Chorismos

Werner Hamacher, “Working Through Working” Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996) pp.23-56

Of all that has worked toward, furthered, and offered its services to National Socialism; of all that made it what it was; and of all that survives it without the most immediate horror, the most banal, self-evident and, therefore, most easily forgotten could also be the most effective. It is something that cannot primarily and in every instance be considered fascistic; something that has a very long and, many would say, venerable, mythological, theological, and philosophical prehistory; and in this history, especially in its most recent segment, it is what has been conceived of as a determination of man’s essence. This banal, self-evident, and even still today widely presumed human factor is work. Work did not only organize what in fascism was crude violence and authority. The wish for work as the form of a remunerated life did not only aid Hitler’s party in its ascent to power. This party did not only present itself as a labor party. Nor was it alone capital (according to Marx’s handy formula, money that breeds itself, this self-producing and self-working capital) that paved the way for the Nazi clique. The call to work–to work on the country, work in industry, to work on the “people” and for the “people” of workers, to work on arms, to work with fist and brow, to work against everything and everyone who was said to be hostile or merely foreign to the work of the people–this call to work pervaded and determined [End Page 23] the entire ideological, social, and political organization of the fascist epoch. And, in turn, work–working out, working through, and working off (Verarbeitung, Durcharbeitung, Aufarbeitung) –became the watchword for the atonement of guilt and the settlement of debts. Work, finally, comes to define the task that must be met by congresses for enlightenment and demystification. The meaning of this enlightenment and demystification, however, does not lie in mere working but, rather, in ceasing to carry on fascistically determined work. It lies in working through this work–and that also means in stopping or, at least, repeatedly interrupting it, to work off work, this work, its pre- and posthistory, the history of this work and history itself insofar as it determines itself as work. It lies in working through what work meant and what it demanded, in working out what it still means and demands. It lies in the imperative of work and in clarifying the work of this imperative: the opening up and disclosure of a dimension in which work stops and gives pause, desists and is ex-posed (aussetzt). As long as we do not clarify what work means for National Socialism and what National Socialism as an institution of work itself means, we cannot understand what this institution is beyond a political and ideological phenomenon of a past–yet how and to what extent “past”?–epoch. Nor can we clarify what work against fascism would mean and what we, for example, do–and whether “we” in fact “do” it–when we analyze some elements of this institution.

The question about the work of fascism and about the endogenous fascism of work should not be posed solely for the sake of historical clarity. It is not only a historical or academic question. It is also a question about the structure of history, especially about the structure of what, from the perspective of work, the past and the future might mean and demand. Thus it is also a political question, one that, in principle, concerns the structure of present-day and future institutions–political, economic, juridical, and scientific. In his lecture “What Does It Mean: Working off the Past?” (”Was heisst: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit”), a lecture that up to this day, twenty-five years after its publication, is not obsolete, Adorno aired the suspicion that the formula of “working off” tended to serve the “unconscious, but not all that unconscious, defense against guilt” and, consequently, to perpetuate injustice. 1 The defense function is thus designated as one of the constitutive elements of work in general. The historical continuity of National Socialism, made possible by this defensive work, forms the basis of one of the decisive considerations of Adorno’s brief talk: “I regard the afterlife of National Socialism in democracy as potentially more threatening than the afterlife of fascist tendencies against democracy” (”AV,” 126). In this remark, Adorno has his eye partly on the “comeback” of shady figures, but also, and here he does not leave the slightest doubt, on the systemic continuity of fascism and a certain praxis of democracy. If working through the past (”Aufarbeiten”) –not coincidentally but, rather, precisely because it is work–always simultaneously entails a defense against and disavowal of this past, then work itself is a form of history that produces continuity in the semblance of change and survival in the guise of overcoming. The passing of the past, history itself, is work. Thereby, however, it is precisely that past above and beyond which work, working off, is supposed [End Page 24] to lead. The threat that issues from the National Socialism within democracy issues as a form of historicizing work, as the work of history, that is essentially, and this means before every particular content, homogenization and formation. But this also means that in it consists the exclusion, disavowal, and tendential, or real, extermination of the nonhomogeneous, the nonassimilable, and the formless. Work is the form in which fascism, especialy fascism, survives, because, on the one hand, it was the form of survival priveleged by fascism, and, on the other, because it was survival in the manner of formation. The afterlife of fascism in democracy, in short, belongs to the life of fascism itself–and may, moreover, belong to that specific form of democracy that defines itself through, and as the democracy of, work, as ergocracy.

Wherever its concept or praxis happens to show up, work (this for the most part still hypothetical thought could be drawn out) is work against vanishing, against death or the work on death. As the form of counterdeath, as organized defense against finitude and as the phantasmatic institution of immortality, it must–whether it seems to be connected to manifestly political, cultic, or discursive forms–meet two, and indeed two mutually exclusive, demands. On the one hand, it must entertain the closest imaginable affinity to precisely that death against which it is meant to guard. On the other hand, it must assert the claim that it is more powerful than death, far above it and itself immortal, indestructable, and infinite. If the system of National Socialism–and, in general, every totalitarian political system–defines itself as a system of work, then, according to this hypothesis, it also defines itself as a system that outlives its “own,” infinitely appropriable death. Work and its politico-economic, social, and discursive system, would thus be the praxis of a virtually infinite survival, the survival of its “own” death, the praxis of outliving itself. In this sense, we would do well to attend to a further remark by Adorno:

National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it lives on merely as the ghost of something so monstrous that it has not yet died of its own death or whether it never died in the first place; whether the readiness for the unspeakable lives on in men as it does in the circumstances that enclose them. [”AV,” 126]
National Socialism does not lie behind us as a historically surmounted phenomenon; it may even be utterly insurmountable and resistant to attempts at working through it. For, as a “monstrous” form of work, it is nothing but the production of its own afterlife and survival, and thus it continuously produces itself as specter–not as a chimera and mere illusion but, rather, as a reality worse than death: namely, the sheer positivity of life, dead life, living death. In a very precise and yet to be determined sense, National Socialism was work; for this reason it is difficult, perhaps in the end impossible, to bring its conscious, political, and historical working through to a close. Therefore, up to today it is undecidable, Adorno fears, whether organized murder, or the mere readiness for it, survives.

The question that might help us apprehend fascism as both a historical phenomenon and a principle for the organization of life and survival, a question that may at [End Page 25] the same time alter the terms in which fascism is analytically treated, might run as follows: What does “work” mean in fascist ideology and, insofar as this ideology is an integral moment of the fascist system, what does “work” mean as a fascist institution? In order to sketch an answer to this question–and anything more than a sketch cannot be attempted here–I shall refer to three authors and to three motives that gave shape to the system of work under fascism: one mytho-theological, one ontological, and one morphological. These motifs can obviously not be separated from one another; rather, in their interweaving, they characterize the structure of what–in this particular historical segment and at its borders and thus also beyond them–is called “work.”

As “creative work” (”schaffende Arbeit”), work was for Hitler a distinguished and distinguishing form of battle, hailed as the struggle that would overcome class war and achieve the unity of “fellow countrymen and -women.” In his address of 1 May 1933, he celebrates Labor Day in a natural-mystical sense as the “day of life’s becoming” and “awakening nature,” and thereby at the same time, as the “day of winning back our proper force and strength.” 2 As the day of return (”Wiederkehr”), of coming back (”Rückkehr”), of recovery, repetition, and winning back, as the day of restitution and reinstitution of this “natural” and “proper” “force,” May Day is for Hitler “thereby also and at the same time,” the day of “that productive work that knows no narrow limits, that is not bound to the trade union, to the factory and the office–the day of a work that we want to recognize and advance wherever it is executed in the good sense for the being and life of our people” ( HRP, 259). The fusion of life, nature, and work, the naturalization of work and the ergotization of nature and of life, is not the only rhetorical–and not only rhetorical but also ontological–trick the agitator deploys here in his effort to conjure accord, harmony, and agreement. The work he means is not work on nature but the work of nature, that is, the work of our proper nature, “of our proper force and strength,” and only as such is it work for “the being and life of our people.” Vitalistic and dynamistic, work becomes the preeminent form for the appropriation of “the being and life of our people,” the master form of self-appropriation, a form of force that is both natural and societal. It is the form of the self-production of the “proper,” of the “ours,” of the “we”: the form of autochthonous self-socialization and the form of winning back one’s proper history, the form of self-presentation. Work is auto-fusion. It is thus not as if the chief ideologue attributes to his spellbound public a firm egological substratum, as though it were a self-sufficient given. Instead, he suggests that the community he imagines is one of self-production and self-generation through work. The egologically understood society is self-producing and, in thus producing itself, a society that returns to itself, an ergological society. The subject is its process of production: “people” is substantially work. For this reason, he speaks of work exclusively in terms of “construction,” as constructive (”aufbauend”), and in terms that imply elevation, “raising up” (”Erhebung”), a vocabulary that follows the verticalism of his ontology of the “being . . . of our people” (”des Seins . . . unseres Volkes” [ HRP, 259]).

The conjuring of the “collective and harmonious work of all,” in which society [End Page 26] should understand and take hold of itself and the people should once again become properly a people, is directed, domestically, ideologically, and politically, against the class-war politics of the trade unions. And Hitler, psychopompous, makes no secret of this. “The people,” he says, interpreting their “unconscious,” “the people feel, unconsciously, in their interior [!], that those ceremonies of the Marxist kind were at variance with the dawning spring. They did not want hate; they did not want struggle: they wanted to rise!” ( HRP, 261). Yet in Hitler’s address (and in others by him as well), this rising– “Erhebung” here connotes “erection” more than “insurrection”–in which the self-presentation, self-production, and self-positing of the people are accomplished through work, bears resemblance to a curious Christian theologeme: the idea of the “resurrection of our people” ( “Auferstehung unseres Volkes” [ HRP, 261]). 3 The people that rises up through work to itself, to its proper “being and life,” presents itself as a mytho-theological figure, the divine savior, the hero, the redeemer and the self-redeemer, the resurrected Christ. The people is Christ, the hic et nunc resurrecting, insofar as it rises from the dead by the power of its work. The invocation of and the identification with this theological figure assumes, however, that in the first place this people has been degraded and insulted (Hitler makes this assumption quite explicit, once again using the language of psychology to speak of an “inferiority complex” that has been “artificially inbred” [ HRP, 261]). It further assumes that this people has died and has become a corpse: “the world persecutes us[;] . . . it will not recognize our right to life” ( HRP, 263). From the spell of humiliation and the denied right to life, from the spell of class conflict and death by lack of recognition, “we want redemption from this spell” ( HRP, 261). We, the working people, want to redeem ourselves, this murdered and lifeless people. Work is the redemption of the inferior and from the inferior. It is the rise of the degraded to ranks of the chosen, the self-elected; and as self-elected, it is the resurrection of the dead in the radiant, spectral body–in the phantom, to recall Adorno’s remark. The people, in its essence, is work, which, in turn, is essentially self-redemption. In his ergological restitution of the Christological myth, Hitler remains true to at least one motif of Christian dogma: this Christ that is the “German people” is not redeemed by a superior power. Rather, he redeems himself and rises by his own strength from the grave: “We know that all human work must in the end be vain if the blessing of Providence does not shine above it. But we do not belong to those who comfortably await the hereafter. We are given nothing. . . . We ask not of the Almighty, ‘Lord make us free!’ We want to be active, to work.” ( HRP, 263-64) Thus we alone, the unfree, make ourselves free: we make ourselves, we work ourselves, and we liberate and redeem ourselves through our own proper work. For the chief ideologue of the National Socialist German Labor Party and the chancellor of the Reich, work is–on Labor Day, 1 May 1933–the form of Christological self-redemption, self-erection (”Selbsterhebung”), and the resurrection from the death of the Weimar Republic. It is the self-appropriation of the people in its self-production. Work is the mythical form of liberation, self-deification. The National Socialism that Hitler conjured up is a political mytho-theology of work. But this work is first of all [End Page 27] nothing else but a suggestion–in fact, the suggestion of autosuggestion and thereby the fictionizing of a self, the suggestion there could exist an autonomous, self-enacting, self-producing and self-resurrecting I. The real presence, transubstantiation, suggested here is a citation from an obsolete theology, from a theology become propaganda. It is a staged presence, and the work through which it seeks to become a reality consists in little more than the rhetorical reproduction of a mythological schema. It consists thus in the work of the refusal to work. The transfigured political body of the people “Christ” is not the spirit of Hitler’s so-called spiritual people but, rather, its phantom, the specter of a specter. 4

