HEIDEGGER: CONSPIRACY AGAINST REALITY

The philosophical/textual reappraisals which have emerged in Heidegger studies after publication of the Black Notebooks are interpreted in this article as consistent with Heidegger's modernist project presupposing certain strategies of isolation, withdrawal, and estrangement. Those strategies had become steadily less useful in the approach to World War II. Heidegger had identified several modes of concealment (authentic vs. manipulative, or false, ones), but he succumbed himself to a conceptual position of estrangement and exclusion that did not necessarily provide the expected cognitive benefits. That position imposed an extremely narrow range of options for abandoning the uncompleted project of Being and Time, which was in question precisely because it was susceptible to both naturalizing and anthropologizing. In his so-called Kehre or turn, Heidegger did not reject the original project of conceptualizing Being as an instance of estranging every ontic entity; on the contrary, he tried to accomplish it in a very bold way by elaborating a narrative structure for Being's history that had no proper personages in previous versions. The "conspiracy," regardless of how it may in fact be realized, is inevitable because it occupies an intermediary position between the "world" and "reality" (in Luc Boltanski's terms) or between the "ontic" and "ontology," the ontological distinction that lies at the centre of Heidegger's philosophy. The abstract conceptual personages of Being and Time are replaced by personages in a conspiracy, and this move allows him to retain "agency," and refrain from any anthropologizing and naturalizing (up to a point). However, Heidegger's openness to terminology from conspiracy theories carries with it a range of unexpected consequences, including regarding the positions of conspirators (Jews, Bolsheviks etc.) as equivalent to "Caesarism." The conspiracy against reality cannot be exempt from the production of that same reality whose personages in turn are setting the scene for self-annihilation.