What the ecology of fear obfuscates is thus a far more radical dimension of terror. Today, with the prospect of the biogenetic manipulation of human physical and psychic features, the notion of "danger" inscribed into modern technology, elaborated by Heidegger, becomes a commonplace. Heidegger emphasizes how the true danger is not the physical self-destruction of humanity, the threat that something will go terribly wrong with biogentic interventions, but, precisely, that nothing will go wrong, that genetic manipulation will function smoothly - at this point, the circle will, in a certain manner, be closed and the specific openness that characterizes being-human abolished. That is to say, is the Heideggerian danger (Gefahr) not precisely the danger that the ontic will "swallow" the ontological (with the reduction of man, the da [here] of Being, to just another object of science)? Do we not encounter here again the formula of the fear of the impossible: what we fear is that which cannot happen (since the ontological dimension is irreducible to the ontic) will nonetheless happen . . .

The insufficiency of this reasoning is double. First, as Heidegger would have put it, the survival of the being-human of humans cannot depend on an ontic decision of humans. Even if we try to define the limit of the permissible in this way, the true catastrophe has already taken place: we already experience ourselves as in principle manipulable; we just freely renounce the possibility of fully deploying the potential. "In the technological age, what matters to us most is getting the 'greatest possible use' out of everything." Does this not throw a new light on how ecological concerns, at least in their predominant mode, remain within the horizon of technology? Is the point of using the resources sparingly, of recycling, and so forth, not precisely to maximize the user of everything?

Pp. 447-8

¶ 9:49 AM