Resurrected through “creative work” in its Christo-mythological phantom body, this people is robbed of its trade unions the next day, on 2 May 1933, and one year later, on 24 October 1934, it is surrounded by the “German Worker’s Front” (”Deutsche Arbeitsfront”), the “Organization of Productive Germans of the Brow and Fist.” Its goal is the “formation” (”Bildung”) of a community of people as a community of performance, the “performing community” (”Leistungsgemeinschaft”) of all Germans. 5 A few years later, the slogan Arbeit macht frei (Work makes free), which could have come from Hitler’s May Day address, will bedeck the entrance to the euphemistically billed “concentration camp” Ausschwitz. 6 In this sentence, we are to understand that work as the form of the self-appropriation of the “being and life” of a people is simultaneously the form of its liberation from everything that is not itself, that is not proper to it–that is improper, foreign, and, at the same time, according to a troglodytically bipolar thinking, inferior, debased, unfree, and dead. The sentence “Work makes free” is the resurrection formula of the national-Christian, necro-vitalistic mythology of fascism. It defines Auschwitz as workplace: a workplace where the nonproper, the nonworking–and, it is thus insinuated, the already dead–are once more put to death, in order that the proper, the society of work, can emerge as the product of its own labor. It defines murder as the work of life on itself. It defines Jews as the unredeemed; it defines Communists as the dualists of class conflict; it defines Gypsies as the homeless and propertyless; it defines homosexuals as the un(re)productive: it defines them all as material for work, as work materials–namely, as the always already former, as the dead, unproductive people–and it defines work, on the one hand, as the production of corpses, and, on the other, as the production of the “gleaming,” spectral body of the work-state. “Work makes free” is not an arbitrary or cynical slogan. It is rather the name of Auschwitz and thus the name of National Socialist Germany. It does not deceive about the reality of work but, rather, pronounces its truth: the system of liberation through work and, consequently, the system of self-production–the production of the figure of the self–is the system of Auschwitz. Yet the unreality that cleaves to this slogan, as well as to the reality of the work it defines, and that seduces one to understand it as mere cynicism does not lack objectivity. For this work deemed to make free consists essentially in the rejection of a structurally irreducible moment of work itself, in the rejection of what in work exposes it to something foreign, to something that does not define itself as work, that is inappropriable and that does not permit of being included within the [End Page 28] defining borders of a univocal concept, a form or an idea. Work, as it determines the system of Auschwitz, the system of National Socialism, defines itself as the rejection of what is foreign to work and the foreignness of work “itself” through murder: the practical condemnation and extermination of what in work does not correspond to an egological figure and thus does not conform to the process of figuration, of what in work is not itself and what does not come back to itself.

I turn to the second of the three motives that define the concept of work under National Socialism, the ontological motif, which is closely related to the Christological one. This ontological motif was stressed most energetically by Heidegger in 1933 and 1934 and represents a peculiar reinterpretation–but also interpretation–of his existential analytic of Dasein. Of course, my concern in this short sketch of Heidegger’s relevant remarks is not to reconstruct the many complications attending his concept of work (a task, incidentally, yet to be accomplished) and still less to discuss these complications in the context of his thinking and its metamorphoses. What is important to me here is that, in his Rectorship philosophy, Heidegger conceived of the essence of Dasein–of finite being oneself (”Selbstsein”) –as work and that he placed this determination of the humanity of man in the service of National Socialist propaganda. On 22 October 1933, in the largest lecture hall of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger delivered a speech in front of six hundred unemployed persons slated to be put to work by the Work Procurement Program (Arbeitsbeschaffungsprogramm). After having greeted them as “fellow German countrymen! German workers!” summoned to “communal work,” and having explained that the Work Procurement Program is properly–and this “properly” is what matters here– “erection” and construction in the new future of our people,” he says that the decisive characteristic in the creation of work lies in the fact that it must “first and foremost make one again fit for Dasein [”daseinsfähig”] in the state and for the state and thereby for the whole of the people.” 7 The procurement of work makes one fit for Dasein. In this, work is not only characterized as ego enhancement (though Heidegger also suggests as much when he states that the unemployed “should, before himself, win back the dignity and footing [”Halt”] that is fitting and, before his fellow countrymen, earn for himself the security and determination that is fitting” [ NZH, 199]). 8 In this, it is above all postulated that Dasein itself is essentially work: the creation of employment “creates” the capacity for Dasein, and since Dasein “in the first place and above all” lies in this fitness, in its capacity and possibility, it “creates,” along with work, immediately also Dasein. Dasein is work, and–according to the ideology of the reconciliation of classes and social strata–it is the work of the “fist” no less than that of the “brow.” Since work, in itself, must already be knowledge if it is at all to be properly work, the creation of work must complete itself organically–thus runs Heidegger’s argument–through the creation of knowledge (”Wissensbeschaffung”). Heidegger deduces the necessary (and, incidentally, politically inoffensive) consequence from this program of deprivileging when he says

“The worker” and a person in possession of scientific knowledge are not opposites. Every worker is each in his own way knowledgeable [”ein Wissender”], and only as one [End Page 29] with such knowledge can he work at all. The animal is denied the prerogative of work, and inversely, everyone who knowingly [”wissentlich”] acts and everyone who scientifically [”wissenschaftlich”] decides is a worker [NZH, 202].
With this, as the (poorly founded) opposition to the animal well indicates, the essence of Dasein in general, its humanity, is once again located in conscious, knowing, and volitional work. “All work as work is something spiritual [”Geistiges”], for it grounds itself on proper knowledge” ( NZH, 202).

For Heidegger, Dasein is characterized as the work of knowledge (Wissensarbeit) and thus, essentially, as technology. This characterization is made for the most part independently of the politics of class appeasement and against the background of téchne, from the lexicon of Greek philosophy, that is to say, understood above all as practical know-how and knowledgeable praxis. Heidegger postulates the identity of work and knowledge as téchne in his Rectorship Address, written five months prior to his Work Procurement speech. In connection with the Aeschylus sitation, “know-ledge” (” Wissen” is Heidegger’s shorthand translation for téchne ) “is much more impotent than necessity.” Heidegger characterizes this “creative impotence [”Unkraft”] of knowledge”–and thus of the work of knowledge (”Wissensarbeit”), of work in general, and of téchne –as ” the ultimate form of man’s energeia, the ultimate way of man’s Being-at-work [”am-Werke-Sein”]. ” 9 Accordingly, he characterizes “theory itself as the ultimate realization of the true praxis” ( SDU, 12). Téchne, in the double sense of knowledge and work, is thus for the Heidegger of the Rectorship Address “the ultimate realization” of Dasein; and energeia, as “Being-at-work,” is Dasein itself. Like the questioning of the philosopher, this work is not a prelude to something else but is “itself the ultimate form [”Gestalt”] of knowledge” ( SDU, 13). It is, I repeat, “form,” and as this “ultimate form,” it is the “ultimate actualization” and therefore the actuality of Dasein. This means, however (and Heidegger deduces the consequence with the precision of a logician), that Dasein –determined as work, téchne, energeia — creates not only itself but also (incidentally, very much in contrast to the antisubjectivist conception of Being and Time ) its world. Heidegger writes: “If we want the essence of science in the sense of a questioning, unprotected steadfastness amid the uncertainty of beings as a whole, then this will to essence [”Wesenswille”] will create for our people their world of most interior and exterior danger, that is, their truly spiritual world” ( NZH, 203). 10 The “form” (”Gestalt”) of work as the “essence” of science as well as of Dasein allows for steadfastness (”Standhalten”) in the world of danger. But to the extent that “form” willfully withstands this danger, Heidegger argues à la Hegel, it is not passively exposed to but is itself agent, mover, creator of this world and this danger. Dasein, therefore, is essentially constituted as auto-téchne, and it is as such doubled in itself, polemically different from itself: it is the steadfast “form” of work and, at the same time, the working out (”Erarbeitung”) of danger–self-assertion and self-endangerment in one, creating and “creative impotence,” ALT=”[greek text]”> , which as such exposes itself to the ALT=”[greek text]”> it worked for and itself created. In contrast to Hitler’s paranoid [End Page 30] dissociation of what is properly one’s own and what is foreign, Heidegger insists that in the work of Dasein itself there is something at play that remains utterly irreducible to this work. If Dasein is work, then it is work only because it is exposed in itself to something other than itself. And yet, the Rectorship Address leaves no doubt that the work of Dasein ought not be work with or on this other but, rather, work against it. It should be work against what in this work itself stands out as “uncertain” ( SDU, 13, 14), “constant world uncertainty” ( “ständige Weltungewißheit” [ SDU, 14]), as “hidden” ( “verborgen” [ SDU, 11]), as “madness” ( SDU, 19), “cessation” ( “Ende” [ SDU, 10]), and “nonbeing” ( “Nichtsein” [ SDU, 10])–in short, against what stands out as foreign to work, against what is out of work and unemployable. Dasein is ergontologically constituted. But, for precisely this reason, it cannot contest the necessary existence of what is foreign to work, of the other, without simultaneously entering into battle with itself as an other that is not yet itself. As work, Dasein, being-there, is being-there-in-danger (Da-in-der-Gefahr), and, as such, it is being-there-with-the-other (Da-beim-Anderen-Sein). Its exists only to the extent that it remains in itself exposed to an ALT=”[greek text]”> . The option of thinking work as defined against this other is not a philosophical but a political (indeed, a national-political and ego-political) option–one with which the self of Dasein in the egological form of the proper people was meant to stand its ground and be hypostatized as an ergopolitical state of the self.

