HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM

by

ANDREW J. MITCHELLStanford University

ABSTRACT

Terrorism is a metaphysical problem that concerns the presence of beings today.Heidegger’s own thinking of being makes possible a confrontation with terrorism onfour fronts: 1) Heidegger’s conception of war in the age of technological replacementgoes beyond the Clausewitzian model of war and all its modernist-subjectivist presup-positions, 2) Heidegger thinks “terror” (Erschrecken) as the fundamental mood of ourtime, 3) Heideggerian thinking is attuned to the nature of the terrorist “threat” andthe “danger” that we face today, 4) Heidegger rethinks the notion of “security” in amanner that alerts us to the oxymoronic character of “homeland security.” The epochof terrorism is likewise the era of political transformation that Heidegger identifies with“Americanism.” In this essay an e!ort is made to think terrorism qua metaphysicalproblem and to inquire into the perhaps privileged role of America for the thinkingof terrorism today.

Heideggerian thought is a thinking that is engaged with its times.Whatever we might make of Heidegger’s political choices, the factremains that even these decisions can be seen as attempts to thinkwith and against the times. It is no stretch to say that our time todayis the time of terrorism—an uncommon time, no matter how com-mon a claim this may be—especially in the United States. What thenmight a Heideggerian engagement with our time of terrorism bring tolight? To answer this, it is important to note that Heideggerian think-ing, as a thinking of being, must engage with its times precisely becauseit is through these times that we first find our access to being (or rather“beyng,” Seyn). For Heidegger, however, the contemporary scene isdominated by technology and, as his later writings endeavor to show,this is indicative of a “withdrawal” of beyng. Heidegger distinguisheshimself from the various foes of technology, however, by viewing thiswithdrawal as nothing negative on its own. Instead, this withdrawal isa further dispensation of being. Beyng withdraws and grants us thesewithdrawn times.

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This does not mean that beyng exists unperturbed somewhere behindor beyond these beings. The withdrawal of being is found in theseabandoned beings themselves and is determinative for the way theyexist. Heideggerian thinking, then, allows us to ask the question of ourtimes and to think terrorism. My contention in the following is that thewithdrawal of being shows itself today in terrorism, where beings existas terrorized. Terrorism, in other words, is not simply the sum total ofactivities carried out by terrorist groups, but a challenge directed atbeings as a whole. Terrorism is consequently a metaphysical issue, andit names the way in which beings show themselves today, i.e., as ter-rorized. This “ontological” point demands that there be the “ontic”threat of real terrorists. Further, this metaphysical aspect of terrorismalso indicates that a purely political response to terrorism is destinedto fail. Political reactions to terrorism, which depict terrorism from theoutset as a political problem, miss the fact that terrorism itself, quametaphysical issue, is coincident with a transformation in politics. Thatis to say, political responses to terrorism fail to think terrorism. In whatfollows I will elaborate some of the consequences of thinking terror-ism as a question of being and sketch a few characteristics of thepolitico-technological landscape against which terrorism takes place.

In order to do so, I will address the role of America in Heidegger’swork, for it is in “America” that politics and technology are driventhe furthest toward interdependency. “Americanism” names the pro-ject of technological domination and the will to world homogeniza-tion. This is not a reason to dismiss Heidegger as “anti-American,”however, regardless of how strong the grounds for such an assessmentmight appear. If we hold Heidegger to his own insights, then even hewould have to admit that there remains a crucial role for America inthe face of “Americanism,” a role which itself might constitute anAmerican “privilege” for the thinking of our times (and thus, perhaps,for the thinking of beyng today). The logic of this privilege in themidst of extreme denigration is perhaps the most important point fora proper understanding of Heidegger’s views on technology. In thepages that follow, an attempt is made to pose the question of this priv-ilege in regard to both technology and the land of America.

Insofar as Heideggerian thinking is a thinking of being, then it mustbe able to think terrorism, for the simple reason that terrorism names thecurrent countenance of being for our times, and without such a correspon-dence to being, Heideggerian thinking is nothing. The issue is not oneof applying a preestablished Heideggerian doctrine to an object or sit-

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uation that would remain outside of thought. Rather, the issue is oneof recognizing that the objects and situations of our world themselvescall for thought, and that in thinking the world, we enter into a cor-respondence with being. But what sort of correspondence can beachieved between the thinking of being and terrorism? Heidegger’sarticulation of the age of technology already contains in germ fourroutes of access for the thinking of terrorism.

First, Heidegger himself witnessed a transformation in the makingof war, such that he was led to think beyond the Clausewitzian modelof modern warfare and to open the possibility for a “warfare” of adi!erent sort. This thought beyond war is itself an opening to terror-ism. Second, Heidegger prioritizes terror (Erschrecken) as a fundamen-tal mood appropriate to our age of technological enframing. Terror isa positive mood, not a privative one, and it corresponds to the waythat being gives itself today. Third, Heidegger thinks threat and dan-ger in an “ontological” manner that calls into question traditionalnotions of presence and absence. Terrorism attends this transforma-tion in presence. Finally, and following from all of this, Heideggerrethinks the notion of security in a manner that alerts us to the oxy-moronic character of “homeland security” and the impossibility of everachieving a condition of complete safety from terrorism. In each ofthese ways, Heideggerian thinking responds to this most uncommonof challenges.

I. The End of War

If terrorism is anything, then it is nothing like war. While Heideggerdoes not directly speak of terrorism by name, he nonetheless a/rmsan end to the era of modern warfare. With the passing of this era ofhigh representation, Heidegger sees a dramatic change in what con-stitutes a theater of war. The World Wars point to an era beyondmodern warfare as Clausewitz had definitively formulated it, an erawhere wars are fought without goal or end, where soldiers are con-sidered the same as supplies, and technology keeps such supplies insteady circulation for instant availability. This is a postmodern era thatHeidegger thinks with the name of “enframing” (Ge-stell ). Without nam-ing terrorism, Heidegger does o!er a thought of conflict beyond therepresentational modernism of Clausewitzian warfare. Under the aegisof enframing, this beyond is terrorism, an epoch in the history of beingcoincident with that of modern technology and, as we shall see, the

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American project. In approaching these issues, the Clausewitzian con-ception of warfare provides a frame for appreciating the solutions ofcontemporary technology to the questions of conflict and peace. Tothis end, three points in Clausewitz’s conception of warfare, each serv-ing to demonstrate its modern nature, shall be posed.

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In preparing a definition of war, Clausewitz claims that war is “noth-ing but a duel on a larger scale.”1 With such pride of place given tothe duel, we are here immediately introduced to a thinking that willbe guided by the idea of opposition and, in Clausewitz’s own terms,“polarity.”2 This oppositional thinking is determinative of the modernera and its fidelity to rational-subjectivist thought. A duel, however, isa particular form of opposition, where two parties are clearly identifiableand stand opposed to one another mediated by a ruling law. Thereis a ruling law between them that specifies the contract of the duel; thereare certain assumptions that make up the etiquette of the duel; andthere is the aberrant exigency of the duel itself. In short, the duel ispart of an agreement: “There can be no engagement unless both sidesare willing to fight.”3 War is thought by Clausewitz in terms of oppo-sition and agreement, both understood by the terms of policy. War islogically understood, in other words, within an oppositional structurethat includes not only the opposition between friend and foe, but thatof political theory and military practice. Clausewitz’s greatness lies inthinking the modern rationalist categories of warfare directly, with aforce at times capable of exposing their boundaries. But for all this,Clausewitz remains a great modern rationalist. His oppositional ratio-nalism, the “logical” character of his thought, is the first characteris-tic to consider in Clausewitz’s modernism.

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A second characteristic of the duel is that it takes an object; the duel-ing parties duel over something. The duel points to a will, which liesat the heart of Clausewitz’s explicit definition of war: “War is thus anact of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”4 In other words, war is atest of the willingness of the will, of its willingness to risk itself for itsgoal or for the object of its directing policy. Throughout On War,Clausewitz emphasizes the role of the will and the allied notions of

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morale, esprit de corps, and feeling, for “If war is an act of force, theemotions cannot fail to be involved.”5 The emotions are most certainlyinvolved for Clausewitz; they are another of the unpredictable vari-ables that the general must try to take into account while planninghis/her strategy; but it is always the will that holds the decisive placein his thinking, “the animosity and the reciprocal e!ects of hostile ele-ments, cannot be considered to have ended so long as the enemy’swill has not been broken.”6 The will is the glove by which reason isable to seize the world. Whatever does not seize the world and actupon the world is irreal, ine!ectual, and therefore permitted—hencethe rational pride in freedom of thought and speech, and hence, too,the egoistic greatness of that pride. The will drives the troops to over-come physical exhaustion, and this will is influenced by the prevailingwills around it. This is what is known as the morale of the troops,and morale is always heightened by the extreme displays of will thatare valorized by the name “courage.” Courage is another way thatthe body is handled by reason; it is a virtue of reason, where virtuecan only mean excellence in the manipulation of a tool. Clausewitz’sconcern for morale and courage is, at root, a concern for the will asthe first instrument of reason. To break the opponent’s will is to ren-der it ine!ectual (to read it its rights, in other words). Clausewitzremains modern in his focus upon the will as negotiating between twodistinct realms of activity (theory and practice, we might say), a mat-ter that likewise informs the third mark of Clausewitz’s modernity.

