A2 Spanos

a. Spanoss ideology recreates the political Nazism of Heidegger.

J. Russell Perkin, Professor of English, Saint Marys University, Review Essay: Theorizing
the Culture Wars, POSTMODERN CULTURE, v 3 n 3, 1993, Muse.

Spanos's extensive reliance on Heidegger raises a political question that he doesn't

adequately face. The humanists are lambasted for every ethnocentricity that they committed; Babbitt,
perhaps not without justification, is described as having embodied "a totalitarian ideology" (84). But the
book is defensive and evasive on the topic of Heidegger's political commitments.
Spanos seems to think he can testily dismiss those who bring up this matter as
enemies of posthumanism, and his treatment of the topic consists mainly in referring readers to an
article he has published elsewhere. But the problem remains: Heidegger's ontological critique,
when translated into the political sphere, led him to espouse Nazi ideology. If Heidegger
is to be praised as the thinker who effected the definitive radical break with humanism, surely the
question of his politics should be faced directly in this book.

b. The impact is the recreation of Nazism and genocide.

Emmanuel Faye, Associate Professor, University of Paris Ouest-Nanterra La Defense,

HEIDEGGER, THE INTRODUCTION OF NAZISM INTO PHILISOPHY IN LIGHT OF THE
UNPUBLISHED SEMINARS OF 1933-1935, ed. M.B. smith, 2009, p. 322.

The vlkisch and fundamentally racist principles Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe transmits strive
toward the goal of the eradication of all the intellectual and human progress to which philosophy
has contributed. They are therefore as destructive and dangerous to current thought as the
Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples. Indeed, what can
be the result of granting a future to a doctrine whose author desired to become the
"spiritual Fuhrer" of Nazism, other than to pave the way to the same perdition? In that
respect, we now know that Martin Heidegger, in his unpublished seminar on Hegel and the state, meant to
make the Nazi domination last beyond the next hundred years. If his writings continue to proliferate
without our being able to stop this intrusion of Nazism into human education, how can we not expect
them to lead to yet another translation into facts and acts, from which this time humanity
might not be able to recover? Today more than ever, it is philosophy's task to work to
protect humanity and alert men's minds; failing this, Hitlerism and Nazism will continue to
germinate through Heidegger's writings at the risk of spawning new attempts at the
complete destruction of thought and the extermination of humankind.

a. Spanoss calls for a truer ontology only perpetuate the myth of the fall from
perfection.
 J. Russell Perkin, Professor of English, Saint Marys University, Review Essay: Theorizing
the Culture Wars, POSTMODERN CULTURE, v 3 n 3, 1993, Muse.

The genealogy Spanos constructs is impressive, and later developments have certainly vindicated his view
of the Harvard Report, which in the early 1980s might have seemed overly paranoid. Spanos clearly shows
a pattern in the recurrence of general education programmes based on restricted canons, beginning with
the period during and following the first world war, then during the cold war, and finally in the post-Vietnam
period. His insistence on acknowledging the importance of the Vietnam war in discussing
the humanities at the present time is an important act of cultural memory. As an uncovering of the
motives impelling the right in the culture wars, this book should be required reading for oppositional critics.
However, as a political intervention it is flawed in several important ways, and I will conclude this
review with an account of these, and a suggestion by way of Henry Louis Gates of a less paranoid and more
pragmatic strategy for the cultural left. On the one hand, Spanos gives his book theoretical depth by
beginning at the most basic level of the question of being. On the other hand, in purely rhetorical terms, many
readers will probably find the juxtaposition of the heavily Heideggerian first chapter and the details of the
Harvard Report to be catachrestical; it is hard for even a sympathetic reader to grant the enormous linkages
and assumptions involved in the argument. If Spanos had let his Heideggerian approach inform his genealogy
without feeling it necessary to include so many long quotations from Being and Time and other works, the
book would have a wider rhetorical appeal and thus a potentially greater political effect. Another problem is
that the book makes huge historical assertions that have the effect of lessening
difference, even while it attacks the metaphysical principle "that identity is the
condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around" (4; emphasis in original).
This is something Spanos has in common with some followers of Derrida who turn
deconstruction into a dogma, rather than realizing that it is a strategy of reading that
must take account of the particular logic of the texts being read. Spanos asserts that
the classical Greeks were characterized by "originative, differential, and errant thinking" (105),
which every subsequent age, beginning with the Alexandrian Greek, through the Romans, the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Victorians, and right up to the present, misunderstood
in a reifying and imperialistic appropriation. This not only implies a somewhat
simplistic reception-history of ancient Greek culture; it also, significantly, perpetuates a myth--
the favourite American myth that Spanos in other contexts attacks in the book--of an original
period of innocence, a fall, and the possibility of redemption.

b. This ontological shift causes a total violence much worse than their impacts
our evidence is comparative and conclusive.

William Rasch, Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies, Indiana University,

SOVEREIGNTY AND ITS DISCONTENTS, 2004, p. 3-4.

Now, if the triumph of a particular species of liberal pluralism denotes the de-politicization of society; one would think that theoretical opposition to this trend would seek to
rather than asserting the value of the political as an essential structure
rehabilitate the political. But

of social life, the post-Marxist left seems intent on hammering the final nails into the
coffin. In the most celebrated works of recent years, Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer (1998) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Empire (2000), the political (denoted
by the notion of sovereignty) is irretrievably identified with nihilism and marked for extinction. In both instances , the political is the cause of the

loss of natural innocence (Agamben, -1998, p 28), that flowering of human productivity that the
Western metaphysical tradition has suppressed; and the logical paradox of
sovereignty is to be overcome by the instantiation of a new ontology. In this way,
violence, which is not thought of as part of the state of nature but is introduced into
the human, condition by flawed or morally perverse social institutions, is to be
averred. That is, the faulty supposition of ineluctable violence that guides political theory from Hobbes to Weber is to be replaced by a Heideggerian, Deleuzean,
Spinozan or Christian ontology of original harmony. In the words of John Milbank, a Christian social theorist who currently enjoys a modest following among political thinkers on
there is no original violence, but rather an originary harmonic peace which is
the Left,

the sociality of harmonious difference. Thus violence is always a secondary willed intrusion upon this possible infinite order
(Milbank, 1990, p 5). This, then, is the great supposition that links the ascetic pessimism of an Adorno with the cheery Christian optimism of Milbank; the world as it is is as it is
 To seek to remedy the perversity
because of the moral perversity of (some) human agents who willfully construct flawed social institutions.

of the world as it is from within the flawed social and political structures as they are only increases the perversity of the world. One must,
therefore, totally disengage from the world as it is before one can become truly engaged. Only a thorough, cataclysmic
cleansing of the world will allow our activities to be both innocent and productive.
Clear, though only partially acknowledged, is the fact that this cleansing, which aims at ridding the world of

intrusive violence, is itself an act of fierce and ultimate violence ultimate in its
purported finality, but also, certainly, in its extreme ferocity. What remains equally clear, though not acknowledged, is
that whoever has the power to determine the nature of this harmonious sociality is the one who can determine which acts of violence are to be judged as intrusions into the placid domain and
which acts of violence are to be condoned as necessary means of re-establishing the promise of perpetual peace. Determining the nature of this desired, nay, required
What our ultimate sovereign of harmonious
originary peace is itself a sovereign act, not the abolition of such sovereignty.

peace will do with the willfully violent intruders can only be guessed, but it is certain
that they will not be looked upon as legitimate political dissenters, and the
unconditional violence that will be used to eliminate their presence will be justified by
invoking the harmonic peace or natural innocence they have so deliberately and
maliciously disturbed.