Despite its recognition of the “uncertain,” or “questionable,” of the “aletheically” hidden and therefore irreducibly other, the ontology of work in Heidegger’s Rectorship Address remains an ontology of the “questionability of proper Dasein” ( “Fragwürdigkeit des eigenen Daseins” [ SDU, 15]). It is an ontology of a particular “people” philosophically and politico-historically privileged in its work, an ontology of proper work and of work itself as inalienable and unexposed propriety. Very concretely, this means: (1) that work is the essential form of socialization; (2) that the society of work is always the only proper society–the “people”; (3) that it can be a society only of aggressive appropriation, one that must “advance” and “march forward” (”vorrücken”) into the uncertain ( SDU, 14); and (4) that this work-society must be voluntaristically organized, must be a work-state and leader-state. Heidegger declares in his Work Procurement speech that “‘worker and work,’ as National Socialism understands these words, divides not into classes but binds and unifies fellow countrymen and social stations into the one great will of the state” ( NZH, 202). Work is the “will of the state”–that is, genetivus subjectivus, work is always already that which the state wills. However, it also means that all work, to the extent that it is work, is also already a will for the state and the work of the state and on the state. Heidegger, along with Ernst Jünger, calls the state of Dasein the “work-state” ( “Arbeitsstaat” [ NZH, 202]); it is the state toward which the work of the self-enacting and self-instituting Dasein that wills itself as state strives. This”work-state”is Dasein itself; more precisely, it is the self of Dasein as institution. Understood as work and technology, Dasein is immediately its own proper instatement, its nationalization (”Verstaatlichung”). It is–in a turn of phrase that Heidegger soon thereafter, in the Nietzsche [End Page 31] Lectures, denounces as the last figure of the occidental metaphysics of subjectivity–the will to power as state. And because work is the “ultimate form” ( “höchste Gestalt” [ NZH, 202]) of man, it must subject itself to the principle of form (”Gestalt”) and follow a leader, in whom the “will of the state” ( “Wille des Staates” [ NZH, 202]) embodies itself. In what the will to work wills, Heidegger can accordingly conclude, ” we follow only the preeminent volition of our leader. To become a follower indeed means: . . . incessantly [”unausgesetzt”] willing that the German people, as a people of work, . . . as a work-state, secure itslongevity and greatness” ( NZH, 202; my emphasis). Just as Heidegger insists at the end of the Rectorship Address that “our”decision for “ourselves” has “already been decided”by the “young and newest force of the people” ( SDU, 19) and that our decision is, therefore, only a decision for the “force” and “form” of the decision, he supposes here, at the end of the Work Procurement speech, that the will of the “we” is “already” “surpassed” by the will of the “leader” and, thus, by a will to what has “already” been willed. Dasein, the will to power as state, can first come into its own, according to this logic of self-appropriation, self-forging and self-formation, in the figure of the leader. It thereby adheres to a logic of the historical present thought as restitution and reinstitution. In willing the already willed and in deciding for the already decided, Dasein comes back to its proper future as a past in which all that can be has “already” been willed and all that must be has “already” been decided.

Inthis circular self-comprehension of the will in the form (”Gestalt”) of the state, “work-state” and leader-state, Dasein, thought and promulgated as work, achieves presence and denies, indeed disavows in its incessant (”unausgesetzten”) willing, that it must itself in the first place be experienced as exposedness (”Ausgesetztheit”), if indeed it should be able to determine itself as work. “Work = presence” is the formula Heidegger uses in his Logic Lectures of the summer semester of 1934. 11 The presence of which he speaks here is understood to be eminently historial, namely, productive of history. But it is auto- and tauto-historical.In a steadfast form attuned to “longevity and greatness,” it is history as the self-appropriation of work: monumentalization of the autonomy of the self (”Selbständigkeit”) at the cost of all others. As with Hitler, the Christological feature of self-presentation and self-historicization is not lacking in Heidegger’s treatment of the monument of work: “God is dead,” Heidegger proclaims–citing the pronouncement of Nietzsche, the “last German Philosopher”–and suggests that he himself, as the very last, the final, or even post-final, philosopher, can proclaim the finite resurrection of this dead God, the restitution and return of finite Dasein in the form of the technological “work-state.”

Dasein is no longer a temporalizing projection into the unrepresentable and unbounded open as it was in Being and Time. It is also not ex-position and exile into the unembodiable, as in Heidegger’s later philosophy. Dasein is here, in the political fundamental ontology of the Rectorship period, work as installment and installation, as the putting-to-work (”die Einsetzung und das ‘Ins-Werk-Setzen’”) of the truth of its present decision for its “ownmost possibilities” in the form of the “work-state” and its “leader.” And this Dasein is the self-production of the finite subject [End Page 32] only to the extent that it is the re-production of the previously posited Christological paradigm of reproduction. It is ex-position not to the unpositable but into positing–activism of positivity. Here, the question is no longer one of the openness of Being as being-other but of the arrest and internment of Being in what already is (im schon-Seienden). The political ergontology and morphontology of Heidegger during the Rectorship period was the ethical and political collapse of his philosophy: the collapse, namely, of the ontological difference, in many respects an endogenous collapse, for Heidegger never ceased to think Being as the Being of beings and of Dasein.

I turn to the third determination of work, the morphological, and to the third author, Ernst Jünger. Though published before the National Socialists came to power in October of 1932 and denounced by Hilter as National Bolshevist, internationalistic and “dangerous to the public,” Jünger’s book, The Worker (Der Arbeiter), is the protofascist manifesto par excellence. Jünger himself had dedicated a presentation copy of Fire and Blood in 1926 to “the national leader Adolf Hitler!” 12 but after 1932 Jünger disdained all contact with the “shooting-gallery figure.” 13 Much later, he time and again defended The Worker as a nonpartisan diagnosis and answered his critics with the charge, “after the earthquake, one smashes up the seismographs.” 14 This sententious defense is symptomatic in its dishonesty. In the first place, fascism was not a natural event–but this is exactly how Jünger, in a way that we will have to discuss, conceptualizes it. In the second place, after an earthquake one smashes up only the seismographs that failed to register the quaking. In the third place, the diagnostician of political catastrophes is, in fact, reproachable for not having taken steps to prevent them. Even in his muddled allegory Auf den Marmorklippen, Jünger did not so much as lift a finger or utter a word against National Socialism. That he maintained a distance between himself and his protagonists was a matter of intellectual dégoût. That he later condemned them he himself repeatedly attributed to his contempt for their technical incompetence. In Heidegger’s conciliatory but nonetheless devastating critique of Jünger, “Zur Seinsfrage” (On the question of being)–a text also readable as a self-critique of his Rectorship philosophy–Heidegger is less disingenuous, both politically and theoretically more precise, when he recalls that a small circle of university instructors, for whom he had elucidated The Worker in the winter semester of 1938-39, were not surprised that the discussion had been “monitored and ultimately broken up.” “For,” explains Heidegger, “it belongs to the essence of the will to power not to let the actual that it empowers appear in actuality as what it itself is. ” 15 Translated, this means: the Nazis–the actualized will to power–wanted to prevent the truth about themselves from being told. And this means further: The Worker offers a phenomenology–but the most apologetic one imaginable–of the National Socialist system.

Jünger concludes The Worker with the sentence, “Here, to partake and render service: that is the task that is expected of us.” 16 Like nearlyeverything else he has written, this not only pompously but also wretchedly formulated imperative, this “task that is expected of us,” dictates “the steeling of arms and hearts.” Evoking Max [End Page 33] Weber’s metaphor about the “steel-hard casing” (”stahlharten Gehäuse”) required by the “rational way of life” and borne by “the spirit of Christian asceticism,” Jünger does not of course reiterate Weber’s culture-pessimistic alienation thesis but, rather, formulates the martial program of a constructivism that will bring “pure existence into view,” “pure existence” as “form” (”Gestalt”), in the unity of the “dominion and form [”Gestalt”] ” of the worker ( A, 246). From the first to the very last pages of his treatise, Jünger leaves no doubt that he is not concerned merely with a limited sociological phenomenon–the preponderance of the “lower classes,” the ever increasing pervasiveness of its lifestyle, the planetarization of the “workshop-landscape.” His theme is, more grandly, the “ultimate existence” ( A, 36), the “fullness” of Being “in the force of a shaping [”Prägung”] that only just began” ( A, 45). The Worker lays claim to being nothing less than an ontology–not an ontology of work (a task reserved until much later for the restorative attempts, Marxist in orientation, of Lukács) 17 but rather an ontology of the “form” (”Gestalt”) of its “bearer,” a morphontology. Jünger’s book presents itself not only as the diagnosis of a transformation of class structure, not only as a prognosis of the planetary uniformation of society, time- and space-experience in a “plan-state” and “plan-scape” of unimaginable proportion. It presents itself much more as the theory–better yet, the vision–of an organic as well as technical paradigm that–exempt from all fluctuations, movements, and developments–persists as the transhistorical ground of all figures. “Thus the figure of the worker,” Jünger writes, “is more deeply and statically em-bedded in Beingthan all the likenesses and orders with which it confirms itself, deeper than constitutions and works, than man and his communities, which are like the changing expression on a face whose fundamental character persists unchanged” ( A, 45). The name “worker” is neither a professional title nor a reference to human individuals or masses. Individuals and masses, according to Jünger, are bourgeois and thus obsolete categories. Rather, “worker” is the title of a “new type of man,” a type in which the “form” (”Gestalt”) of the worker” is embodied” ( A, 311).

In its onto-morpho-logical conception, The Worker not only exhibits that disposition for totality whose loss had been bemoaned by left-wing as well as right-wing intellectuals of the Weimar Republic. 18 It also “embodies” and “represents” this totality founded in the “figure” of an indelible “Being.” And to this “figure” corresponds the totality of the world–a correspondence Jünger never tires of stressing. It is a world that increasingly assumes the character of a “work world” (”Arbeitswelt”), without niches, refuges, or vestiges of nature. The convergence of “total work character” (”totalem Arbeitscharakter”), which appears as the “mobilization of matter” in the “totality of technical space,” with the “totality of the type,” which sketches itself in the “mobilization of man”–this convergence of power and world “expresses itself,” Jünger writes, “in the fusion of the difference between the organic and the mechanical world; its symbol is the organic construction” ( A, 177). The fusion anticipated by Jünger between the work type (”Arbeitstypus”) and the work world (”Arbeitswelt”), between organic and mechanical mobilization, is thus guaranteed by a kind of preestablished harmony. Here, they coexist in the transcendent “Being” of [End Page 34] the “figure” (”Gestalt”), which becomes visible in its symbol, the “organic construction” ( A, 177). This “organic construction,” this “symbol” of “static Being” is, however, nothing other than technology ( A, 309). It represents “form” (”Gestalt”), whether in the means of production, from the wheel to electricity, or in lifestyle, from the uniform gesture to cultural orders. And conversely, technology is, as Jünger understands it, symbol. “Technology,” he explains, “is meaningful only because it is the way in which the figure (”Gestalt”) of the worker mobilizes the world. This fact endows it with the status of a symbol” ( A, 200; cf. 196 and 311). Technology is symbol or representative or representation of Being. The “total mobilization” of matter and man through technology is the symbol or representative or incarnation of this static form (”Gestalt”). “The type . . . possesses rank in the degree to which it embodies the figure of the worker” ( A, 311). The “work-state” and its “plan-scape,” the workshop-landscape and its “work-armies” (”Arbeitsheere”) –or anything else that becomes an object of the physiognomic and political visions of Jünger–is embodiment, representation, expression, radiance, crystallization, appearance, symbol or–time and again–”representation” of “presence.” And this holds a fortiori for work. It is always work in the strongest sense and has meaning as work exclusively to the degree that it is the work of signification, of symbolization, and of the representation of “the worker,” of his “figure,” of his, and thus of its, proper “presence.” It is properly work only as a return to what does not work, work only as the annulment of work to the benefit of the epiphany of “static Being” ( A, 309).