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The third trait is more subtle; it is also the trait that gives Clausewitz’sthought its classical character, the inheritance of the Platonic distinc-tion between the ideal and the real. Clausewitz recognizes an idealstate of war beyond the material wars fought during his day. Such awar, an “absolute war,” would pit equally powerful forces against oneanother in positions of exact polarity; there would be no terrain, norecalcitrance or exhaustion of the troops or supplies, and the di!erencesbetween the sides would be irreconcilable. Such an ideal war wouldnever end, and it is this war that acts as a regulative ideal, as both aguiding idea (Hauptvorstellung) as to how things should be and as a stan-dard of direction, a point of reference (Richtpunkt), towards its own everfuller realization.7 All real wars are imitations of this war, and it is thegeneral’s task to approximate absolute war as closely as possible. The

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role of strategy for the general is to negotiate between the desired idealand the demands of the real. The general’s purview, then, is the gapbetween the ideal and the real, the space of what Clausewitz terms“friction.” Friction is a general name for the innumerable details pre-venting a perfect translation of the ideal upon the real; it includes themorale of the troops, the thickening e!ects of danger, insu/cient orincorrect intelligence, etc.; in short, it includes everything that cannotbe counted upon, every uncertainty. Friction denotes the illogical, since“[l]ogic comes to a stop in this labyrinth.”8 The best general is theone most at home in this halfway house between the ideal and thereal. Clausewitz is in the ranks of the other modern philosophers intaking up this Platonic distinction.

These three points of war equally determine an ideal of peace. Warfunctions for Clausewitz as a forceful expression of will to overcomean opponent, guided by the view of an ideal (absolute). When thatopponent is completely overcome—and the text vacillates at timesbetween disarmament and utter destruction—which is to say, whenthat opponent is beaten in their will, then there can be peace: “Oncethe prize is in its hands, the political object has been achieved; thereis no need to do more, and it can let matters rest. If the other stateis ready to accept the situation, it should sue for peace.”9 In such anend, war reaches its goal: “we must always consider that with the con-clusion of peace the purpose of the war has been achieved and itsbusiness is at an end.”10 For the enemy to press for peace demon-strates a weakened and depressed will to engage the opponent. Butthis is not to say that the will is beaten or that the fighting is overand done with. The only peace that could ensure this would be thepeace resulting from an absolute war, where “hostilities could not enduntil one or other side were finally defeated.”11 Political interventionusually stops a war before this point is reached, with a result that hos-tilities can always be renewed. Hostilities may resume, Clausewitzclarifies, “but this only shows that not every war necessarily leads toa final decision and settlement.”12 Only an absolute war can lead toa final decision and settlement, which is to say, only an absolute warcan lead to peace. Obviously, war and peace may not always be clearlydistinguishable in reality, perhaps they are never so, but they are alwaysso ideally.

Clausewitz’s modern conception of warfare comes to an end withthe end of modernity. Contemporary warfare, for its part, operates

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according to the influx of new technologies that are themselves partof a general technological “enframing” of the world. Enframing, Ge-stell, is Heidegger’s name for an era of technological supremacy whereall of the world is brought ever closer together by a systematic elim-ination of distance and di!erence across the globe. The conditions ofmodern warfare listed above can find no hold here, and it is preciselywhere these conditions fail that we are forced to think terrorism. Thetechnological era, as the era of terrorism, distinguishes itself from themodern on each of the three counts above.

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Opposition is no longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since tech-nology has served to eradicate the distance that would separate thesupposedly opposed parties. The analysis of technology in Heidegger’swork is guided by the (phenomenological) insight that “All distancesin time and space are shrinking” (GA 79: 3; cf. GA 7: 157/PLT, 165).13

Airplanes, microwaves, e-mail, these serve to abbreviate the world, tobe sure, but there is a metaphysical distance that has likewise beenreduced, that between subject and object. This modern dualism hasbeen surpassed by what Heidegger terms the standing-reserve (Bestand ),the eerie companion of technological dominance and “enframing.”Insofar as an object (Gegenstand) would stand over against (Gegen) a sub-ject, objects can no longer be found. “What stands by in the sense ofstanding-reserve, no longer stands over against us as object” (GA 7:20/QCT, 17). A present object could stand over against another; thestanding-reserve, however, precisely does not stand; instead, it circu-lates, and in this circulation it eludes the modern determination ofthinghood. It is simply not present to be cast as a thing.

With enframing, which names the dominance of position, positing,and posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what theywere. Everything becomes an item for ordering (bestellen) and deliver-ing (zustellen); everything is “ready in place” (auf der Stelle zur Stelle), con-stantly available and replaceable (GA 79: 28). The standing-reserve“exists” within this cycle of order and delivery, exchange and replace-ment. This is not merely a development external to modern objects,but a change in their being. The standing-reserve is found only in itscirculation along these supply channels, where one item is just as goodas any other, where, in fact, one item is identical to any other. Replace-ability is the being of things today. “Today being is being-replaceable”

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(VS, 107/62), Heidegger claims in 1969. The transformation is suchthat what is here now is not really here now, since there is an itemidentical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This cycle of order-ing and delivery does not operate serially, since we are no longer deal-ing with discrete, individual objects. Instead, there is only a steadycirculation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much asit is there in storage. The standing-reserve spreads itself throughoutthe entirety of its replacement cycle, without being fully present at anypoint along the circuit.

But it is not merely a matter of mass produced products beingreplaceable. To complete Heidegger’s view of the enframed standing-reserve, we have to take into consideration the global role of value, acomplementary determination of being: “Being has become value” (GA5: 258/192). The Nietzschean legacy for the era of technology (Nietzscheas a thinker of values) is evident here. But the preponderance of valueis so far from preserving di!erences and establishing order of rank,that it only serves to further level the ranks and establish the identityof everything with its replacement. When everything has a value, anexchangeability and replaceability operates laterally across continents,languages, and di!erence, with great homogenizing and globalizinge!ect. The standing-reserve collapses opposition.

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The will that dominates the modern era is personal, even if, as is thecase with Leibniz, the ends of that will are not completely known bythe self at any particular time. Nonetheless, the will still expresses theindividuality of the person and one’s perspective. In the era of tech-nology, the will that comes to the fore is no longer the will of an indi-vidual, but a will without a restricted human agenda. In fact, the willin question no longer wills an object outside of itself, but only willsitself; it is a will to will. In this way, the will need never leave itself.This self-a/rming character of the will allows the will an indepen-dence from the human. Manifest in the very workings of technologyis a will to power, which for Heidegger is always a will to will. Becausethe will to will has no goal outside of it, its willing is goalless and end-less. The human is just another piece of a standing-reserve that cir-culates without purpose. Actually, things have not yet gone so far; thehuman still retains a distinction, however illusive, as “the most impor-tant raw material” (GA 7: 88/EP, 104). This importance has nothing

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to do with the personal willing of conditional goals, as Heidegger imme-diately makes clear, “The human is the ‘most important raw material’because he remains the subject of all consumption, so much so thathe lets his will go forth unconditionally in this process and simulta-neously becomes the ‘object’ of the abandonment of being” (GA 7:88/EP, 104). Unconditioned willing transcends the merely human will,which satisfies itself with restricted goals and accomplishments.Unconditioned willing makes of the subject an agent of the abandon-ment of being, one whose task it is to objectify everything. The more theworld comes to stand at the will’s disposal, the more that being retreatsfrom it. The human will is allied with the technological will to will.

For this reason—and the following is something often overlooked inconsidering Heidegger’s political position between the wars—Heideggeris critical of the very notion of a Führer, or leader, who would directthe circulation of the standing-reserve according to his own personalwill. The leaders of today are merely the necessary accompaniment ofa standing-reserve that, in its abstraction, is susceptible to planning.The leaders’ seeming position of “subjectivity,” that they are the oneswho decide, is again another working of “objectification,” where nei-ther of these terms quite fits, given that beings are no longer objec-tive. The willfulness of the leaders is not due to a personal will:

One believes that the leaders had presumed everything of their ownaccord in the blind rage of a selfish egotism and arranged everything inaccordance with their own will [Eigensinn]. In truth, however, leaders arethe necessary consequence of the fact that beings have gone over to away of errancy, in which an emptiness expands that requires a singleordering and securing of beings. (GA 7: 89/EP, 105; tm)

The leaders do not stand above or control the proceedings, the pro-ceedings in question a!ect beings as a whole, including the leaders.Leaders are simply points of convergence or conduits for the channelsof circulation; they are needed for circulation, but are nowhere out-side of it. No leader is the sole authority; instead, there are numer-ous “sectors” to which each leader is assigned. The demands of thesesectors will be similar of course, organized around e/ciency and pro-ductivity in distribution and circulation. In short, leaders serve thestanding-reserve.

Any goal beyond the will itself, any political goal, for example, willnot be able to voice itself over the will’s own monologue. Insofar asmodern warfare was a use of force for political goals, modern warfare

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is surpassed. The will surrenders its relation to the object in order towill itself all the more forcefully. It reaches a point where no politi-cal, which is to say “external,” goal can reach it. There can be noopposition when the will recognizes nothing but itself, and the morethe will succeeds in this, the more impersonal it becomes. Politics’e!ectiveness withers away in this transformation, since the goals of pol-itics remain always conditional. The unconditional will is apolitical,and this transforms the relation between war and politics as expressedin Clausewitz’s famed dictum.

War is not, as Clausewitz still thinks, the continuation of politics by othermeans. If “war” means the “total war,” i.e. the war that arises from themachination of beings here let loose, then it becomes a transformation of “pol-itics” and a revelation of the fact that “politics” and every plan-directedcourse of life were themselves only ever the uncontrolled execution ofmetaphysical decisions that they do not master. (GA 69: 209)

The transformation of war into terrorism, since this is what we aretalking about when we talk about the machination of beings, is equallya transformation of politics. The metaphysical decisions beyond ourcontrol are those having to do with being as replaceable value. Politicaldecisions are not made by leaders who would be in control of thematters decided. These decisions are nothing that we could willfullydecide. Politics becomes in this a means of directing life according toa plan. We will return to this idea of planning when considering itsrole for our general “security.” For now it is enough to note that withthis transformation in the nature of politics, it can no longer be saidto precede its “continuation” in war. The transformation of war intotal war (or terrorism) is equally a transformation of politics:

Such a war does not continue something already present, but rather com-pels this into the execution of essential decisions, of with it itself is notmaster. For this reason, such a war no longer admits of “conquerors andconquered”; all become slaves of the history of being. (GA 69: 209; em)

Conquered and conqueror are both political designations and are eachoutmoded today. The leaders are slaves.

