But for German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s self-induced undoing, his writings about caring as a pre-requisite to knowing the truth of things would seem to be the right remedy to a hardened state that makes villains of what it does not know.

Daniel O’Hara is among those for whom Heidegger can’t be wholly redeemed. Citing Jacques Derrida’s previous critique of Heidegger, O’Hara reduces a chunk of the former Nazi party member’s opus to a case of “hot ear” (Radical Parody: American Culture and Critical Agency after Foucault, 1992).

In the chapter, “Selves in Flames” O’Hara subjects Heidegger to a sustained treatment of the fashionably obscure auto-da-fe in the dress of ridicule. He seconds Derrida’s opinion that Heidegger’s claim to have located a “Greco-Germanic ‘otherness’” is only a “’blind’ repetition of the Judeo-Christian conception of ‘spirit’” (190).

Derrida’s entirely “imagined assembly of various theologians” – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – addresses Heidegger in “an imaginative invocation” to say:

“…we are appealing to this entirely other in the memory of a promise or the promise of a memory. That’s the truth of what we have always said, heard, tried to make heard. The misunderstanding is that you hear us better than you think or pretend to think…” (From Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question in O’Hara, p. 189).

Heidegger’s privileging of a Germanic spirit is thus presented as nothing other than an “unwitting” receptivity to an invocation not exclusively High German in origin but encompassing the Jewish tradition as well. I am not saying this isn’t hilarious. But if Heidegger’s scholarly contribution is to be remembered as essentially a regressive move that confuses itself for independent thought, and if this charge is effectively a denial of the intellectual merit of Heidegger’s work as its one saving grace, what does this say about the invocatory spirit as a mode of knowing?

Jacques Lacan distinguished his construct of the invocatory drive from invocatory performance. The drive is a partial drive whose erogenous zone is associated with the ears. Its partial object is the voice and the associated verb is ‘to hear.’ Of course, Lacan did a lot with this set up. Concerning the observation where the play of signifiers in language is made to serve less as play and more as a regulatory function, this speaks to “a void at the heart” of positivism. Then, if what’s desired in a “truly invocatory performance” is a desire for mastery over master signifiers, themselves material constructs borne along on sound waves that exist and also pass into non-existence by which mode they have the ability to penetrate – what’s being demonstrated is how the drive itself feeds into the performance. Together they describe a route of enjoyment whose ultimate significance is nothing more than that. It does not speak to a cause or a telos (with the aid of Lacan’s intervention). The schema allows for the reading of any such performance in terms of whatever it is that’s considered enjoyable. I’m guessing that’s where the fun begins in psychoanalysis, particularly where the regulatory function is retained as a guise.

O’Hara wrote that Heidegger was “self-elected.” There is a sense from reading O’Hara that Heidegger mistook a mirage of sound as real, a bell that didn’t toll for him in quite the way he imagined. I’m not a Nazi sympathizer, but on the whole I can’t say I buy this assessment, since it rules out too much when we try to widen the judgement in its application beyond the narrow case of Heidegger.

Here I think the grounding in invocatory performance can help to discern to what degree its goodness of fit, its wideness or narrowness, is determined. Not on the basis of the individual’s desire but by the way language structures that desire. The difference would consist in that between open and equal opportunity, the opening of all wombs/minds for a transformative power to take place, as opposed to believing this can be achieved by leaving things up to experts. The only thing that such a closing or restricting of circuits of exchange could limit is the penetration of non-transformative appearance. Love finds its way. And I think O’Hara must sense this to be true, since he makes sure to attach the restrictiveness, the desire for exclusivity, to Heidegger:

“For what Heidegger and his peers hate is the specter of a triumphant, democratically leveling, rationalistic universalism, and what he and his peers love is an endangered or embattled, distinctively different, passionately embraced localism” (187).

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