It goes without saying that this conception of work, interpretation, language, politics, and being is anything but “revolutionary.” Or, it is “revolutionary” only insofar as it is the restitution of a classical morphology, of an idealistic semiology–a symbology–the restitution of a classical, metaphysical ontology of work. What distinguishes Jünger’s conception from these, however, is his taste for undifferentiated uniformity, his obsession with the formalism of the “total.” As a result, he promulgates not a national or international socialism but a planetary socialism without society–not a worker’s state, but a “work-plan-state” under the “will to total dictatorship” ( A, 45). This may prevent him from being a vulgar racist, but it causes him to be a techno-racist, who glimpses the burgeoning of a “new race” of “consummate stamp” ( A, 245), with “racelike quality” ( A, 212), from the “native soil of the people” ( A, 307). His fanatical fixation on the total permits him to consign to oblivion bourgeois museum culture and the “so-called cultural assets” whose conservation it serves. But, at the same time, it forces him not only to generalize art as the “representation of the form of the worker” ( A, 217) but also to render it “absolute”–and, thus rendering it absolute, to conserve it. Jünger’s totalism permits him to recognize that the universalization of technology–the “mobilization of the world through the form of the worker”–will result in the wholesale destruction of cult powers; his totalism also permits him to recognize in this universalization “the most decisive anti-Christian power” ( A, 161). But this same totalism causes him, in turn, to assign “cultic significance” ( A, 246) to the “form of the worker.” In short, Jünger’s gestures are dictated by a repetition compulsion. Not only does he time and again [End Page 35] repeat one and the same argument–his argument is itself fundamentally one of repetition, restitution, reinstitution: the cults must be destroyed in order that the one cult can be erected; thefeeble arts of civil society must beswept away and room made for absolute art as the representation of the generative “elementary forces” ( A, 207);races are obsolete, but in their place rises a techno-race of precision and violence. Nation states are wasting away in the anarchy of competition. They will be replacedby the planetary dictatorship of a peerless order. The destruction of the particular is always at the service of its resurrection in the general; the dissolution of the manifold, at the service of the re-creation of its one model; the break up of forms and movements, at the service of the reconstruction of the one static form. Jünger’s system is not National Socialist for the sole reason that it represents the latter’s hypertrophy–and thus, quite simply, its principle. His system is the system of the planetary techno-morpho-logical archi-fascism. It is the system of “total mobilization” to the point of the immobility of the form ( A, 220), the system of the planetary performance of form, ofpure positivity.

“The task of total mobilization is the transformation of life into energy. . . . Thus, it draws on the potency of life, while formation gives expression to Being and must avail itself not of a language ofmovement but, rather, of a language of forms” ( A, 220). The identity of energy and form, of a language of movement and one of forms, culminates in that “mathematically factual style,” that “precise, univocal language” in the “univocal space” ( A, 279) of an “univocal and rigid work world” ( A, 277), whose organ is the press. The univocity of the language of work, which affords just as little latitude to other meanings as to other languages and fulfills itself every instant in the actualization of its ideal of discourse, finds its perfectly suited counterpart in the “changed way in which one today reads the newspaper.” Jünger finds:

Even reading is no longer compatible with the concept of leisure; it appears far more with the markings of the special work-character. . . . One wants to feel that the world changes as one reads, yet, at the same time, this change is constant in the sense of a monotone alternation of the colorful signals one scurries past [in public transportation]. [ A, 277]
The constant change at which the act, the “work-act” (Arbeitsakt), of reading aims, according to Jünger, is a “change” exclusively within the static conditions of the one, final, “univocal world of work.” It is the constant recurrence of the same, of the “monotone alternation” of traffic signals. The “total mobilization” of signal language and of its immediate correspondent signal reading is nothing else than the mobilization to the static form of “Being.” In this totally mobilizedlanguage, the world changes instantaneously when it is spoken or read. It is a “happening” that “distinguishes itself through presence” ( A, 277), through the presence, namely, of a form that lies in the generalized auto-performance as the automatic identity of stating and understanding, of mobilization and constancy, of act and meaning, addresser and addressee. It is in this perfect collapse of all pragmatic, semantic, grammatical, and [End Page 36] rhetorical dimensions of language that its “special work-character” takes shape. In this collapse, performativism and formalism, monosemantism and autotropism collaborate in the uniformed universe of thefigure of the worker. The archi-fascism that presents itself in this figure is nothing other than the system of technically installed presence: the system of the “nothing other.”

“Work in the highest sense,” so writes Jünger, “means representation of the worker” ( A, 212). But this means self - representation of presence, representation of what does not work; accordingly, work in the highest sense means the annulment of work. The consequence is compelling, and Jünger never ceased to repeat it in every imaginable variation. He thereby delivered the formula of the National Socialist ideology of work. For all three models of work discussed here–the mytho-theological, the ontological, and the morphological–work is, paradoxically, exactly what does not work. For Hitler, work is the propagandistic citation of the myth of resurrection and self-appropriation. It directs itself against everything that is other as the already dead and terminates political work in murder. For the Heidegger of the Rectorship philosophy, work is the structure of Dasein insofar as it does not just direct itself to but against the other and only thus assists in the establishment of one’s proper “form” (”Gestalt”). For Jünger, it is the representation of “form” (”Gestalt”) and reabsorption of movement in its constancy. Defined as self-appropriation, self-restitution, and self-institution, work is always the technology, or symbol, of what does not work. It is stasis,order, mythically immobile form, or historically transcendent Being. It is thus the always already proper that should always already be belonging and conforming to itself. In work, all three models promise freedom from work. That means, however, that they promise freedom from the other. They are models of self-resurrection insofar as they are models of the destruction of the other. The work that they propagate is actually resistance against work. For, however much it may still be a project of appropriation and formation, work that is not fascistically organized is always exposed to an other irreducible to the form of the self and inaccessible to its appropriations. It is always also a project that remains open to the other, to nonwork, to what is foreign to work, to an anergon.

One of the reasons why it is so difficult to work through the fascistic obsession is that it is an obsession that consists in the systematic disavowal of work. The institutions of National Socialism did not want to be open projects but, rather, immediate realizations of an idea–orof a phantasm. The institutions wanted to bring history itself to a standstill in form and monument, and it is thus difficult, if not impossible, to integrate them into its course. If they can be worked through, then this work must not confine itself to a recognition and acknowledgment of their murderous atrocities. What has to be worked through is the resistance against work and against working through, against the resistance that was there from its start and that determined its political theories as well as its praxis. The work of National Socialism–the work of the “redeemer,” of “form” of “Being”–was determined from the outset to produce nothing: nothing but its self, nothing but the form of its being, nothing but the self, and thus nothing. It was work as the work of the extermination of work and as the [End Page 37] work of self-extermination. 19 Working through this work does not only mean mourning over the victims of the fascists and thus for the fascists–namely, instead of them–but also over and for us: to mourn over what in our work is mere integration, assimilation, appropriation, self-assertion, and self-production and not also alteration (”Veranderung”), to mourn over what is merely work and not also what in work itself is not and never will be work. The ideology of work, still dominant today, its concealment in sociological theories of intersubjectivity or interdiscursivity, its systematic idealization and its practical tyranny, we ourselves, to the extent that we are subject to, or take part in, it–all belongs to what makes up the arsenal of resistance against the working through of fascistic systems of work. We cannot allow ourselves to be contented with any theory of work, of production, or of positing that repeats the old morpho- and ergontologisms, even if only implicity, in the guise of the new, without opening them through attention for the amorphic and anamorphic, the anergic, unstable, and destabilizing, for the workless and for those who strike. Working through has a chance only when work itself is worked through and opened to what is not work, which is never static form, state, or statue, and never pure performance or pure figure. Under conditions other than those of the anergon, of afformation and affiguration there is no other future.

23 September 1994

Parerga
After having written in “Leisure and Idleness” in The Gay Science about the “breathless haste” of work as the proper “vice of the new world,” Nietzsche continues–and has not only America but also Europe in mind:

Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always “might miss out on something.” . . . More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a “need to recuperate” and is beginning to be ashamed of itself. “One owes it to one’s health”–that is what people say when they are caught on an excursion into the country. Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. 20
Regardless of whatever else it might have been,National Socialism could be all that it was only because it was a system of work. International capitalsocialism, in this respect, does not lag behind. It is the perpetuation of that system with scarcely altered means. One will have to, when confronted with both–and we all are, with no exceptions, confronted with both–one will have to ask oneself what in the structure of work and in the joints, rifts, and rejects of its system permits of another work [End Page 38] and perhaps something other than work, to ask oneself what its Parerga and Anerga and what “taking a walk with ideas and friends” allows. One will have to inquire into a conduct and a language–and, doubtless, not only inquire–that do not work, that cannot be deployed as a means, and that serve neither those systems nor like systems to come.

One will have to work in such a way that the work of fascism, the fascism of work, cannot live off it and continue to work. Otherwise, the talk about working off the past is a feeble reclamation–to whose address? It must, however, have a sense that does not allow itself to be dominated by this past–or by any of the other pasts–but, rather, one that lays it bare and renders it analyzable under the very sober light of a still unimaginable future and of what in this future is more and something other than future.

One will have to work in such a way that one bids farewell to the heroic redemption and damnation schemes of mythic provenience, which always and always still ally themselves with the concept and experience of work (and, once more, with concept and experience as work). One will have to work in such a way that one goes thence where the heroism of redemption (”Erlösung”), of dissolution–the solution (”Lösung”), “final solution” (”Endlösung”), immanent to work and discourse–and the fatalism of damnation, of the cursed earth, of work as socage, as punishment and humiliation, depose (”aussetzen”).

