosophy (for example, his critique of historicism and

philosophy as authority), as something that belongs to the

same constellation of problems opened by Schürmann and

Derrida. In fact, Schürmann himself points to the

relationship between aletheia and rhizome as conditions of

possibility for anarchy.

• The last problem I wanted to share with you is precisely the

necessary elaboration of a political reflection regarding

anarchy and post-hegemony, a reflection that should go

beyond what we usually understand by those two names.

Schürmann refers to Heidegger’s uncertainty regarding

democracy as the best political system, and even if we might

be willing to defend democracy as the inalienable horizon ofour time, we still need to question the truth of democracy, as

Jean-Luc Nancy recently put it. What does infrapolitical

deconstruction mean in this context? Considering that post-

hegemony, what we mean by it, is not just an internal

movement within the logic of hegemonic, but something

different, an attempt to break away from the metaphysical

injunction of the will to power and the will to will.

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

University of [email protected]

reiner schurmann an-archy as an end to m

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