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We have already stated that technology closes the gap between sub-ject and object, with the human becoming just another piece of the

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standing-reserve alongside all the rest. The abolition of distance isequally an abolition of di!erence, including that between the real andthe ideal. For Clausewitz, this di!erence was a fact expressed in eachof the innumerable ways that the material world failed to live up tothe “smoothness” of the ideal. There is inadequate information, achange of attitude within the atmosphere of danger, questions of moraleand willingness for both the troops and the general; there are coinci-dences, surprises, the resistance of the terrain—all of which prevent ageneral from simply and directly executing a war, but instead requirestrategizing. Strategy serves as a technical term for Clausewitz, denot-ing the skill of the general in best realizing the ideal situation of absolute war within the real material conditions that the battle pre-sents. Perhaps the roughest area of friction that a general must con-sider is found in his/her greatest asset, the troops. Modern warfare is a matter of troop mobilization, assault, reinforcement, and defense;and for this reason, consumption of resources remained a concern forClausewitz. The troops were the most important resource for the real-ization of “total” war; they were needed to negotiate the distance thatyet extended between the ideal and the real. A consequence of this isthat modern warfare could still concern itself with calculating and com-paring casualties and losses. In an ideal situation, troops would o!erno resistance and never be lost. Such is the case with war under thereign of technology.

With everything available as standing-reserve, troops included, theexhaustion of resources is no longer possible. Resources are preciselyin themselves replaceable, to the extent that, in being given over toreplacement, even the idea of an “in itself ” is already drained of real-ity ahead of time. There are no longer any “losses” that cannot bereplaced. In other words, there is no longer any friction. All uncer-tainty is lost, since it is not recognized in the first place. Everythingis monitored and controlled. The whole “battle” is given over to aplanning that is able to incorporate everything it encounters, since itonly ever encounters what is already planable in essence, the standing-reserve. Strategy’s demise is the ascendancy of planning. What thismeans is that war can now go on interminably, subject to no otherlogic or obligation than its own. Nothing can resist it. But withoutresistance, war must end. Peace can now go on interminably as well,subject to no other logic or obligation than its own. The logic in ques-tion for both war and peace is the logic of replacement, the obliga-tion for each is the obligation to consume. There is no law that would

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supervene or subtend consumption; there is no order outside of it thatcould contain it. Clausewitz’s ideal is realized in a manner that col-lapses the very distinctions that gave it birth. “War” is no longer aduel; it recognizes no authority outside of itself. The name for thisnew amalgam of war and peace is terrorism. Terrorism is Clausewitz’sabsolute war in the mirror of technology.

War and peace come to complete agreement and lose their opposi-tional identity in the age of value and the ersatz. Without concern forresources, consumption continues untroubled, since war is a kind of“consumption of beings” no di!erent from peace: “War no longer bat-tles against a state of peace, rather it newly establishes the essence ofpeace” (GA 69: 180). The essence of peace so established is a peacethat defines itself in regards to war, which binds itself inseparably towar, and which functions equivalently to war. In either case, it is simply a matter of resource consumption and replenishment. InClausewitzian terms, there is perhaps too much continuity or “con-tinuation” between war and peace, “War has become a distortion ofthe consumption of beings which is continued in peace” (GA 7: 89/EP,104). The peace that technology brings is nothing restful; instead it isthe peace of unhindered circulation. We cannot even ask when therewill be peace or when the war will end. Such a question, Heideggerspecifies, cannot be answered, “not because the length of the war can-not be foreseen, but because the question itself asks for somethingwhich no longer is, since already there is no longer a war that wouldbe able to come to a peace” (GA 7: 89/EP, 104; tm). The basic oppo-sitions of Clausewitzian warfare are undone at this point, an undoingthat includes the distinction between ideal and real.

It also includes the distinction between soldier and civilian. Sincesuch distinctions depend upon a di!erence between war and peace,they too can no longer apply. Everyone is now a civilian-soldier, orneither a civilian nor a soldier—a “worker,” one might say, or other-wise put, a target. With everyone involved in the same processes ofconsumption and delivery, everyone is already enlisted in advance.There are no longer any “innocent” victims or bystanders in this, andthe same holds true of terrorism. Terrorism is not the use of warfareagainst civilians (pace Carr), for the simple reason that there no longerare any civilians.14 It is equally not war against soldiers, and for thisreason we go wrong to even consider it war. Terrorism is the onlyconflict available and the only conflict that is in essence available andapplicable. It can have everything as its target. Terrorism follows from

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the transformation in beings indicative of the technological age. Thistransformation remains important at each point of a Heideggerianthinking of terrorism and is the ultimate consequence of the abolitionof war and peace; beings have become uncommon.

What was common to the beings of the modern era, their objec-tivity, is lost. In place of the constant presencing of things, we are surrounded by the steady circulation of resources. It is in the com-plete availability of these resources that we might encounter the uncommon:

The disappearance of the distinction between war and peace compelsbeings as such into the uncommon; the reverberation [Erschütterung] ofthis compulsion through everything common becomes all the more uncom-mon, the more exclusively that the common persists and is further pur-sued. (GA 69: 181)

What were once common, the beings to which we were accustomed,are now made uncommon. But the common endures nonetheless.Beings are made uncommon, and this is overlooked so that they maycontinue to be regarded as the same beings to which we were accus-tomed. What is uncommon is that this alteration in the nature of beinggoes unremarked. There is a dissembling here (and we will return tothis as decisive for the mood of terror), but the dissemblance is notto be thought as solely on the part of the human. A few pages later,Heidegger comes to specify what it is that is truly uncommon in allof this, “that beyng veils itself ” (GA 69: 187). The veiling of beyngdescribes the same movement that compels beings into the uncom-mon. This uncommon situation grows ever more uncommon the morethat it is ignored and unacknowledged, i.e., the more common that itbecomes. In e!ect, the veil is the veil of the common, beyng veils itselfin commonality. That beings have become uncommon is ignored. Thetransformations that Heidegger sees operative in contemporary war-fare ultimately signal a change in the nature of being.

Taking the above three points as transfiguratively inaugurating theClausewitzian ideal of absolute war, it is not di/cult to guess wherethis ideal is most perfectly realized. If we wished to name that “coun-try” where the Clausewitzian ideal of absolute war is most demonstrablyvisible—where terrorism is almost celebrated—then it could be noother than America. In the 1969 Le Thor seminar, Heidegger seemsto imply an inability for America to think “the question of being” andcouches this inability in the current reality of the American situation:

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As to the interest of America for the “question of being,” the reality ofthat country is veiled from the view of those interested: the collusionbetween industry and the military (the economic development and thearmament that it requires). (VS, 97/56)

America is the place where the identification of peace and war is fullyrealized in the collusion of industry and the military. Industry increas-ingly determines the options available for the everyday life of the pop-ulace. That same industry now has at its disposal the military powerof society. Where free trade is hindered, where natural resources arenot completely available to the market for “political” reasons, militaryintervention is called for. Democracy is another name for free trade,it is solely an economic term, and democracy must be spread acrossthe globe, not due to any respect for “human rights,” but in order toallow industry to exceed its own expectations and expand its traderoutes. Resistance to free trade is met with “liberating” martial force.Conversely, military spending is a driving force in the economy. Dueto sheer size alone, economic e!ects attend the military as employerand as contributor to local economies. The military provides access tohigher education for many who would otherwise have to make dowithout it. It likewise allows citizens to learn employable skills for workin society. The presence of the military in a community is valued asa sign of prosperity. We might also add that military vehicles (theHummer) and military clothing (“camouflage”) have penetrated main-stream American fashion. Nowhere is the abolishment of the distinc-tion between war and peace more evident than in today’s America.

But if we attend closer to Heidegger’s words, it may be possible tohear in them a hope for America in the thinking of being. Those whoare interested in the question of being do not see the reality of theircountry. Without this situated awareness of one’s “homeland,” thequestion of being cannot be posed. The question remains an abstractand academic matter, something for quotation marks, the “questionof being.” Would a proper understanding of American reality makepossible an asking of this question, or is the question simply impossi-ble for America? Is America, as the epitome of all Americanism, stilla homeland or has technology completely ravished the country of allspecificity and uniqueness? These are the questions that the age oftechnological machination raises for America. Heidegger names thefundamental attunement of this age “terror” (Erschrecken).

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II. The Opening of Terror

Terror is essential to the Heideggerian thought of another beginning(andere Anfang), a beginning apart from the one that inaugurated themetaphysical tradition, the first beginning. The first beginning, as bothPlato and Aristotle attest, begins in wonder (yaumãzein) before thebeings of the world. To appreciate what Heidegger has to say aboutterror as the basic mood of our technological era, we should compareit to wonder as the basic mood of metaphysical philosophy. Whatappears in wonder, the wondrous, is uncommon (das Ungewöhnliche).Heidegger goes to great lengths in the 1937/38 lecture course BasicQuestions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic” to distinguish the fun-damental attunement of wonder from other possible misconceptions.Amazement, admiration, astonishment, etc., all begin with an individ-ual thing that is considered uncommon and that is contrasted againsta previously determined horizon of commonality. This is not the casewith wonder. Here, what is most uncommon is precisely that whichis most common to a being: that it is what it is. In wonder, there isa turn to what is common in order to experience it as uncommon.In wonder, the uncommon is no longer viewed against the common;rather, the thing is appreciated as unique. It is impossible for a thingto be unique if it is fully known, comprehended (planned), and placedat one’s disposal in the manner of the standing-reserve, for in such acondition the thing is immediately and already substituted and replacedby more of the same. If the thing is not to be completely known inthis way, then something must be held back or withdrawn. Wonderis an appreciation of the uncommon in the midst of the common; itis precisely the countermovement to the covering or veiling of beingwith the common that we saw above.