Working through history always runs the risk of falling under the law of vengeance. It runs the risk thus of falling under the law of exchange, the quid pro quo, the symmetry of the tooth for a tooth and between one eye and another and ergo under the law of the repetition and perpetuation of the past. If this working through is to have a chance of breaking free from the vicious circle of vengeance, then it must break free from the circle of work determined as vengeance. In this work, something more than work, something other than vengeance, and something, with respect to the past, new must occur. From this excess, this excendence, of work something suggests itself in the concept of working through: on the one hand, it indicates the traversal of a traumatic event and its transformation into a conscious experience. Thus it indicates that process in which what has remained unconscious or preconscious and what persists in the form of phantasmatic reproductions is revealed to consciousness and becomes available for processing (”Verarbeitung”). In this sense, working through concerns the repetition compulsion that threatens to block work. Work itself, however, can be subject to repetition compulsion and, consequently, can itself constitute a blockageto work and to working through. In the pure mechanics of obsessive activities, it can be the unconscious execution of a traumatic command, the subservient fulfillment of a dictatorial scheme, the always identical reproduction of an always identical injury and its defense. Working through would mean, then, making this anxiety and that injury accessible in a gradual process, gaining access to the inaccessible, [End Page 39] passing the impassable. On the other hand, however, “working through” must mean further that one works through (” hindurch arbeiten”) that trauma and this over-and-over-again retraumatizing work, that one does not stick to the work on trauma and the trauma of work but, rather, that one can pass through and over and above its permanent restitution and reinstitution. This working through and working one’s way out of work can no longer be achieved by way of work, according to its scheme, its concept, and its ideal. It must far more pass through this scheme, this concept, and this ideal and pass over and above it. It must, as working through, be more and something other than work. Or it must, in accord with its tendency, at very least go at this more and this other, approach them.

Prepared long in advance, totalitarianisms have made work a trauma. They have laid it to waste. The history of capitalist work, which culminated in the National Socialist, Fascist, and Stalinist economies of terror and which, far from over, continues in the politics of exploitation and self-exploitation in not only the “developed” but also and especially in “underdeveloped” countries–this history of work, in the establishment of its absolute, that is to say, murderous and suicidal standard, has reached its end. We are not living after the end of this history; we are living at its end. We are living–if we can simply call this “living”–on the border of history determined as work, in its epoché more than its epoch: there, thus, where this history no longer simply makes progress but, rather, where the scheme of this history, its historicity, the scheme of work–sheer auto-performance–opens itself. In this opening, the possibility of an other history or of something other than “history,” the possibility of an other work or of something other than work, announces itself. But this is not a promise. The promise belongs–albeit ambiguously–to the order of the history of work. This does not give cause to hope. Hopes are oriented toward the future, toward what is to come, toward what comes forth and, working, produces itself, or what through work is produced. We touch now on–and have already for some time, and perhaps have already as long as “there is” time–the end of “work-time” (”Arbeits-Zeit”). We touch it (I merely note these two examples) with the hyperstable apparatuses and the machines produced by machines that remove themselves further and further from “human” labor and leave a breach there where this “human” labor was. We touch it, on the other hand, in the fact of the finitude of “natural” resources: both times, in that we touch the border of classical work and work materials and thus touch upon something out of work.

If the “figure of the worker” constitutes a fusion in which the tendencies of the past join forces with the new instruments of technology in order to forge an autonomous type, or even the type of types, and if this figure should represent a “destiny” whose historical emergence breaks through even history itself, then the question is, what does not fall under the precinct of the auto-morphosis, of this self-production of the figure of work? [End Page 40]

What is an anergon?

Are the working conditions produced without exception by work? Are they the products of work? Or are they exclusively working material?

What does not show itself, what does not work its way out, what is not, as work?

What is the metahorizon of the horizon, the other side of the horizon, that gives contour to the figure of the worker? It is first the other side of the horizon that makes it possible for this figure to erect itself, but on this other side it falls.

What is the space– is it and is it something –in which the worker sets up his workshop?

What does not conform to this figure, without, however, resisting it? And what resists it without itself being an object?

And, is it, in general, a what, a something, that does not work there, or is a “nonmodalizable,” a withholding that eludes all modalities, all types and manners, all forms and measures, all procedures and means? What relation does the ammodel entertain with the model? I shall translate to prevent misunderstandings: what relation does the admodel (the outer horizon that first gives way to the possibility of a model and, thus, is itself not a model, but an admodel ) entertain with the model? And, does it entertain a relation at all? Can this relation of relation and “irrelation” be maintained?

The ammodalization. Ammodelation: inauguration and suspension of the model, modus, and modernity, the so-called postmodern included. Modernity and postmodernity are historical concepts. Wherever it is a question of the structure of history and not of intrahistorical epochs, one will have to test out the “concept” of ammodernization, of that event whose rhythm gives contour to particular historical epochs, modes, and figures, to particular historical developments and concepts, and even to the concept of history as such, without itself assuming a historical form but not without taking something away from their form.

The worker is the figure of planetaryperformativity: in him it is no longer possible to separate reality from theater. He deploys himself, repeats himself, and changes himself: iteration and alteration dictate the ratio of the transformation of his figure; they are his figuration, his morphosis. By dint of its alteration, however, formation must always have at least one element that carries on its monstrousnonessence (”Unwesen”), that does not let itself be reduced to form and to the process of formation. It must always have something unformed from which the form departs, something to which it owes itself and through which it is impeded. There must be at least this one element that is other than the form and other than the form of genesis of the form: an afform, an afformative. In it, the domain of the possible positing of forms is inaugurated–in this, it is an ad-formative –and in it, the sovereign authority of this domain as well as each and every one of its manifestations, each and every one of its positings, is de-posed, suspended, disarrayed–in this, this afformative is an a-formative. In every parergon an anergon, in morphosis an anamorphosis or [End Page 41] amorphosis, in every figuration and transformation an ad-, an a-, an affiguration, must impart “itself.”

This affiguration, this afformation, which does not posit but ex-poses, is not something and “is” other than Being.

The historian posturing as a border patrolman: he attempts to secure the borders between the past, the present, and the future, to regulate traffic, and will grant passage only to what can present its marks of identification and recognition. Hollywood did not invent the “time cop.” He already existed as “history cop.” Yet what comes to pass with that which smuggles itself in under another name, with a marked card, a marked mark? What comes to pass with the passage itself? Does it come to pass, or does it not? Where in history lies the counterpart to no-man’s-land: no-man’s-time?

Since National Socialism, all concepts are ruins. They are not merely stigmatized, not merely damaged: they are rubble. This holds no less for the concept of the past than for the concept of recollection, no less for the concept of historical progress than for that of work. And it holds, moreover, for that of working through. Even for Freud, the ideal of working through lay in the cure and thus in the approximation of a condition of relative normalcy. This ideal of normalcy entertains too many close affinities to the norm implemented by the totalitarian regimes of this century not to have exhausted its viability. It can no longer serve as a means of orientation. We do, indeed, need criteria, but we do not have a single criterion at our disposal that would not be in ruins and not a single one that would not harbor the danger of becoming murderous. Idealizations are, indeed, structurally unavoidable, but every inherited and every imaginable idealization is monstrous. When in a book entitled Representing the Holocaust someone calls for the development of a “social ritual” that would make the work of mourning and the process of working through into an institution, when in the same context someone goes so far as to attribute a ritual dimension to historiography and ultimately asserts that a language adequate to Shoah depends “on ritual as well as aesthetic criteria,” then one will certainly not be able to deny one’s empathy with this hair-raising naïveté. However, one will ask oneself with horror in what way the program of this aesthetic ritual should structurally differ from the program of exactly that ritual–that sacrificial ritual–whose working through it is meant to promote. The confusionism that here, with an appeal to the notorious ideal of critique and critical judgment, exhibits its distressing incapacity for critique would have to be understood, for better or for worse, as a symptom of the ambivalence of institutionalized ideals–including, of course, the ideal of critique. Every ritualization of working through would be exempted from working through. There is no “adequate” language for the mass murder of Jews, Communists, homosexuals, Gypsies, and the ill. There is no adequate concept and no adequate aesthetic form for that which could respond to the generalized terror under totalitarian regimes. There are only, once more, demolished concepts, ruined rituals, shattered forms of representation. [End Page 42] The “aesthetic rituals” of which Representing the Holocaust dreams, would, of course, be just as harmless as they are naïve if they were not in principle of a kind with the politics of belittlement, harmonization, standardization, and idealization– of the idealization and aestheticization of the Holocaust. . . .

It is also not enough to speak of the ruin of forms and their ruinous effects. One has to ask oneself what, exactly, remains of the standards, the ideals, the schemes of thought and action that organized totalitarianism, and one has to ask further what in the remains of the terror of work has been spared and may even be rescued from the danger of relapse. Little. The minimal structure of work: to relate to something other than it ever itself can become.

The conceptual remainder that has survived work–and, accordingly, must have preceded its rule–this reef in the concept (Riff im Begriff) on which the work of destruction and the self-destruction of work must founder, this that is undestructed and unprocessed (I am attempting to render this formal minimal structure of work more precise) is, in the first place, nothing but its unproductive surplus, its excess, its excendence out of the domain of positive, positing, and producing violence. This surplus, in any case, has the character of a transference (”Übertragung”) –not, of course, in the sense of a substitution of a past form, or its representation, with its “natural” or artificial surrogate, but rather a transference to an other that cannot be anticipated in a model or grasped according to the scheme of a form. In this transference that knows no transferential object, the scope of work (as well as, in particular, the scope of what can be called working through) is ripped open. In this transference without object and without end, without secure trajectory and without recourse, in this exfert, working takes place as the sheer project of relating to something or someone as yet–and always as yet–undetermined. Relating to an other, outside the field of work and irreducible to this field, transference–a trans-ference that is more than the carrying (the “ference”) of something bearable, something tolerable or some gain–is exactly what remains of work: the play, the open rift in which it moves, and the absolute premise under which alone working and working through is possible.

Freud’s understanding of the psychoanalytic notion of working through has assumed this direction. Thus understood, working through is possible only in the open horizon of transference and relies in all its effects on this horizon and its possible opening. The resistance against working through is a resistance against transference, against addressing the other, against a course or a discourse where the speaking subject gives in to a movement in which it constitutes itself just as much as it deconstitutes itself. Working through is tranference. And just as working through is above all a working through virtually the entire complex of work, so the transference in question would be above all a carrying, a “ference” (”Tragen”) beyond every carrying. Its aim cannot be determined in any nominal unity, in any scheme of syntagmatization, or in any conventional performance. Since, however, in order to “suceed,” every discursive movement, every transmission, every transference must [End Page 43] not only go above and beyond its objects and means but, at the same time, must also avail itself of certain means, objects, and addressees, a structurally unavoidable resistance brings itself to bear in the tranference against the transference and in working through against working through. The resistance to transference lies in that the transference is directed toward a particular object, a particular person, a form, a type, an ideal. The resistance to working through lies in working through itself whenever it follows a particular scheme of work with predetermined, schematic, conventionalized ends or contents.

