What, according to Žižek, was Heidegger’s error in 1933? Precisely the one which typifies our response to the possibility of revolutionary change, change disruptive of reality itself – namely, anxiety and retreat. Or, to be more precise, Heidegger gives us the kind of retreat in the face of anxiety which seems like no retreat at all, a kind of “acting out” pretending to be a decisive “act.” In its embrace of both an extra-individual “people” and a basic disruption of modern reality, Nazism seems to follow through on the promise of “will” and “violence,” the promise of a “non-metaphysical core of modern subjectivity,” but this appearance is false. Nazi “will” is, of course, merely the self-assertion of a larger, corporate but all the more metaphysical subject. Nazi violence is directed against people (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) who represent what cannot be integrated into a totalized reality and precisely not against totality itself. As Žižek puts it, perversely, in his essay on Heidegger in 1933, “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”.

Nazism, like all Fascism, remained a kind of show, a “pseudo-Event” filled with the appearance of change, but designed in the end to ensure that “nothing will really change”. On, the other hand, while the Soviet experiment may have failed dismally to transform the fabric of society, with horrific human consequences, that was not a problem with its intention. Quite the contrary, the Soviets really tried to overturn the existing social order, and it was their initial success in doing precisely that which produced the vehemence of the Stalinist backlash. Above all, the Soviet experiment tried to transform the very relationship between individual and society in the terms of the collective. Thus, for Žižek, we can express Heidegger’s breakdown before his own conception of fi nitude as his failure to see that he really should have embraced the Soviet opportunity rather than the Nazi pseudo-alternative. For Žižek, “it was only Soviet Communism which, despite the catastrophe it stands for, did possess true inner greatness”. Had he remained “in the truth” of his own insight, Heidegger would have had to become a Communist!

Pp. 21-2

¶ 4:42 AM