Wonder is found at the first beginning, seemingly far from the tech-nologically dominated here and now. Its original opening to the beingof beings is not something that is simply given, but something thatmust be tended. For the Greeks, according to the Basic Questions lec-ture course, beings were thought in terms of fÊsiw, and what was won-drous for the Greeks was the upsurgence of fÊsiw. But such anupsurgence could not be withstood or preserved without a correspondingcomportment on the part of the human. “What is the basic attitudein which the preservation of the wondrous, the beingness of beings,unfolds and, at the same time, defines itself ? We have to seek it inwhat the Greeks call t°xnh” (GA 45: 178/154). T°xnh names the tending

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and caring for wonderful being. It is a grasping of a being, but in away that is in “accordance” with the being. While the human standsin the midst of beings, but also at a remove from beings, t°xnh nego-tiates the relationship between the human and the wondrous. Throught°xnh, beings are “released to their own essence, in order to hold swayin themselves and thus to pervade man as well” (GA 45: 178/153; tm).Otherwise put, t°xnh is originally allied with fÊsiw and lets beings bewhat they are.

In a certain regard, then, it could be said that t°xnh is at odds withfÊsiw, but we would immediately have to add that this tension is itselfpart of the wonder that is experienced, that wonder is impossible with-out t°xnh. There is wonder in the accordance between fÊsiw and t°xnh.A separation is certainly evident between the two, but it is not yetantagonistic, “T°xnh is a mode of proceeding against fÊsiw, though notyet in order to overpower it or exploit it, and above all not in orderto turn use and calculation into principles, but on the contrary, tohold the reign of fÊsiw in unconcealment” (GA 45: 179–80/155; tm).Here it is clear that a t°xnh that, contra this one, was indeed antag-onistically disposed toward the wondrous would proceed by utilizingnature and making of it a matter of calculation. Everything uncom-mon, not to mention wondrous, about the being would be lost. Thisis certainly the path of modern technology, but t°xnh is not yet tech-nology. “Nevertheless,” Heidegger claims “that this could lead to mod-ern and contemporary technology, and had to lead to it, has its groundin the beginning and has its foundation in an unavoidable incapacityto hold fast to the beginning” (GA 45: 179/154; tm, em). What thismeans is that fÊsiw calls for its own demise; it can never be main-tained or preserved completely. It is never fully present and untrou-bled, but always furrowed and endangered. The danger that Heideggerwill specify in the lecture course is an abolition of wonder and theuncommon. Beings become representations; the clearing of élÆyeiacomes to be understood as correctness and adequacy (ÙryÒthw andımo¤vsiw). All of this is already latent in wonder, and it is the exac-erbation of this danger that leads to terror.

To begin with, the interpretation of beings that arises out of won-der mistakes being for “beinghood” (Seiendheit), a conceptual general-ity arrived at by means of an abstraction from these beings, theuncommon becoming a commonality. This metaphysical conception ofpresent beings and the captivation with them that attends it then cul-minates for Heidegger in the technological interpretation of beings as

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standing-reserve (Bestand), where presence, i.e. complete unconcealment,is the sole characteristic. The technological comportment no longerstands in “accordance” with beings, letting them be what they are,but instead falls upon them to bring them out of unconcealment andto account for them. Further, this movement is one with what Heideggercalls the “abandonment” or “withdrawal” of being. Here, Heideggercalls attention to the precedence of beings over being, with being slip-ping ever further into the background. The self-aggrandizement ofbeings goes so far as to almost sever the relation with being. Beingsare let loose from being, disbanded from being. Yet the logic of thiswithdrawal is such that the emergence of beings at all is only possi-ble on the basis of this withdrawal (a withdrawal that itself is preciselyno basis at all, but an abyss). Beyng withdraws in the presentation ofbeings, and the more available the being becomes, the more beyngwithdraws, until, reaching a point where the items of the standing-reserve are available in essence, the withdrawal of beyng reaches itsapogee. Beyng’s withdrawal is the elimination of concealment. Oncethe being is no longer concealed, once it does not “essence,” it is aban-doned by beyng. Wonder leads to the abandonment of being as thefulfillment of the promise of a fÊsiw that calls for its own supplanting.

This antagonistic role of t°xnh is so encompassing as to transformthe world. In fact, insofar as Heidegger understands “world” as anevent of spacing, distance, meaning, di!erence, and singularity, thereis no longer a world in the era of contemporary technology. Instead,we are confronted by an un-world: “the ‘world’ has become an unworldas a consequence of the abandonment of beings by the truth of being”(GA 7: 88/EP, 104; tm). As the landscape becomes more and more astorehouse for the supplies of the standing-reserve, as reality is evermore shaped to accommodate the distribution and relaying of stock,the world is destroyed. We have already seen that modern warfarehas come to an end; now we see that the world has as well.Consequently, for Heidegger in 1938, the term “world war” requiresthe care of quotation marks, “The ‘world wars’ and their character of‘totality’ are already a consequence of the abandonment of being” (GA7: 88/EP, 103). Terrorism is the truth of world war. A “war” on ter-rorism, is therefore impossible, a “world war” against terrorism dou-bly so. America’s battle with terrorism may well be the first “unworldwar” in history.

In the advance of the unworld, America “enjoys” a certain prior-ity. It is the place where beyng has most withdrawn, if one may speak

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in such a manner, to the point of calling into question the identity ofAmerica itself. As the globalizing movement of Americanism spreads,the specificity of America is likewise lost. Heidegger’s many referencesto “Americanism” as opposed to “America” may give us pause forthought. Can America prevail in the face of Americanism? Is it possiblethat America may be the greatest victim of Americanism? If we areable to see a di!erence between America, the embattled homeland,and Americanism, the movement of cultural hegemony, then Heidegger’swords will have to be heard as a caution to America: “This estab-lishment of the unessence [Unwesen] of machination is reserved forAmericanism” (GA 67: 150). America is not the villain, Americanismis, as Heidegger may well be saying when he asks “[w]hether wesu/ciently understand that everything dreadful [alles Grauenhafte] lies inAmericanism and certainly not with what is Russian” (GA 67: 150).15

To this we might add, “nor even with what is American.” Americanismattacks America from within and the uncommon challenge that it posesis first and foremost a challenge to America. This terrible privilege isAmerica’s alone. The fÊsiw that calls for its own demise necessarilyleads to the dreadful and ambiguous case of Americanism.

It is in the face of this technological wasteland of the Americanisticunworld that terror can occur as a salvation. Terror is the attunementproper to the unworld and the age of machination, and to feel terroris to be given the opportunity to respond to it. Terror is experienced“at the abandonment of being” (GA 65: 46/32; tm), which is to saythat it is felt “in the face of what is closest and most obtrusive, namelythat beings are” (GA 45: 2/4). Terror is experienced as a trembling,a fact which finds some etymological support.16 A movement of terroris disclosed here as well, a flight from the terrible, a withdrawal. Thetrembling withdrawal of terror is not something that is simply a sub-jective experience (Erlebnis); rather, it is a trembling on the part ofbeyng to which terror is attuned. In the Contributions to Philosophy ( fromEnowning), trembling (Erzitterung) names the way in which the event ofthe clearing of being takes place. Trembling is “the spreading out ofthe time-play-space, in which trembling itself, as the hesitation of itsclearing (the there), takes place [sich ereignet]” (GA 65: 244/173; tm).The opening of the “there,” the clearing of being, cannot occur infull presence. Opening and concealment are not so oppositionally disposed. “Hesitation” is the surest index of this fact. Terror as a fundamental mood is an attunement to this hesitating, wavering, self-withholding of beyng. In a strange image from the Contributions,

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Heidegger states that the e!ects of this hesitation are “sprayed” forth,from no single, self-present origin, and that this spraying is attunement(Stimmung): “Attunement is the spraying forth of the trembling of beyngas enowning in Da-sein” (GA 65: 21/16; tm). The intimacy (Innigkeit)that Heidegger stresses here and elsewhere between trembling andenowning should not be lost on us. Beyng trembles.17 The withdrawalof beyng sets up a resonance that lacks any substantial stability—a res-onance between beings and the withdrawn beyng.

But terror would not be at all attuned to this if beyng and its aban-doned beings were to retain a separate and distinct identity. The res-onance that Heidegger describes is such that there are no resonatingpoles to support it. This is another way in which modern or Clausewitzianopposition is overcome for Heidegger. Because the presence of with-drawal in beings can only be experienced as a trembling, terror is thefundamental mood of the age. Terror is the feeling of a bond withbeing, one that persists in the face of a withdrawn being and partic-ipates in that same withdrawal. Terror, in a sense, would be a mem-ory of being, not of something that ever took place, but of taking-placeas such. This remarking of being is terror, and for Heidegger it pro-vides a retreat from the onrush of the standing-reserve: “Terror letsthe human retreat before this, that the being is, while at first the beingwas just a being to him: that the being is and that this—beyng—hasabandoned and withdrawn from all ‘beings’ and what appears as such”(GA 65: 15/11; tm). Seizing upon terror in this manner, one sees thatthere is no being behind beings and that what befalls beings befallsbeing as well, due to their strong intimacy. Terror puts being intobeings, in some sense, and this alerts it to the responsibility of guard-ing and preserving this withdrawal of being. To preserve it is to insistupon a moment of concealment in technological circulation, a blindspot before its infinite eye. The terrified one accords with being andthis means that, for the American, the “reality of that country” maybe seen and the “question of being” finally posed as the question ofbeing. This bond of terror is at the same time the bond of the citi-zenry, the bond of the citizens of the homeland America. What is ter-rifying is that America withstands the onslaught of Americanism; terrorcan teach us this. Terrorism is always “Erschreckenismus.”