In his “Direction de la cure,” Lacan noted without further commentary: “le travail de transfert (Durcharbeiten).” 21 “Working through”–he translates it as perlaborer–designates for him simply the work of transference. In “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage,” where he confirms “c’est bien là un travail” and not without irony recalls that one tends even to grant this work a certain “valeur formatrice” that in the end may succeed in producing a skilled worker, Lacan presents something like a formula of orientation for what happens in this work of transference. The subject, he writes,

dans ce travail qu’il fait de la reconstruire [to reconstruct the imaginary work that is its being] pour un autre, il retrouve l’alienation fondamentale qui la lui a fait construire comme une autre, et qui l’a toujours destinée à lui être dérobée par un autre. 22
The work of the subject, its being and its ego, is constituted as an other. As an other it is rediscovered anew in its reconstruction for another–the analyst, and from the very beginning (”toujours”), it, this subject, this other-than-itself, is destined (”destinée”) to be taken away by an other. The play of the prepositions and genera of the other Lacan opens up in his formula of working through proceeds unproblematically as long as it is an issue of “pour un autre” and “par un autre.” It becomes uncontrollable and completes the turn toward a play in which the player loses himself as soon as “comme une autre” is in question. For as an other, the work of the subject, the image by way of which this subject constructs its identity and out of which it makes a Being for, and by grace of, others– as such an other the subject is both constructed and reconstructed. Yet, it would have to be reconstructed in such a way that the latter, as an other, in its turn offers itself as an other other–not, however, as such and not as itself. The space of working through and of the work of transference would have to be such that in it the as an other sets itself apart as an other other and detaches itself from the construction and its repetition in the reconstruction. It would have to be the space and the time-space of detachment and thus the opening up of a time and a space in the first place. It could not be the restituting and resaturating renewal of the construction of the subject for others; rather, it would have to be the ex-struction of this for others in an unconstructed and unconstructible time-space interval, in which it is for other others and perhaps for another for, other than for and other than as. [End Page 44]

Thus it is said, in passing through Lacan’s leading formula and presumably a bit beyond it, that the work of transference comes to pass as the release of one other from an other other, of one as from an other, one for and one from from an other for and from. It comes to pass, that is to say, as the work of a differential re-petition of the scheme of work and thus as the opening of a difference, of a time-space and a movement one could provisionally designate as alteralteration: the alteration of that relation to the other through which the subject constitutes itself and the alteration of that particular other that is built according to precisely the ratio of this relation. Within the margin of free play between a for others and an other for others –and this margin of free play is not coextensive with the difference between Lacan’s two a s, the small and the large–occurswhat tranference, the work of transference and working through, designates. It takes place in this margin of free play, mind you, that opens up as an unoccupied field already before the constitution of subject and object, I and other, thus already before the labor of its fixation to a figure, an ideal or a work. Thus, it offers itself as a space neither of work, idealization, or oeuvre. This interspace, then, should not to be misunderstood as the empty space of lost or absent objects, to which what Freud calls the “work of mourning” might apply. Nor should it be misunderstood as the space of displacement or substitution, by way of which what he calls “dream work” renders unconscious representations accessible to consciousness. Working through allows the mechanism and contents of dream work to become recognizable. It takes part in the work of mourning, but it cannot be reduced to it, providing that this work is not merely a question of the formation and reformation of subjects and objects but, rather, of precisely that domain in which it might have a chance, at all, of forming and transforming itself. Since, however, the imaginary, idealizing, forming, and fixating relation to the other is the work and “oeuvre” (as Lacan writes) of the subject and the subject as oeuvre, there could be no (as Lacan does not write) working through and no work of transference that would not in extremis launch itself as interruption (”Aussetzung”) and ex-position (”Ent-setzung”) of work and thus (I take up a word from Blanchot) as “desoeuvrement.” For the sake of exactness–and, more still, of exaction –working through would have to be thought–and, more than merely thought–experienced not as “perlaboration” (as Lacan translates it) but as allaboration: asthe opening up of possible work (adlaborare) in which the figures of work and the work of figuration areabandoned (”aussetzen”) (a-laborare). 23 And further, since it is first this traversal of work that gives way to a worklessness in work and also to the history-space and time-space of alteration–of alteralteration –there is history first and only when the figures of space, time, and history are worked open and off (”auf- und offengearbeitet”), when they, as figures of work, are also exposed to something other than work. There is no history without work, but there is no work without its–and perhaps endless–end (without an end that is not even its end). The “infinite analysis” of which Freud speaks in his later work, the infinite working through and transference, is the process in which this other history, this history no longer related to any figure, any oeuvre, or any work, opens. That it can be nothing but infinite means also that its agents and [End Page 45] objects are finite. This concept of infinite analysis and of infinite transference needs to be won for politics.

In his small study of 1914 “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” Freud hints, toward the end of his deliberations, how the change from one other to an other other, from the one addressee of speech to that other, might look, that change in theprocess of working through cannot do without. The hint is given far more despite than by Freud. It has the character of an anecdote and stands in his text without metapsychological commentary or theoretical formalization. In psychoanalytic work, Freud recalls, the process of “overcoming” (”Überwindung”) resistances is initiated by naming them to the patient. But this “naming” does not itself immediately effect the removal of the resistances. The effect of the ineffectiveness of naming does not, however, show itself principally in the analysand but, rather, in the analyst, whose conception of the power of naming, interpreting, and analytic words is considerably compromised. Freud writes:

I have often been asked to advise upon cases in which the doctor complained that he had pointed out his resistance to the patient and that nevertheless no change had set in; indeed, the resistance had become all the stronger, and the whole situation was more obscure than ever. The treatment seemed to make no headway. 24
In this situation, it is thus the analyst who lodges complaint, he and not the patient who suffers. It is the analyst who needs an analyst and who turns to this other analyst for advice. This almost inconspicuous turn in which the doctor steps out of the psychoanalytic situation in order to safeguard itfrom without, redefines not just the “situation” itself–it becomes a parasituation–but also the concept of work that can be performed in it. In this decisive phase–the phase to which Freud entrusted “the work which effects the greatest changes” (”RRW,” 155) and in which it is precisely a question of working through resistances–the “situation” ceases to be the dialogical dyad in which an active analyst confronts a passive patient or an active patient confronts an attentive and understanding analyst and these two work together as a duo, reflecting their presentations one in the other (Freud says that the doctor puts the resistance before the analysand [ “seinen Widerstand vorgestellt”]), and define their work, however implicitly, as that of the pair, the reflexivity and specularity of a narcissism à deux. According to the expectations of the analyst, psychoanalytic work consists in the synthesis of representations (”Vorstellungen”) and must in every regard accommodate the ideal of cooperation if the analytic “pact” is not to be broken–which means, if the ego ideal of the analyst is not to be wounded. With the complaint of the analyst directed at another, at the analyst of the analyst, the dialogical dyad, the definition of work as normalization and idealization and the interpretation of the analysis as the work of identificatory naming, is left behind and abandoned in favor of a principally open, a no longer simply naming, a transidealizing and virtually interminable [End Page 46] polylogical process. The condition of every transformation is a “trans” of formation as well as of form. The other, whose memory and speech are in the hands of the analyst, is himself refered to another, to an other other, the analyst is referred to an ana-analyst. With the introduction of the hyperbole of the addresses and representations of the other, with this hyperbole of the figure of the specularly defined other, with this alteralteration, work itself sets out for an other work and something other than work: it ex-poses itself–stands still, stalls, seems “to make no headway.” It abandons (aussetzen) the scheme of work that stipulates the instantaneous effectivity of the dialogical–or, equally, self-reflexive–word, turns to an other than its other and becomes working through.
“This gloomy foreboding,” Freud continues, in his report on the complaint of the analyst that the treatment did not seem to be making any headway,

this gloomy foreboding always proved mistaken. The treatment was as a rule progressing most satisfactorily. The analyst had merely forgotten that giving the resistance a name could not result in its immediate cessation. One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis. Only when the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance; and it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the existence and power of such impulses. The doctor has nothing else to do than to wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always hastened. [”RRW,” 135-36]
“Allow time,” “wait,” “let things take their course”–this allowing, giving time, and waiting, this unavoidability and inaccessibility to the action of the analyst, characterizes an entirely new comportment in contrast to the analytic dialogue. For it distinguishes itself not by way of question and answer, action and reaction–and thus not by way of discursive interaction or interdiscursivity–but, rather, by way of an extraordinary inactivity, an actlessness and speech-actlessness, in which the analyst is no longer the addressee and conversation partner of the analysand but, rather, of an other analyst, a third or fourth or, in the end, uncountable one. It is an inactivity in which the analysand, in his turn, does nothing else but address his resistance–resistance, that is to say, delay, time given, the giving of time (”Lassen der Zeit”). He addresses thus that incalculable and chronometrically unlocatable other of the other and in him the withdrawal of the address, the ineffectiveness of the word, and the suspension of work. Working through is to submerge oneself in resistance, in the ex-positon (Aussetzen) of work, in the allowing of time, in another beyond of a representable, definable, and measurable other. It happens where this other has no form but, rather, lets forms–of time, of space, of language or action–simply take their course. And it takes place thus, not in the time-space of figures but in the rhythm of affiguration, as anamorphosis and amorphosis. Not as action or speech-act, not as [End Page 47] work or the work of speech, in the precinct of interdiscursivity and its ideals but, rather, as the allowing of actions, works, performances: as afformation, as the speaking of not-speaking and the action of inaction. 25

Freud writes: “to immerse” oneself in resistance, “to work through, to overcome it.” As its preparation by “immersion” and its continuation by “overcoming” shows, the concept of working through is coupled by him not only with the idea of a “through” but also with the idea of a “going through above and beyond” thus of a detachment from what, in the first place, must be traversed, of a perforation of resistance, which opposes itself to work (as the earth opposes itself to the mole insofar as it digs through the earth in order to enter, or exit, its hollow). Since idealizing–or, simply, conventionalizing–work accompanies working through, it is always work that constitutes a resistance to working through. However, work is not the first and final resistance. For since it is the form of the production of world consistency according to the ideals of discourse, it remains, in principle, susceptible to reworking in each and all of its posts. The resistance, which it is unable to adapt to its model, derives from the only field in which this form of production can possibly occur: from what, without itself being work, allows–and to some extent, necessitates–this work.

If Adorno privileges the concept of “working off” (”Aufarbeitung”), then, surely, in order to place the accent on two semantic values that stand out from the conception of “overcoming” implicit in the concept of “working through,” what must be “worked off” has not even been an object of work; it must be worked on retrospectively, like a trauma that strikes a body, psychical or political, so quickly that it has no time to mobilize its reserves, its defensive or integrative mechanisms. Moreover, in the “off ” (auf ) of “working off ” (”Aufarbeiten”), one can also hear “open” (”offen”) and, accordingly, understand “working off” as an opening (”Öffnen”), slackening, as the destabilization of a closed, contracted, monolithic complex, as a laying free by way of which what was and what still comprehends and arrests the present in the past is unlocked. As catching up (”Nacharbeiten”), working off (”Aufarbeiten”) operates the integration of the past and its remnants into the precinct of objectifying consciousness. As working open (”Offen-arbeiten”), it goes over and above its idealizing, formative, and repressive borders.

