What does it mean to think with another scholar—including one with whom one may have many differences and disagreements? Thinking with someone, especially a powerful interlocutor like Weber, does not mean “relying” on their thought, but rather engaging their insights and provocations, reflecting on their approaches to problems—and their limitations in addressing them. For me, this is as true of thinking with Marx, Adorno, or contemporary critical theorists as it is of thinking with Weber. You cannot just work with theorists with whom you are in accord. That’s intellectual mirroring or imitation, not thinking. And you cannot submit the history of social and political theory to political litmus tests. No one would pass, and it’s a silly way to approach reading and learning.
I’m frankly baffled by anxiety about intellectual engagements with political opponents, especially dead ones. Why so fearful? It strikes me as an anti-intellectual posture, where one imagines being captured by the engagement or tarred by the association. In that respect, it indexes precisely the nihilistic breakdown between knowledge and politics, the erasure of a line between intellectual inquiry and public power that I just outlined—as if to engage the thought of others is to ally or stand with them. Was Aristotle afraid to think with Plato? Marx with Hegel or Ricardo? Arendt with Heidegger, Augustine, or Machiavelli? Or contemporary theorists with (the racist and misogynist) Arendt? Martin Luther King with Socrates? Paul Gilroy with Hegel? No. Would you go to the barricades with these interlocutors? No!
It’s interesting how nihilistic times tend to be self-reinforcing, because they’re exactly the times in which someone going to back to a thinker who was active a century previous, as Brown has done with this book, can be asked—by an interlocutor who, we can assume, is both reasonably well-informed and quite sincere—a question which boils down to “is this philosophical project morally tainted from the outset, regardless of what work it may do or conclusions it might reach?”
This was bugging me through much of last year, viz. the bombastic trumpeting of that book on Heidegger’s having been a Nazi. This was not an idle concern on my part, either: I have a chapter in a book that will be published some time later this year, which takes as its jumping off point Zo Sofia’s essay on container technologies, which in turn jumps off from a bunch of late Heidegger; said book has been co-edited by progressive, leftist German academics. There is understandable discomfort among them around citing a Nazi!
Admittedly, there are folks who still refuse to acknowledge that Heidegger was a Nazi, and it seems pretty clear that the administrators of Heidegger’s legacy have done as much as they could for as long as they could to muddy the waters. It’s a good thing that we know for sure, and it’s a good thing that it gets written about and discussed.
But it’s not a good thing when that discussion, whether tacitly or directly, concludes with something along the lines of “… and that’s why no one should ever read or refer to Heidegger ever again.” Somewhere in the bowels of this blog are a couple of incomplete drafts of attempts to counter that argument from my own particular standpoint; someday I may get round to finishing one of them (or, more likely, starting a new one). In the meantime, Brown’s response above will be my go-to citation on the matter.
The resistance to discussing dark associations also manifests in other fields and disciplines, as Alex McLean has found out: apparently enthusiasts and scholars of avant garde and/or noise music really don’t like having it pointed out that Futurist musician Luigi Russolo was a very close associate of the Italian Fascist party.
There is an understandable flinch when something we like or admire is suddenly associated with something bad—but it seems to me that the flinch from, and subsequent refusal (or even denial) of such facts, is rooted less in an ambivalence toward the something bad, and more in a fear that one will be tarnished by second-order association, and punished for it. This is why it’s important that we continue to read Heidegger, continue to study Russolo, even as we know that they were engaged in deeply reactionary and violent political projects: not because we want to propagate facism, but precisely because we want to understand fascism, and how it came to appeal to people who did or thought other things that we find interesting or valuable; because we want to understand where it is they went wrong, in order that we might avoid making the same errors.
To be very clear: fascism was and is a repugnant and deeply wrong answer to the social and political questions of its time, but it was nonetheless immensely popular and successful. If we cannot understand how and why it was successful, we will struggle to come up with better answers that stand any chance of winning over those who are attracted to it.
The current state of global politics is a sure indicator of the bankruptcy of a moral strategy that begins and ends with shouting “the Nazis were evil!” If you can’t articulate why fascism was so deeply wrong, if you can’t understand how it emerged from the conditions and context of its time, then you’re inadvertently increasing the likelihood of its return—slouching toward Bethlehem, so to speak.
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