In the 1941/42 lecture course devoted to Hölderlin’s hymn to mem-ory and commemoration, “Andenken,” Heidegger returns to terror in acontext that stresses its non-operative or extra-economic character.Here the concern is with the festival and the holiday as an interruption

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of the everyday, the latter understood as the reign of utility and use-ful work. But Heidegger will not find the essence of the holiday todepend upon the presence of the workday; holidays are not “days o!”for him. Rather, the festival begins through a measured reserve andkeeping to oneself (Heidegger’s terms are Innehalten and Ansichhalten).This “coming-to-oneself ” is a freeing of one’s essence which bringsone before the appearance of the uncommon (cf. GA 52: 74–75). Justas wonder distinguished itself from amazement, admiration, etc. by thefact that it experienced beings as uncommon without recourse to apreviously understood horizon of conventional commonality, so toodoes terror need no recourse to the common. Terror is a transfor-mation of the everyday that nevertheless exceeds the everyday. It bearswitness to an ever more thickly veiled withdrawal. At the momentwhere one collects oneself for the holiday, “Wonder begins, or elseeven terror” (GA 52: 75). In either case there is a belonging to theuncommon. And what is it that is uncommon? “The uncommon con-centrates itself in this: that beings exist at all, and not, far rather, noth-ing” (GA 52: 75). For wonder, the being of beings was uncommon,for terror, the uncommon is the veiling of being. This veiling insti-tutes a situation of terror and trembling, wherein uncommon beingwears the robes of commonality. The uncommon can only be foundin the common, and to find it there is to retreat from the all too com-mon theatrics of presence. Terror is an interruption of the play ofpresence.

The covering of the uncommon is a ruse that Heidegger identifieswith his own version of the “as if.” In the abandonment of Seyn, par-ticular beings appear “as objects and as present-at-hand, as if beyngdid not essence [als ob Seyn nicht weste],” a locution Heidegger repeatsin the 1937/38 lecture course: “It is almost as if beings have beenabandoned by beyng, and we are heedless of it,” and “beings are nowtaken for all that is, as if beyng and the truth of beyng were nothing”(GA 65: 115/81; tm, em, GA 45: 185/159; tm, em, 196/169; tm, em).Such present-at-hand objects have nothing wondrous about them, theyare simply there at our disposal to be distributed and employed as wesee fit. But beyng does essence and beings only appear as objects. Theessencing of beyng means that beings are not completely given overto unconcealment, at least not yet. Not yet because complete uncon-cealment is what endangers beings and being. Such a chiaroscuro ofpresence and withdrawal is represented as pure presence, as thoughbeyng did not essence. Since terror attends to the withdrawal of beyng

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via an experience of the unconcealment of beings, terror is an inter-ruption in the ordinary and everyday state of a!airs wherein whatcomes to presence is unquestionably taken for pure presence. The firstdraft of a lecture from the Basic Questions course is quite clear on this:“The wonder of being can no longer be encountered, that a being is.Such a thing has become obvious” (GA 45: 197/169; tm). Terror breaksthe commonality of things, puts a halt to our everyday manner of tak-ing beings for granted as present and at our disposal: “Terror is aretreat from the routine [Geläufigkeit] of dealings with the familiar[Vertrauten], back into the openness of the rush of self-concealment, inwhich openness the hitherto routine [Geläufige] proves itself to be atonce estranging [das Befremdliche] and confining” (GA 65: 15/11; tm).Terror retreats before the common in order to view it as uncommonand self-concealing. Where wonder gazed upon being, terror retreatsbefore withdrawal.

With the abandonment of beyng, an abandonment that sets us firmlywithin the fully machinational unworld of technology, beyng only seemsto have left without a trace. We are left with our terror, but this terroris now the trace of beyng. At the end of the Basic Questions lecturecourse, Heidegger wonders whether withdrawal does not belong to theessence of beyng, and for a thinking of terrorism this question is key(see GA 45: 189/163). What if terror belonged to being? Terror wouldtestify to the withdrawal of being and between the testimony of ter-ror and the withdrawn being to which it testifies, there would be aspan of distance, the very distance marking withdrawal. If terror belongsto being, then terror is not separated from being nor without relationto it. If terror did not belong to being, then being would truly begone. We would be wrong even to speak here of an “abandonment”of being, if terror did not belong to being, for “abandonment” impliesa separation from what was once bound, a disbanding. If the terrorof beings did not belong to being, there would be neither testamentto being nor even being. There would be only oblivion, the impossi-ble. Instead, there is an aping of presence through technology. Thisposturing of beings, the a!ectation, is what terror discovers, the lie offull presence. Beings exist “as if ” beyng did not essence. Terror is anindignation at the posturing of being. The posturing in question hereshould likewise be heard as yet another modification of stellen. Terroris sensitive to the di!erence between the real and the “as if,” or rather,terror knows that the real is ever only as if real, and sensitivity to thisslender fissure in the bulk of presence is enough to transpose the world.

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Nothing stable, this juncture in being itself must be followed and traced.It trembles. Terror takes a situation that looks hopelessly doomed andfinds the essential within it, but terror contains its own demise, too.We flee from it. We respond to it with a hardening of our own ways;we rea/rm the identity of being instead of opening ourselves to others.The American response to terror has been one of Americanism, therecan be no doubt about that. Terror ends in this, and there is no com-memoration, just a forgetting. The commemorative aspect of terrorallows us to remember the fallen and understand how they can stillbe with us today in our American way of being.

III. The Threat of Being

Terrorism will take place in the withdrawal of beyng, in the unworldof machination. The modern configuration of war is surpassed by thetechnological plan of homogenized circulation, and the distinctionbetween war and peace falls away in their mutual commitment to fur-thering the cycle of production and consumption. The abandonmentof being that forms this unworld by draining the world of its beingdoes not occur without a trace, however, and terror in its tremblingcorresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results from such adevastation—or, “becoming-desert,” Verwüstung—of the world; terror-ism is always born in the desert. Terrorism is metaphysical because it touches everything, every particular being, all of which may beattacked and annihilated. The circulation of the standing-reserve setsan equivalence of value among things with a resulting worldlessnesswhere existence is another name for exchangeability. The exchangedand replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged, not seri-ally, but essentially. They are not fully present when here. Terrorismnames this absence, or rather is the e!ect of this absence, which is to say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with anabsence that could be the e!ect of any loss of presence. The absencein question is not an absence of presence, but an absence in andthrough presence. It would be ridiculous to think that such a changein being would lack a corresponding change in beings. This changein the nature of being shows itself in the fact that all beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of destructionvia terrorist acts. There would be no terrorist threat were it not forthese terrorists, yet there would be no possibility of a threat were itnot for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only “e!ect” of this absence

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in presence; Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in pre-cisely this regard. Terrorism’s claim, however, is distinct from that ofatomic war.

Like the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at the level of threat.Insofar as it calls into question all beings, terrorism is itself a meta-physical determination of being. Terrorism makes everything a possible objectof terrorist attack, and this is the very terror of it. Everything is a pos-sible target, and this now means that all beings exist as possible tar-gets, as possibly destroyed. But this should not be taken to mean thatthere are discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with destruc-tion. The ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature ofthe being itself. The being can no longer exist as indi!erent to itsdestruction; this destruction does not reside outside of the being. Instead,destruction inhabits the being and does so, not as something super-added to the being, but as the essence of the being itself. Beings arehenceforth as though destroyed. Terror brings about an alteration inthe very mode of being of reality, the real is now the terrorized. Realityis already terrorized; the change has already taken place, and thisregardless of whether an attack comes or not. Beings exist as endan-gered, as terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present.It means that, in terms of pure presence, beings exist as already destroyed.Destruction is not something that comes at a later date, nor is it some-thing that may or may not already have taken place. Destruction existsnow as threat. The e!ectiveness of terror lies in the threat, not theattack.

Like the threat of nuclear war, the threat of terrorism targets every-thing, with no chance of distinguishing potential from nonpotential tar-gets. This means that there is nothing we can do to avoid it. Sincethere are no marks that would betray a place, person, or thing as pos-sible location or victim of terrorist assault, there is no way that wecan be prepared for it. This means that terrorism is able to threatenus where we are most unsuspecting. Terrorism attacks precisely wherewe would not expect an attack because it targets the basis for oursense of security, the commonness of the everyday. Terrorism is athreat to the ordinary and the common. It comes from within oursafest regions, from no outside source. An outside terrorist power wouldeither annihilate beings or not annihilate beings. In the first case, thebeings would be nothing; in the second, they would remain extant.This manner of thinking, in terms of presences and absences, of some-thing and nothing, actually has nothing terrifying about it. The point

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is almost Epicurean; annihilation is nothing to us. The terror of ter-rorism is not located in the fear of an external power, but in the ter-ror that the enemy is already here with us, “inside” our walls, threateningthe homogeneity of the home. This terrorism is nothing that blows upbeings into nothingness, but rather one that places them in dangerand only threatens to destroy them. But this threat is stronger thanany terrorist attack ever could be.

Heidegger provides us with a further way of conceptualizing thethreat of terrorism, a way that is likewise attentive to the conjunctionof interiority and terror. His remarks are found in a posthumouslypublished dialogue between an older man and a younger man, dated8 May 1945, the day of Germany’s capitulation in World War II, andentitled “Evening Conversation in a Prisoner of War Camp in Russiabetween a Younger and an Older Man.”18 What threatens here is notthe world war, as Heidegger makes painfully clear in the dialogue’sdated postlude: “On a day that the world celebrates its victory / anddoes not yet realize that / for centuries already, it is the victim / ofits own upsurgence” (GA 77: 240). The world wars, as we have seen,are only the result of more “global” changes, of transmogrifications ofontology, if even that name still holds. The threat in the camp is thatthe devastation of the earth will continue without end and that therewill be an annihilation of the human essence in the process. For theolder man, this is the epitome of evil, “the devastation of the earthand the annihilation of the human essence that goes along with it aresomehow evil itself [das Böse selbst]” (GA 77: 207). The considerationof evil that follows will slowly unfold the logic behind the terroristthreat and reveal the error in the older man’s concern with annihilation.