By way of its “paramorphemes”–through and off (”Durch und Auf”) –working is absolved from its fixation to its auto-teleological, auto-eschatological, process. It does not refer to itself, to the ideal or the standard of the self determined as work, and, therefore, it cannot be trimmed back to the morphological scheme of self-reflexion, as Habermas, Hegelianizing, recommends in his (otherwise likable) reiteration of Adorno, “Was bedeutet ‘Aufarbeiung der Vergangenheit’ heute?” 26 Working through and working off refer to something other than the self and its other; they refer, as all work ought, to an other that cannot be reduced to the self and its work and thus to the “figure of the worker.” In the work-break between our historical and our possible forms, as their possibility and their transformation into other forms and something [End Page 48] other than form, in forms that are no longer ours and perhaps no longer forms, we–or “we”–work off the form of work.

Of the intellectuals who supported National Socialism with their theories and in their administrative functions, Heidegger is perhaps the only one in whose later writings one can read something of the working off of work here in question. The author of the sentence “Work is the presence of historial man” did not just change his mind and exchange his former opinion with a more accommodating, liberal-democratic one. Rather, he traced the implication of this sentence–that, namely, work is the essence of existence (”Dasein”) –back to its ontological and, more precisely, techno-ontological tradition. When in “Zur Seinsfrage” (On the question of being) he points out to his former prompter, Ernst Jünger, that the metaphysics of work (which Jünger presents in The Worker with the subtitle Form and Dominion ) is nothing more than the thoroughgoing perpetuation of the metaphysics of the will to power, that”work” becomes identical with “Being,” and that “Form” belongs essentially in thedomain of what Heidegger calls the “Ge-Stell,” 27 this is, on the one hand, nothing less than a massive critique of exactly that techno- and ergontology Heidegger advocated in 1934 in Jünger’s and Hitler’s entourage and, on the other hand, everything but an ingratiating gesture toward the doctrines of 1955–for theirs was just this ideology of work. Heidegger undertakes the working off of the ontology of work–he prefers to speak of its “Verwindung” –from the perspective of the history of Being, since for him it determines not the character of a particular historical political system but the character of the entirety of modern thought. The “Letter on Humanism” of 1946 leaves no doubt in its equivocal apology for Marxist materialism that also in it Heidegger sees a “destiny within the history of being” behind which the question concerning Being must reach:

The essence of materialism does not consist in the assertion that everything is simply matter but rather in a metaphysical determination according to which every being appears as the material of labor. The modern metaphysical essence of labor is anticipated in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the self-establishing process of unconditioned production, which is the objectification of the actual, through man experienced as subjectivity. The essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology. 28
Thus, the essence of work, one could paraphrase, conceals itself in the essence of self-production, the unconditioned auto-performance that presents itself as subjectivity. With this sentence, Heidegger withdraws from the position he had assumed in the assertion–in the self-assertion–”Work is the presence of historical man.” For work is no longer thought as self-presencing and self-execution but, for its part, as involved in a movement (Heidegger calls it, verbally, “essencing” [”Wesen”] ) that is not absorbed in work and cannot be absorbed by it. From the thought on the essence of technology Heidegger can go on to the determination of work as ekstasis (”Entrücktheit”) or “exposedness into being” (”Ausgesetzheit in das Seiende”), which already in the 1934 Logic Lectures differed markedly from the Jüngerian doctrine of [End Page 49] the planetary dominion of the figure of the worker. 29 It is this “ex-posedness” (”Ausgesetzheit”), under the more precise name of “release” (”Gelassenheit”) and without the direction toward a domain of possible objectifications that allows for a resituation–and, in fact, de-situation–of work. In one of Heidegger’s “field-path-conversations” (”Feldweg-Gespräche”) that dates from the end of the war, entitled “Evening conversation in a Prison Camp in Russia” (”Abendgespräch in einem Kriegsgefangenenlager in Rußland”), work, in the context of acritique of nationalism and internationalism, is denounced as the form of a disastrous collective subjectivity: this subjectivity transacts the “business of devastation, that is, of work, on account of the heightened potential of work.” 30 And in ” text]> “–A Three-way Conversation on a Field-path between a Researcher, a Scholar and a Wise Man,” he who eleven years earlier had not hesitated to characterize work as the essence of Dasein and the juncture of Being straightaway doubts “whether work and output are actually appropriate measures [gemäße Maße] for the essence of man.” And the “wise man” continues: “Assuming, however, that they are not, then one day the entirety of modern humanity, its much-praised creative accomplishments included, would have to collapse in the emptiness of its rebellious self-forgetfulness.” 31 This breakdown of the world of work would be the result not so much of the “negation of leisure, of the neg-otium,” but, rather, of something “more negative still,” namely, the “refusal of rest,” 32 of release (”Gelassenheit”) as the reference to what before all work and in work is open to what itself cannot be work.

“We all work. Always have. Always will. It’s a state of mind. So you keep moving. And you celebrate all of your moods. You take in a deep breath and let out a scream that says, ‘Yes, I can.’” (Advertisement for clothes by Anne Klein II) 33

“If the working class would thoroughly banish from mind the vice that rules them . . . and rise up in their formidable strength not in order to demand the illustrious human rights that are only the rights of capitalist exploitation, not in order to demand the right to work that is only a right to suffering but, rather, in order to forge a brazen law that would forbid everyone to work more than three hours a day, then the old world, trembling with joy, would feel in its core the stirring of a new world . . . yet how can one demand a virile resolution from a proletariat who has been corrupted through the capitalist moral! . . . O Laziness, have mercy upon the endless suffering!” (Paul Lafargue) 34

J’allais conclure: “Peut-être moi, aussi, je travaille . . .” –A quoi? n’eût objecté aucun, admettant, à cause de comptables, l’occupation transférée des bras à la tête. A quoi–tait, dans la conscience seule, un écho–du moins, qui puisse servir, parmi l’échange général. Tristesse que ma production reste, à ceux-ci, par essene, comme les nuages au crépuscule ou des étoiles, vaine. (Stéphane Mallarmé) 35

[To be continued]

23 August 1995

Werner Hamacher is Professor of German and the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Pleroma–Dialectics and Hermeneutics in Hegel (1996) and Premises–Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan (1996). “Working Through Working” comes from his work in progress, Politically Read.

Notes
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “Fascism and the Institution of Literature” 28 September-2 October 1994, organized by Volker Kaiser for the German Department at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Aufarbeitung der Vergagenheit,” Eingriffe: Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 1963), 126; hereafter abbreviated “AV.”

2. Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen (1932-1945), ed. Max Domarus (Neustadt: Verlagsdruckerei Schmidt, 1962), 1:259; hereafter abbreviated HRP.

3. In a lucid essay, Eric Michaud has brought out further traits of the “Christlikeness” of the National Socialist people and its leader; see his “Un Sauveur: Adolf Hilter, ou la tyrannie du visible,” Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse 49 (spring 1994): 119-32.

4. In the paragraphs headed “The Evaluation of Work” in Mein Kampf, Hitler already in the 1920s follows the scheme of argumentation and suggestion integral to his address of May 1933, when he founds the differentiation between the “material” and “ideal” value of work in connection with a discussion of the “spiritual pliancy,” the “spiritual levels” ( HRP, 481), and “spiritual leadership” ( HRP, 482), and in view of an “ideal Reich” ( HRP, 487). The value of work is esteemed ideal where it is measured, mystico-naturalistically, both as a “offering of nature”–and thus of “birth”–and as gift of the “community of the people,” and where this value as sacrifice is restored to the community and its nature, to this nature- and natal community. With the sacrifice of “ideal” work to its indigenous idea, to the “spirit” of the “community of the people,” work departs from the domain of rationality, of isolation, and of contingency and enters the “Reich” of its necessity, organicity, and intimate communality. It is thus “essentially” a return to its origin, a return to its provenance, to its natural community, to itself and to its concept and, herein, “ideal,” “spiritual.”

I shall cite a long passage from this complex of suggestions in which Hitler’s rhetoric of naturalist ideality becomes apparent:

Pure material value stands in opposition to that of the ideal. It does not rest on the significance of executed work measured materially but, rather, on its necessity in itself. [This] work goes on the account of its birth as well as on the thereby engendered formation [”Ausbildung”], which it receives from the people at large. . . . The form of the contribution [to the upkeep of the cultural community and state] is determined by nature; it falls to him merely to give back to the community of the people with diligence and uprightness what it itself has given him. Whoever does this merits the highest esteem [”Wertschätzung”] and the highest respect . . . ; the ideal [wage], however, must lie in the esteem [”Wertschätzung”] to which all can lay claim who consecrate the strength nature endows and to which the community of the people gives form to the service of his nationhood. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1942), 483-84; my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated MK]
From this nature-spiritual cycle, which work as “necessity in itself” runs through, issues its definition as sacrifice and the muddled formulation of “the will to sacrifice for the deployment of personal labor” ( MK, 235) “In him [the Aryan], the drive for self-preservation has achieved its most noble form in that he willfully subordinates his proper I to the life of the whole [”Gesamtheit”] and, when the hour demands, sacrifices it.” ( MK, 326). “The most wonderful elucidation of this state of mind [”Gesinnung”] is proffered by the word “work,” which, for him, in no way designates the action of sustaining a livelihood but, rather, only a creating in harmony with the interests of the people” ( MK, 326). Precisely this “correct understanding of the concept of work” is, however, what “the Jew” is charged with lacking. In contrast to “the Aryan,” for whom work is sacrifice to the natural idea of the community of the people, “the Jew” does not work. He gives nothing back and fails to receive himself in return–but, since he lacks every ethnic, and thus ethic, “ties” [”Bindung”], his egotistical work is uncreative and robbery. Hitler’s anti-Semitism establishes itself here as an anti-Semitism of work, of self-engenderment, of the nature-spiritual circulation of the sacrifice to one’s proper people. “The” Jew does not dispose of the right, the altruistic, the ethnic, concept of work, because he (but who is, then, “he”?) does not dispose of any ethnicity, thus not of any nature or of any spirit.

5. The text of Hitler’s decree is reprinted in Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente, 1933-45, ed. Walther Hofer (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bücherei, 1957), 87.

6. In his chapter “The Third Reich and Labour,” in Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-39 (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1966), David Schoenbaum draws attention to the possibility that this formula, Arbeit macht frei, which he calls “grotesque,” (80) may not at all have been meant cynically, at least not on the part of Höss, the commanding officer at Auschwitz, who himself had spent years in prison during the Weimar Republic.

7. Heidegger’s speech, first published–and, it might be noted, hardly without his consent–on 1 February 1934 in Der Alemanne: Kampfblatt der Nationalsozialisten Oberbadens, is included in Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente aus seinem Leben und Denken, ed. Guido Schneeberger (Bern: Selbstverlag, 1962), 199; hereafter abbreviated NZH. The word daseinsfähig is italicized in this publication, most probably by Heidegger. I cannot recall having encountered this philosophical scandal in any of his other texts.

8. “Being out of work,” Heidegger says, “is therefore a spiritual [”seelische”] disruption, because the lack of work leaves the ekstasis into things empty. Ekstasis is not a state of fitting in (”Eingefügtsein”). Rather, it is an unfulfilled rapport with things in an enduring state of exposedness to beings,” he claims in a fragmentary transcript of his Logic Lectures from the summer semester of 1934 (Martin Heidegger, Lógica: Lecciones de M. Heidegger [semsetre verano 1934] en el legado de Helene Weiss, ed. and trans. Víctor Farías [Madrid: Anthropos, 1991], 102; hereafter abbreviated L ). In this determination of work (naturally, given that this is based on a transcription, it should be taken with a grain of salt), there are three points worth noting: (1) Heidegger speaks here of a ” spiritual disruption”–in his existential-ontological deliberations on the concept of work, he thus does not hesitate to employ an anthropological and, more nearly, psychological concept of deficiency; (2) he determines unemployment (”Arbeitslosigkeit”) negatively as an “unfulfilled rapport with things,” and characterizes them thus as a mere deficit of work; (3) while work, for its part, is determined as fulfillment of the thing-relation (”Dingbezug”) and, despite its ” ekstatic structure,” as “fitted in” in beings. This is as much as to say that work should constitute just such a form of expropriation (”Entäußerung”) by virtue of which Dasein fits itself into thingly being, accommodates itself to it and, at the same time, fills out its open site, its gap. The world of things is thus just as complementary as it itself, as reference and happening, is complemented by it. For Heidegger, work is thus the constitutive way by which Dasein arrives at its own consistency and the consistency of world: it is consistation. Accordingly, the pain that in Heidegger’s late thought marks the proper experience in the ontological difference (cf. Martin Heidegger, “Die Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache ), can here be characterized as only the deficit of just this experience, as the deficit of work: it is “an oblivious exposedness into beings, . . . pain” ( L, 102).

9. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitat (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983), 11; hereafter abbreviated SDU. The Aeschylus citation is to be found on page 11. For the best analysis of Heidegger’s Rectorship Address as a whole, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La Transcendance finit dans la politique,” in Rejouer le politique (Paris: Galilée, 1981).

10. I have deleted Heidegger’s italics in this sentence; the italicization of “create” is mine.

11. In his Logic Lectures, Heidegger’s determination of work stands in the context of the determinationof “determination”: work is the privileged determination of determination, its determinateness. To the question, What does determination mean? Heidegger sets forth its “threefold meaning in originary unity.” He places stress on the first as “determination to” and thus as “carried-forward for the mission” and thereupon continues:

Our determination is our determinateness, that is, the regulation and training of our entire comportment toward that which is our commission. That is work. The work of historical man is not just any occupation. Work is the mission that, at any given time, has become a determination. It gathers our deeds in the given historical moment and brings it about. Work is the presence of historical man. Historical presence = work. Work is determination and mission, future and pastness. . . . Work and the present, they show themselves in performance [”Vollzug”], in the Now [”Augenblick”]. [L, 78-80]
Of this manifold of the determinations of work, I underline only two aspects. On the one hand, work is located on themedian between pastand future, tradition and project, commission and mission, and thus exactly on that systematic site that in Being and Time is occupied by the Now–that is always the moment of decision for the (at any given time) proper possibilities of Dasein. And, on the other hand, just as this Now is the historical present, so work is pure “performance” (”Vollzug”) (that is, decision and, thereby, the determination of determination): it is the median of time and the median of history as pure perfomance. When Heidegger in the same context designates time as “the great and only junction [”Fuge”] of our being as something historical,” and when this junction is prescribed (”verfügt”) by work, then time is junction and enactment of work as a performance in the fullness of which nothing lacks and which itself, unlike in the “Dictum of Anaximander” ( Spruch des Anaximander from 1946) knows no gap (”Un-fuge”): no gap, no void, no worklessness (”Arbeits-losigkeit”), and no interruption of performance.

After a dreadful discussion about the alliance of “blood” and “mood” (”Geblüt und Gemüt”), Heidegger prudently continues, concerning

a fundamental human disposition[:] . . . to this belongs the determinateness of our Dasein through work. Work = presence. The present is not what happens now, but is the present insofar as it transposes our Being into the appropriate liberation of beings themselves. As a worker, man is taken outside itself [”entrückt”] in the openness of beings. This ekstasis [”Entrückung”] belongs to the essence of our Being, namely as being ex-posed into the openness of beings. [L, 102]
In this further determination of the determination that is work, its character as dislocation ( “Versetzung”; elsewhere it is called “ex-posedness” [”Ausgesetztheit”] ) and ekstasis warrant emphasis as precisely that feature in which work is open to something other than proper Dasein or to this Dasein as a possible other. But this movement of opening, which even in this lecture Heidegger does not relinquish to the ideology of Nazism, is massively curtailed as soon as the reference to this other, to this openness, is defined as “a liberation of beings in a manner appropriate to work” (”werkgerechte Befreiung”). The “liberation”thus already stands under the guardianship of the work. The opening is already one of the modalities according to which Dasein as work closes ranks with itself. Only in this way does work = presence. Only in this way does “the making-present of beings,” as Heidegger writes, happen in it. Only in this way doescoming-to-being (”Anwesen”) = making and, thereby, once more, does coming-into-being = auto-performance . No strike interrupts the essence of this work; no pain of unemployment darkens the joy of self-effectuation. “Therefore,” Heidegger writes, “the question of the joy of work is important. Joy as a fundamental mood is the ground of the possibility of genuine work.” ( L, 102) With this postulate, Heidegger’s fundamental ergontology succeeds not only in linking up with Henri de Man’s psychology of labor, The Struggle for the Joy of Work (1927), but also with that Nazi slogan that promises “Strength through joy” (Kraft durch Freude).

12. Ernst Jünger, quoted in Hans-Peter Schwarz, Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (Freiburg: Rombach, 1962), 117; for Hitler’s assessment of The Worker, see 117-18, cited from Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler.

13. Ernst Jünger, 16 July 1944, in Strahlungen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1979), 2:286.

14. Ernst Jünger, foreword to Strahlungen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1979), 1:11. This statement, like most of Jünger’s sententious utterances, is delivered in the style of the slave-language (the well-bred variant) and is thus not supplied with a specific reference.

15. Martin Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage,” Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 218.

16. Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 307; hereafter abbreviated A.

17. See Georg Lukács, Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins: “Die Arbeit” (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1973).

18. The concept “onto-typo-logy” used by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (see his “Typographie,” in Mimesis des Articulation [Paris: Aubier-Flammerion, 1975]) does not adequately account for the Jüngerian construction. Lacoue-Labarthe orients himself on Heidegger’s answer to Jünger in “Zur Seinsfrage.” Lacoue-Labarthe paraphrases its deliberation and follows it in tracing Jünger’s “type” (”Typus”) back to the platonic eidos and “idea.” This last move enables him to situate the origin of Jünger’s “type” in the “typos” of the eidos and “idea” and to infer the ontotypological constitution of ontology in general. Whatever this constitution may be, the “Being” of the “figure” (”Gestalt”) is thought by Jünger, in the wake of Goethe’s morphology, as “figure.” The “type” is merely its embodiment or representation. Thus I use here the concept “morphontology” or ontomorphologie, in order to designate Jünger’s most fundamental notion.

19. In 1945, Hitler consciously and systematically practiced, as is well known, this politics of self-extermination. Jünger, in 1932, drew up the formula of its system in the opening pages of The Worker. He writes there of the “motor,” the symbol of our times: “It is the audacious plaything of a breed of men that can blast itself into the air and still glimpse in this act confirmation of order” ( A, 37). Jünger calls this “posture” (”Haltung”), which is a “blast” (”Sprengung”), “heroic realism.” But just as Jünger’s objectivity is that of the universalia in re, so is his “heroic realism” without risk, since he can always trust that, in the event of a loss of reality, he would still gain its concrete universal: a “nothing” that serves to confirm “Being.”

20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 259-60.

21. Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 630.

22. Lacan, “Fonction de champ de la parole et du langage,” in Écrit, 248, 249. A footnote to this paragraph notes that in 1966 it was “récrit,” rewritten or reworked. The translator renders the sentence in the English edition as follows: “For in this labor which he [the subject] undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another. ” (Jacques Lacan, “Function and Field of Speech in Language,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan New York: W. W. Norton, 1977, 42)

23. This word formation, as one says rather appropriately in English, “doesn’t quite work.” It doesn’t “function” properly, just as most of the “words” in Finnegans Wake do not “function” “properly” yet allow something to happen for precisely that reason. In Latin, the word allabor does not exist, though allaborare (working, striving, toward something) does. Allabere, a derivation of lapsus, on the other hand, exists in the sense of “to slide toward, land, and unintentionally end up somewhere.” Likewise, labor means “I slide, swing, fall, sink,” just as the homophone labor (tottering under a burden), means “work, effort, oeuvre, need,” and “torment.” In the “word” allaboration (which conforms to the coincidences and conventions of the Latin language as little as does afformative and affiguration ), lapsus should likewise be heard: the tottering, sliding, sinking, or falling, from which labor derives.

24. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 12:155; hereafter abbreviated “RRW.”

25. In exactly this sense, it seems to me, Kafka speaks of the wish, in an aphorism from He (Franz Kafka, Er [1920; reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965]): To hammer together a table, “and in so doing, to do nothing at the same time. But to do nothing not in such a way that one could say: ‘to him, hammering is nothing,’ but rather ‘to him, hammering is an actual hammering and, at the same time, also nothing,’ whereby, no doubt, hammering would have becomemore audacious, more decisive, more real, and, if you will, crazier” (212).

26. Jürgen Habermas, Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 21.

27. Heidegger, “Zur Seinsfrage,” 227-28.

28. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 243-44.

29. See notes 8 and 11 above.

30. See Martin Heidegger, “Abendgespräch in einem Kriegsgefangenenlager in Rußland,” in Feldweg-Gespräche (1944-45), vol. 77 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), 236.

31. Martin Heidegger, in Feldweg-Gespräche, 71.

32. Ibid., 69.

33. Advertisement for Anne Klein II, in Elle, American ed., no. 121, September 1995.

34. Paul Lafargue, Das Recht auf Faulheit–Widerlegung des “Rechts auf Arbeit” von 1848 (Paris: Oriol, 1883); reprinted as Das Recht auf Faulheit und andere Satiren (Berlin: Stattbuch Verlag, 1991), 48.

35. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Conflit,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 358. (I was about to conclude: “Perhaps I, I too work . . .”–At what? no one would be able to object, admitting, because of the accountants, the occupation, transferred from the arms to the head. At what–silences, in consciousness alone, an echo–at least, that could be of service amid the general exchange. Sadness that my occupation remain, to these ones, by essence, like the clouds at twilight or stars, vain.)