The younger man cautions that evil here cannot be understood asa moral bad but, somewhat paradoxically, as what he calls “the malev-olent” (das Bösartige; GA 77: 207). The German term Bösartige desig-nates what it names as a kind or a sort, Art, of evil, Böse; in a senseit is a generic term. The older man objects to this designation as sense-less—it would be like claiming that space is really the spatial—and theyounger man tells him that his objection results from his still thinkingof evil as the morally reprehensible, where such a moral thinking, weare to understand, views everything in black and white terms. Whenwe think evil otherwise, the statement “evil is the malevolent” gainsin significance. Evil is to be thought from out of the malevolent (bösar-tig). “The malevolent is the rebelliousness [Aufrührerische] which is basedin fury [Grimmigen], so much so that this fury in a certain manner con-

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ceals its inward wrath [Ingrimm], but thereby constantly threatens atthe same time” (GA 77: 207–8). Malevolence is a “stirring up” or an“upheaval” of rebelliousness that arises from fury. Not that fury main-tains a simple identity, to be sure. Fury would now seem to lie at theroot of evil, but fury itself bears an inner fury, an inner wrath, thoughthis inward wrath does not show itself directly. Malevolence is thusthe uprising of fury out of a concealed inner fury; it is a transpositionor movement across a boundary, a tale told by the prefixes under con-sideration here: from the In of inward wrath to the Auf of the upheavalof fury. This is malevolence, and it is the essence of evil, as the par-ties soon come to agree, “The essence of evil is the inward wrath ofa rebellion which never entirely breaks out, and which, when it doesbreak out, still disguises itself and which, in its hidden threat, is oftenas though it were nothing” (GA 77: 208). Two points are to be drawnfrom this.

First, as we have seen above, the evil in question here is nothingsimply present, but is found on both sides of a line describing with-holding. Evil is never itself fully or completely present and made pub-lic; rather it is always also withheld. This withholding is why theyounger man objects to the original definition of evil. Evil does notlet itself be grasped and categorized in complete detail; its withhold-ing prevents all that. The best that can be said for it is that evil ismalevolent. There are di!erent sorts of evil and di!erent kinds of evilactions, but to evil as such we can have no access. It is simply notpresent.

Second, the withholding character of evil (malevolence) makes clearthat the essence of evil lies in the threat of a wrathful outbreak, not inthat outbreak itself. Because the wrath never completely breaks out, thereis always the threat of more wrath to come. Evil lies in the fact thatthere is always more wrath to unleash. Which is to say that evil is notreal or e!ective, in the usual sense of these terms, or rather, that real-ity itself is not real. Reality is the disguise of evil, and it is this samestaging of presence that Heidegger had previously discussed in regardsto the beings of machination, which objectively present themselves “asif beyng did not essence” (GA 65: 115/81; tm). It is this very inabilityto completely unleash itself—for presence to ever be fully present—that frustrates evil and angers it further. Evil wants out, and by beingheld in, this want of evil is driven forth all the stronger. As we aredealing here with an evil of technology and machination, it is no sur-prise that the operative logic, as read by Heidegger, is Nietzschean, a

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logic of power and self-empowerment, i.e., a logic of the will. Thelimit of the will is set in order that it might be transgressed and thatthe domain of the will may be expanded in the process. A new bound-ary is then set, only in order that it too might soon be crossed in thisexpansionist metaphysics of the will. The older man recognizes thiswillful component in evil: “If, however, evil rests in malevolence, whichis in itself furious [in sich ergrimmt ist] about its own wrath, and thereforeincreasingly more wrathful, then I would almost say that the malevolentwould be something willful [Willensmäßiges]” (GA 77: 208; em).19 Thisevil, which knows no end and is only enraged by its frustration, infu-riated to the point of crossing the bounds of its own fury, this willfulevil devastates the world.

Devastation (Verwüstung) is the process by which the world becomesa desert (Wüste), a sandy expanse that seemingly extends without end,without landmarks or direction, and is devoid of all life.20 If we fol-low the dialogue in thinking an ancient Greek notion of “life” asanother name for “being,” then the lifeless desert is the being-lessdesert. The world that becomes a lifeless desert is consequently anunworld from which being has withdrawn. The older prisoner makesthis connection explicit, “The being of an age of devastation wouldthen consist in the abandonment of being” (GA 77: 213). As we haveseen, this is a process that befalls the world, slowly dissolving it ofworldliness and rendering it an “unworld” (cf. GA 7: 88, 92f./EP, 104,107f., etc.). Yet this unworld is not simply the opposite of world; itremains a world, but a world made desert.

The desert is not the complete absence of world. Such an absencewould not be reached by devastation (Verwüstung), but rather by anni-hilation (Vernichtung); and for Heidegger, annihilation is far less of aconcern than devastation: “Devastation is more uncanny than mereannihilation [bloße Vernichtung]. Mere annihilation sweeps aside all thingsincluding even nothingness, while devastation on the contrary orders[bestellt] and spreads everything that blocks and prevents” (WHD,11/29–30; tm). Annihilation as a thought of total absence is a thoughtfrom metaphysics. It is one with a thinking of pure presence: purepresence, pure absence, and purely no contact between them. Duringanother lecture course on Hölderlin, this time in 1942 on the hymn“The Ister,” Heidegger claims that annihilation is precisely the agendaof America in regards to the “homeland,” which is here equated withEurope: “We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanismhas resolved to annihilate [zu vernichten] Europe, that is, the homeland,

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and that means: the inception of the Western world. The inceptual isindestructible [unzerstörbar]” (GA 53: 68/54; tm). America is the agentof technological devastation, and it operates under the assumptions ofpresence and absence that it itself is so expert at dissembling. Americaresolves to annihilate and condemns itself to failure in so doing, forthe origin is “indestructible.” We could take this a step further andclaim that only because the origin cannot be annihilated is it possibleto destroy it. This possibility of destruction is its indestructible char-acter. It can always be further destroyed, but you will never annihi-late it. Americanism names the endeavor or resolution to drive thedestruction of the world ever further into the unworld. America is theagent of a malevolent being.

This same reasoning explains why the older man’s original con-ception of evil had to be rethought. Evil is the “devastation of theearth and the annihilation of the human essence that goes along withit” (GA 77: 207), he said, but this annihilation is simply too easy, toomuch of an “Americanism.” The human essence is not annihilated inevil—who could care about that? Instead it is destroyed and devas-tated by evil. Devastation does not annihilate, but brings about some-thing worse, the unworld. Without limit, the desert of the unworldspreads, ever worsening and incessantly urging itself to new expres-sions of malevolence. Annihilation would bring respite and, in a per-verse sense, relief. There would be nothing left to protect and guard,nothing left to concern ourselves with—nothing left to terrorize.Devastation is also irreparable; no salvation can arrive for it. Theyounger man is able to voice the monstrous conclusion of this think-ing of devastation: “Then malevolence, as which devastation occurs[sich ereignet], would indeed remain a basic characteristic of being itself ” (GA77: 213, 215; em). The older man agrees, “being would be in theground of its essence malevolent” (GA 77: 215). Being is not evil; it issomething much worse; being is malevolent.

Malevolent being is a being that threatens. It threatens itself withannihilation, with both total absence and total presence, for they arethe same; it places itself in danger.21 This is so much as to say thatall of the supposed enemies of being—technology, metaphysics, theontic, even being itself in regards to beyng—these are so many waysof being’s self-showing, where being’s “self-showing” is not to be under-stood as though beyng somehow remained behind all of these surro-gates and was imaged in them. Being is found only in these situations,a point Heidegger makes in the Contributions to Philosophy, “Here, in the

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unavoidable ordinariness of beings, beyng is the most non-ordinary;and this estranging of beyng is not a manner of its appearing but ratherit itself ” (GA 65: 230/163; tm). Being is endangered and withdrawnin essence. Just as we saw that there is no sense in talking about evilin itself, so too is there no sense in talking about being by itself: thereis only malevolent beyng. If beings exist in the shadow of a threatenedannihilation, and if such an existence is an existence in terror, then,as reprehensible as this might sound, being itself is what terrorizes.Terror is the threat of being.

IV. Security for Sure

There can be no security. If being is what threatens then security asthe absence of terror would be the absence of being. But the absenceof being is precisely the threat. Obviously, security is just as little tobe found in the absence of danger as it is in the consummation ofthe danger, total annihilation. Instead, security is to be found withinthe danger and threat of being. But how? Heidegger likewise providesus endangered ones with a way of thinking security and preservation.This is his fourth contribution to a thinking of terrorism.

Security and assurance, both equally apt translations of the GermanSicherung, are indissociable from certainty (Gewißheit) for Heidegger. Inthe course of the 1968 seminar in Le Thor, Heidegger provides a briefhistory of this relation between security and certainty: “the quest forcertainty appears first in the domain of faith, as the search for thecertainty of salvation (Luther), then in the domain of physics as thesearch for the mathematical certainty of nature (Galileo)” (VS, 30/13).Heidegger unites these two concerns for certainty within a single con-cept: assurance (Sicherung), “In the quest for mathematical certainty,what is sought is the assurance of man in nature, in the sensible; inthe quest for the certainty of salvation, what is sought is the assuranceof man in the supra-sensible world” (VS, 30/14).22 Certainty is in theservice of assurance or security and is only the epistemological aspectof a greater ontological condition of security. Security is freedom fromuncertainty in all of its forms, sensible, super-sensible, and ontological.Salvation and the mathematical certainty of nature are themselves tobe understood as instances of an ontological assurance against uncer-tainty. Ontological uncertainty would be found in conceptions of sin-gularity, where the uniqueness of a thing renders it irreplaceable andthus opens us to the possibility of loss, or in conceptions of alterity,

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where the other is not anticipated and confined in advance to thestrictures of categorical thought. Uncertainty in this broader sense iseliminated in security. One is securely insulated against these di!erencesof the world. For modern thought, the securing of representations forrepresentational thinking provided the backdrop for the arrival of cer-tainty (see GA 7: 82; EP, 98). Modern metaphysics itself, according toHeidegger, “means the securing of the human being by itself and foritself ” (GA 67: 167). Such a policy must be abandoned as the humanbecomes more and more a piece of the standing-reserve like every-thing else. This postmodern security is accomplished through bestowaland appraisal of value, “Securement, as the obtaining of security, is agrounding in valuation” (GA 5: 262/195; tm).

What is valued can be replaced by something of equal value, andthis fact lies at the center of our conception of security today. Securement,as a giving of value, assures us against loss by making the world replace-able. In this respect, security is nothing other than total availability,imagined as a world of utter transparency where all resources, humanand otherwise, are constantly surveilled and traced through their pathsof circulation. The transformation in being coincident with the end ofmodern warfare likewise puts an end to modern politics and estab-lishes in its place an impersonal commitment to the furthering ofplanned replacement. Security is only possible when everything worksaccording to these plans, and this requires “leaders,” whose true func-tion now becomes evident. For the plan, “the necessity of ‘leadership’,that is, the planned calculation of the securing of the whole of beings,is required” (GA 7: 89–90/EP, 105; tm). The demand for security isalways a call for such Führers.

Planning is a matter of ensuring the smooth and “frictionless” cir-culation of resources along channels and pipelines of order and deliv-ery. The plan’s success is assured from the outset, because beings arenow in essence planable. The mathematical tracking of stock and sup-plies becomes a total tracking when things have become completelyavailable. Nothing is concealed from this taking of inventory, with thee!ect that the mathematical model of the thing is no di!erent fromthe thing itself. The mathematical modeling of things, an operationthat Heidegger traces back to Ockham and the nominalist split betweenword and thing (see VS, 30–31/13–14), is paradigmatic for the disap-pearance of identifiably discrete beings under the rule of technology.The model is no longer a representation of what is modeled but, ina paradoxical manner, the thing itself. Nothing beyond the thing’s

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mathematical model is recognized. Everything essential to the thing iscontained in the model, without remainder. Such is the truth of thestanding-reserve; it is a collapse of the distances that made possiblerepresentation. Without that spacing, there is only the su!ocating rushof the standing-reserve along the circuitry of the plan.

The plan makes manifest the self-willing nature of technology, inthat the plan has no purpose other than to assure its own expansionand increase. For the plan to function, it is therefore necessary thatbeings be consumed and their replacements follow right upon them.The plan plans for consumption, outlining the paths and channels thatthe standing-reserve will occupy in its compelled obedience to order. Theworld wars have pointed towards this end, according to Heidegger,for “They press toward a securing of resources [Bestandsicherung] for aconstant form of consumption” (GA 7: 88; EP, 103–4; tm). This con-sumption is synonymous with replacement, since there is nothing lostin consumption that is not immediately replaced. The plan is to pro-tect itself from loss by completely insulating itself from uncertainty.The plan seeks “the ‘all-inclusive’ [restlose] securing of the ordering oforder” (GA 7: 92; EP, 107; tm). Order is only secured when there isnothing that resists it, nothing that remains in “disorder.” Any remain-der would stand outside of the prevailing order, as would any di!erence,in complete disorder. There is another Nietzschean intimation in this,as Heidegger reads the will to power as a drive to secure and orderall chaos. Without remainder (restlose), without rest, the standing-reservethreatens to encompass everything in a monotonous, swirling sameness.The more secure the world becomes, the greater is the abandonmentof being as it is further enframed within the plan.

Homeland security is thus an oxymoron, since one of the mostprominent e!ects of planning is the elimination of national di!erencesand “homelands.” Security itself is precisely the planned eliminationof di!erences, and as for “homeland,” it is ever more di/cult to con-ceive of a homeland that would be nationally distinct from another.This is not to be understood as a complaint against internationalismeither, for “Just as the distinction between war and peace has becomeuntenable, the distinction between ‘national’ and ‘international’ hasalso collapsed” (GA 7: 92; EP, 107). We have already seen that Heideggerattributes a will to the annihilation of homeland to Americanism; whatneeds to be added to this view is that there is not one form of gov-ernment any di!erent; each is run by leaders:

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The uniformity of beings arising from the emptiness of the abandonmentof Being, in which it is only a matter of the calculable security of itsorder, an order which it subjugates to the will to will, this uniformityalso conditions everywhere in advance of all national di!erences the uni-formity of leadership [Führerschaft], for which all forms of government areonly one instrument of leadership among others. (GA 7: 93; EP, 108; tm)

Government and politics are simply further means of directing waysof life according to plan; and no one, neither terrorist nor politician,should be able to alter these carefully constructed ways of life. Waysof life are themselves e!ects of the plan, and the predominant way oflife today is that of an all-consuming Americanism. National di!erencesfall to the wayside. The homeland, when not completely outmoded,can only appear as commodified quaintness. All governments partici-pate in the eradication of national di!erences. Insofar as Americanismrepresents the attempt to annihilate the “homeland,” then under theaegis of the abandonment of being, all governments and forms of lead-ership become Americanism.

The loss of national di!erences is accordant with the advent of ter-rorism, since terrorism knows no national bounds but, rather, threat-ens di!erence and boundaries as such. Terrorism is everywhere, where“everywhere” no longer refers to a collection of distinct places andlocations but instead to a “here” that is the same as there, as every“there.” The threat of terrorism is not international, but antinationalor, to strain a Heideggerian formulation, unnational. Homeland secu-rity, insofar as it destroys the very thing that it claims to protect, isnothing opposed to terrorism, but rather the consummation of its threat.Our leaders, in their attempt to secure the world against terrorism,only serve to further drive the world towards its homogenized state.

The elimination of di!erence in the standing-reserve along with theelimination of national di!erences serve to identify the threat of ter-rorism with the quest for security. The absence of this threat wouldbe the absence of being, and its consummation would be the absenceof being as well. Security is only needed where there is a threat. If athreat is not perceived, if one believes oneself invulnerable, then thereis no need for security. Security is for those who know they can beinjured, for those who can be damaged. Does America know that itcan be damaged? If security requires a recognition of one’s own vul-nerability, then security can only be found in the acknowledgment ofone’s threatened condition, and this means that it can only be foundin a recognition of being as threat. To be secure, there must be the

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threat. For this reason, all of the planned securities that attempt toabolish the threat can never achieve the security they seek. Securityrequires that we preserve the threat, and this means that we must actin the o/ce of preservers.

As preservers, what we are charged to preserve is not so much thepresent being as the concealment that inhabits it. Preserving a thingmeans to not challenge it forth into technological availability, to let itmaintain an essential concealment. That we participate in this essenc-ing of being does not make of it a subjective matter, for there is noisolated subject in preservation, but an opening of being. Heideggerwill name this the clearing of the truth (Wahrheit) of being, and it isthis clearing that Dasein preserves (bewahrt). When a thing truthfully is,when it is what it is in truth, then it is preserved. In preserving beings,Dasein participates in the truth (preservation) of being. The truth ofbeing is being as threat, and this threat only threatens when Daseinpreserves it in terror. Dasein is not innocent in the terrorization ofbeing. On the contrary, Dasein is complicit in it. Dasein refuses toabolish terrorism.

For this reason, a Heideggerian thinking of terrorism must remainskeptical of all the various measures taken to oppose terrorism, to rootit out or to circumvent it. These are so many attempts to do awaywith what threatens, measures that are themselves in the highest degreewillful. This will can only impose itself upon being, can only draw outmore and more of its wrath, and this inward wrath of being main-tains itself in a never-ending supply. The will can only devastate theearth. Rather than approaching the world in terms of resources to besecured, true security can only be found in the preservation of thethreat of being. It is precisely when we are busy with security mea-sures and the frantic organization of resources that we directly assaultthe things we would preserve. The threat of being goes unheeded whenthings are restlessly shuttled back and forth, harried, monitored, andsurveilled. The threat of being is only preserved when things are allowedto rest. In the notes to the “Evening Conversation,” security is thoughtin just such terms:

Security (what one understands by this) arises not from securing and themeasures taken for this; security resides in rest [in der Ruhe] and is itselfmade superfluous by this. (GA 77: 244)23

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The rest in question is a rest from the economic cycling and circu-lating of the standing reserve. The technological unworld, the situa-tion of total war, is precisely the era of restlessness (“The term ‘totality’says nothing more; it names only the spread of the hitherto knowninto the ‘restless’” [GA 69: 181]). Security is superfluous here, whichis only to say that it is unnecessary or useless. It is not found in util-ity, but in the preserved state of the useless. Utility and function areprecisely the dangers of a t°xnh that has turned antagonistic towardsnature. In rest, they no longer determine the being of the thing. Inresting, things are free of security measures, but not for all that ren-dered insecure. Instead, they are preserved. There is no security; thisis what we have to preserve.

V. Conclusion

Heideggerian thinking is a thinking that thinks away from simple pres-ence and absence. It thinks what Heidegger calls “the between” (dasZwischen). This between is a world of nonpresence and nonabsence.Annihilation is impossible for this world and so is security. The ter-ror experienced today is a clue to the withdrawal of being. The worldis denatured, drained of reality. Everything is threatened and the dan-ger only ever increases. Dasein flees to a metaphysics of presence toescape the threatened world, hoping there to find security. But secu-rity cannot do away with the threat, rather it must guard it. Daseinguards the truth of being in the experience of terror.

What is perhaps repugnant to consider in all this is that being callsfor terrorism and for terrorists. With the enframing of being and the cir-culation of standing-reserve, what is has already been destroyed.Terrorism is merely the ugly confirmation of this point. As we haveseen, being does not linger behind the scenes but is found in the stag-ing itself. If being is to terrorize—if, in other words, this is an age ofterrorism—then being must call for terrorists. They are simply more“slaves of the history of beyng” (GA 69: 209) and, in Heidegger’s eyes,no di!erent from the politicians of the day in service to the cause ofAmericanism. But someone might object, the terrorists are murderersand the politicians are not. Granting this objection despite its obviousnaïveté, we can nonetheless see that both politicians and terrorists arecalled for by the standing-reserve, the one to ensure its nonabsence,that the plan will reach everyone everywhere, and the other to ensureits nonpresence, that all beings will now be put into circulation by the

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threat of destruction. In this regard, “human resources” are no di!erentfrom “livestock,” and with this, an evil worse than death has alreadytaken place. Human resources do not die, they perish.

Insofar as it is Americanism that is identified with technologicaldomination and the spread of the unworld, then it is no wonder thatAmerica is the place where the question of terrorism can and mustbe posed. Instead of turning from terror, we are called to respond toit. Not by sealing ourselves o! from it in a single-minded deafness,but by preserving the trace of being in its withdrawal. America is dis-tinct in this because America most faces the challenge of Americanism.America is today fighting the shadow of itself, it yearns to leap overits shadow and into a state of pure visibility and security. America isnot faced with an outside aggressor, but with its own photographicnegative in Americanism/terrorism. America’s challenge is to not recog-nize itself in Americanism and to preserve its di!erence from this ogre.For America to believe that it is the driving force behind Americanismis for America to believe that it is in control of being. Americanismis a movement of being; it is nothing “American.” America’s other isneither Greece nor Rome, but Americanism. America must distinguishitself from Americanism in order to confront Americanism as its own-most other. Terror can teach us this and lead us to preserve what isour own.

Is this to say that we should remain forever terrorized? exist for-ever in a state of terror? Is this supposed to provide a solution to theproblem of terrorism? Surely that would be an outrageous demand(arge Zumutung) to place upon thinking. The older man says the samething about malevolence as a basic trait of being; it places an outra-geous demand upon thinking. A first step away from the imposed con-venience of Americanism might be heard in the words of the youngerman, “That this should be easy, namely to think the essential, is alsoa demand which only arises from the spirit of devastation” (GA 77:215). If we are to think the essential, to think what withdraws in con-cealment before the total availability of the unworld around us, thenour thinking itself will have to change. Thinking the essential, this isa thinking that we can never be done with, a thinking that is neverto be accomplished, a thinking that concerns what can never be thoughtthrough.

Rather than think from out of the spirit of devastation, we are calledto let it into thought; not to think devastation, but to devastatedly think.Thinking itself must be devastated and terrorized if we are to think

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today. Such a thinking would attend to the uncommon nature of ourpresent situation before the terrorist threat. If America is terrorized,then it is terrorized by Americanism. But Americanism is nothing morethan an epoch of being; it is the withholding of being in its withdrawalfrom us. In the face of this withdrawal we are called to think. Perhapsthis is possible nowhere other than America; perhaps this thinking itselfwill mark another beginning for America, an American thinking thatwould not be enslaved to a pragmatic and utilitarian metaphysics. Tothink in this other American manner would be to entertain a newrelation to technology, what Heidegger calls in the Spiegel interview of1966 an “explicit relationship” to technology and “to what is hap-pening today and what has been underway for three centuries.”24 Issuch a thinking possible? Could it ever arise in America? Heideggeranswers the question directly:

23*&0&.: This explicit relationship, do the Americans have it today?-&*$&00&%: They do not have it either. They are still entangled in athinking, pragmatism, that fosters technological operating and manipu-lating but simultaneously blocks the path toward a contemplation of whatis characteristic of modern technology. In the meantime, attempts to breakaway from pragmatic-positivistic thinking are being made here and there in the USA.25

There are no guarantees that these attempts will succeed; their suc-cess does not require such guarantees. We must hope that in the nameof homeland security we do not too obstinately squelch them.

ABBREVIATIONS TO WORKS OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Volumes of Gesamtausgabe (GA)

GA 5 Holzwege. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 2nd ed. Frankfurt amMain: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003. Translated by Julian Young and KennethHaynes under the title O! the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002).

GA 7 Vorträge und Aufsätze. Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurtam Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. [Note: Cited by pagination of the sin-gle edition, supplied in margins of the GA.]

GA 45 Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewälte “Probleme” der “Logik.” Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,1992. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer under the titleBasic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic” (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1994).

GA 52 Hölderlins Hymne “Andenken.” Edited by Curd Ochwadt. 2nd ed. Frankfurt amMain: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992.

GA 53 Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” Edited by Walter Biemel. 2nd ed. Frankfurt amMain: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993. Translated by William McNeill and Julia

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Davis under the title Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1996).

GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann.2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994. Translated by ParvisEmad and Kenneth Maly under the title Contributions to Philosophy ( from Enowning)(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

GA 67 Metaphysik und Nihilismus. Edited by Hans-Joachim Friedrich. Frankfurt amMain: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999.

GA 69 Die Geschichte des Seyns. Edited by Peter Trawny. Frankfurt am Main: VittorioKlostermann, 1998.

GA 77 Feldweg-Gespräche. Edited by Ingrid Schüßler. Frankfurt am Main: VittorioKlostermann, 1995.

GA 79 Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Edited by Petra Jaeger. Frankfurt am Main:Vittorio Klostermann, 1994.

Single Editions

VS Vier Seminare. Pages 267–407 of GA 15: Seminare. Edited by Curd Ochwadt.Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986. [Note: Cited by paginationof the single edition, supplied in margins of the GA.] Translated by AndrewMitchell and François Ra!oul under the title Four Seminars (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2004).

WHD Was Heißt Denken? 4th ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1984. Translatedby J. Glenn Gray under the title What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper& Row, Publishers, 1968).

Other English Translations

EP The End of Philosophy. Edited and Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York:Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973.

PLT Poetry, Language, Thought. Edited and Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York:Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971.

QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Edited and translated by WilliamLovitt. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1977.

NOTES

1. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege: Hinterlassenes Werk,ed. Werner Hahlweg, 19th ed.(Bonn: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlag, 1980), Book I, chapter 1, §2, p. 191. Edited andtranslated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret under the title On War (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1984), 75. Subsequent references will be cited by book,chapter, and where applicable, section number, with German/English pagination.

2. Clausewitz, I.1, § 15, p. 204/83.3. Clausewitz, IV.8, p. 449/245.4. Clausewitz, I.2, pp. 191–192/75.5. Clausewitz, I.1, § 3, p. 193/76.6. Clausewitz, I.2, p. 215/90.7. Clausewitz, VIII.2, p. 955/581.8. Clausewitz, VIII.2, p. 953/579.9. Clausewitz, I.1, § 13, p. 203/82.

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10. Clausewitz, I.2, pp. 215/90–91.11. Clausewitz, VIII.2, p. 952/579.12. Clausewitz, I.2, p. 215/90.13. For parenthetical references, see key to abbreviations. Modified translations are

indicated by “tm,” added emphasis by “em.”14. Cf. Caleb Carr’s historically detailed and earnest book The Lessons of Terror: A History

of Warfare Against Civilians: Why it Has Always Failed and Why it Will Fail Again (NewYork: Random House, 2002).

15. The strength of this statement is clear when we consider that Russia is largelyidentical with communism, for Heidegger, and that communism is fundamentallyshaped by the power of technology, “The empowering of power in and by uncon-ditioned machination is the essence of ‘communism’” (GA 69: 191). Communismmay well be just more Americanism.

16. Our word “terror” is derived from the Latin infinitive “terrere,” which can meanto frighten, but also, when used transitively, to drive away by terror or fright (herethe a/liation with withdrawal). See “terror” in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2ndedition. The Latin terrere, for its part, goes back to the Greek tr°v, which alsoagrees with the motif of withdrawal, meaning to flee from fear. See the entry“terreo,” in A Latin Dictionary, ed. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1879) and tr°v, in A Greek-English Lexicon, ed. Henry GeorgeLiddell and Robert Scott et al., 9th ed., with a revised supplement (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1996). Lewis and Short also trace the Latin and Greek formsback to the Sanskrit root tras-, trasami, tremble. As for the German erschrecken, fromschrecken, Grimm supplies the Latin translation of “terrere” for both. Schrecken means“to make jump” and to bring about “a violent movement of the disposition [gemüts-bewegung].” See “Erschecken,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm,ed. Dr. Moriz Heyne et al., vol. 3 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1899) and“Schrecken,” in ibid., vol. 9 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1862).

17. It is for this reason that I translate Erschrecken by “terror” rather than follow Emadand Maly’s choice of “startled dismay.” Terror names a trembling resonance. Bytalking around it, by paraphrases, we avoid being claimed by it.

18. Martin Heidegger, “Abendgespräch in einem Kriegsgefangenenlager in Rußlandzwischen einem Jüngeren und einem Älteren,” in Feldweg-Gespräche, GA 77: 203–45.

19. The conversation partners go so far as to claim that the will itself would be evil(GA 77: 208), an even stronger claim when we consider that for Heidegger, theentire history of Western philosophy has been a history of the will, a view voicedin another dialogue of the period, “ÉAg¤bas¤h,” where the wise man states that“With the word ‘will’ I actually mean no faculty of the soul, but instead that whichgrounds the essence of the soul, of spirit, of reason, of love, of life, according tothe unanimous, but scarcely pondered doctrine of Western thinkers” (GA 77: 78).

20. “‘Devastation’ [Verwüstung] means to us that everything, the world, the human, theearth, is transformed into a desert [Wüste]” (GA 77: 211). The conversation part-ners even suggest that the earthly conception of a desert would be merely an“insu/ciently thought out representation” of the devastating processes that havehere come to light (see GA 77: 212).

21. Four years later, in the Bremen lecture “The Danger,” Heidegger expresses thethought of being as malevolent in terms of danger, “Beyng is plainly in itself, fromitself, for itself, the danger [Das Seyn ist in sich aus sich für sich die Gefahr schlechthin]”(GA 79: 54).

22. Not limited to religion, assurance is to be found in morality as such. The youngerman in the labor camp has already made known his aversion for thinking evilmorally; at a later point in the dialogue we find out, perhaps, the reason behindsuch views. Morality, insofar as it is a mode of assurance and security, is identi-

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cal to evil. According to the younger man, “it could be that morality, for its part,and with it all the particular attempts through morality to place the people withinthe prospect of a world order and to posit world-security within certainty, wouldalso be only a monstrous product [Ausgeburt] of evil” (GA 77: 209).

23. The citation continues (GA 77: 244):

But what is rest without that wherein the resting one rests?Where is there to rest, without a belonging in the proper?Where is such a belonging without enownment [Ereignung]?Where is enownment without enowning?

24. See “The Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in Antwort: Martin Heidegger imGespräch, ed. Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (Tübingen: Verlag Günther Neske,1988), 81–114, p. 105. Translated by Lisa Harries with Joachim Neugroschel underthe title Martin Heidegger and National Socialism (New York: Paragon House, 1990),41–66, p. 61.

25. “The Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” 105–6/61; em.

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