1. Following Foucault's most succinct definition, “Discursive practices are not purely and simply ways of producing discourse. They are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms for transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them.” Michel Foucault, “History of Systems of Thought” [1970–71], Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 199–204; here 200. In terms more familiar to some, a discursive practice is at once theoria and phronesis. But then note the necessity on our occasion to violate Strauss's great (public) dictum. “In practical matters there is a right of the first occupant: what is established must be respected. In theoretical matters this cannot be. Differently stated: The rule of practice is ‘let sleeping dogs lie,’ do not disturb the established. In theoretical matters the rule is ‘do not let sleeping dogs lie.’” Leo Strauss, On Plato's Symposium [Chicago, fall semester 1959], ed. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), i. An authentically critical memorial of Gadamer requires thztphronesisbe treated exactly like theoria. Prod all the dogs and dare the consequences. (Memorialized communists should be so lucky.) [BACK]

2. I am thinking here specifically of the work of Balibar and Negri on the imbrication of philosophy and politics in Spinoza, but also more generally of what today is called “the new Spinoza.” See Etienne Balibar, “Spinoza, the Anti-Orwell: The Fear of the Masses” [1982], in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before

3. Cited in Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem andFoucault [1969–72], trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1975), 34. Whatever Gadamer does discuss he illuminates. But, of course, as he is the first to acknowledge, he does not illuminate it fully, and to illuminate one thing is necessarily to obscure another. And there is much that Gadamer does not discuss, and hence does not illuminate and so obscures in another way. But all this is true grosso modo of any philosopher. More specifically, as put by Stanley Rosen: “At his best, namely, in presenting his textual analyses, Gadamer demonstrates that the gift of understanding is indeed superior to method, and even, thanks to his own phronesis or prudentia, to an internally incoherent theoretical foundation. When Gadamer is illuminating about Plato, Dilthey, or Heidegger, it is because the doctrine oi Horizontverschmehungis, erroneous, just as its philological equivalent, the relativity of historical perspectives, is erroneous. Both fall short of the ontological complexity of history, which is intelligible despite its multiplicity of perspectives.” Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 165. For the further development of this argument, see Rosen, “Horizontverschmelzung,” in PHGG2O7-i8. [BACK]

4. Cited from Betty Ramsey, ed., The Little Book of Famous Insults (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper, 1964), 49. [BACK]

5. Compare “Amicus Plato, sed magis arnica veritas” (I am a friend of Plato, but a greater friend of truth) (Cervantes, Don Quixote, pt. 2, ch. 48); and “Amicus Plato, amicus Socrates, sed praehonoranda veritas” (I am a friend of Plato, and a friend of Socrates, but still higher to be honored is the truth) (Luther, “De servo arbitrio,” i). This phrase had passed (via Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics) to Cervantes and to Luther (and to Nietzsche's Zarathustra) from the Platonic Socrates himself: “u|o.ei |o.evToi, av e|a.oi Tiet9r|a9e, a|a.ixgov cpgovftaavTe Zooxgafoui;, jir\q Se ctXr|9eiai; TTOU |a.aXXov” (But you, when you follow me, concern yourselves far less about Socrates, and much more about the truth) (Phaedo gic). Another explicit adherent to this principle was the communist Louis Althusser. See “Portrait du philosophe material-iste” [i()82],mEcritsphilosophiquesetpoKtiques, Tomel, ed. Francois Matheron (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994), 581–82; here 582. Gadamer's eponymous essay on what we can now call the “amicus sed principle” is one of his many reconstructions of Aristotle's responses to Plato. Because “the authentic Platonic philosophy [was] never fixed in writing” it must be reconstructed “not only qua Plato's dialogic form but also through his student Aristotle's written interpretations.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Amicus Plato magis arnica veritas” [1968] (GW6: 71–89; here 74). But what Gadamer does not address are the consequences for his own truth, his own discourse. For a powerful, albeit brief and indirect, critique of Gadamer's definition of the political in Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteks (1978), see Reiner Schiirmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy [1982], trans. Christine-Marie Gros and the author (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 328, n. 30. Finally,

6. Too, as pleased as Waite imagines Gadamer might have been at receiving a festschrift in his honor, Waite also imagines a certain unease on Gadamer's part, given the ancient (not to mention psychoanalytic) tradition that to honor a living person is also in effect to produce that person's epitaph. Furthermore, presented with any essay containing uncritical celebrations of his work, Gadamer (still in Waite's imagination) would find himself in the position of the fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian general and statesman Phocion, who, upon hearing the applause of the crowd he was addressing, famously is said to have muttered to one side, “What asininity could I have uttered that they applaud me thus?” (In his case, however, Phocion was later sentenced, like Socrates, to die by hemlock and was buried outside Athenian walls). Gadamer has earned a certain right not to suffer fools gladly, be they adversaries or friends. Finally, whatever one might think of it theoretically or practically, what Gadamer intends by “dialogue” is a very specific, rigorously argued philosophical principle that has little or nothing to do with the touchy-feely, New Age “Let's dialogue!”—even though the latter can, and sometimes does, appeal to Gadamer for philosophical legitimation. For an apposite (if necessarily schematic) depiction of the tension in Gadamer's writing and personal demeanor between boldness and modesty, combativeness and the desire to please “all possible audiences,” as well as a fair but tough-minded analysis of his “detached opportunism,” see George Steiner, “But Is That Enough? Hans-Georg Gadamer and the ‘Summons to Astonishment,’” Times Literary Supplement (January 12, 2001): 11–12; here 12. Gadamer's “opportunism” may not have been as “detached” as Steiner makes it out to be, however. (He sure was wrong about Heidegger in that regard.) [BACK]

7. Alan Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil [1998], trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 24–25. For more on the theoretical and practical consequence of this Denh und Berufsverbot, see Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis) use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001) and Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September n and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002). [BACK]

8. Of course, the history of philosophy provides many versions of what this second virtue (virtus) might be. In the case of Gadamer, for example, a Machiavellian cynic might define it, in part, as the willingness to practice also a certain degree of immoderation when the case demands, as occurred during the Third Reich with which Gadamer, by his own admission, voluntarily collaborated, at least initially-but let us all strive not to be just cynical Machiavellians. [BACK]

9. It is important to add that most of the following argument applies equally well to what remains today of the Frankfurt School's “critical theory” (e.g.,Jiirgen Haber-mas and Axel Honneth) and to its current “debate” with Anglo-Saxon “Left Rawl-sianism.” For a useful short critique of their unacknowledged common ground, see Alessandro Ferrara, “Left Rawlsianism and Social Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy 91 (Sept./Oct. 1998): 30–32—even though the author ultimately falls into the same

10. Aporia is intimately related to the dialectic (dialektike) and therefore also to the (Platonic) Socrates' technique of interlocutory dialogue (dialogos) (Meno, Sod; Sophist, 2443; Theaetetus, 2iob-c). For Aristotle, this entire process both defines the philosophical project proper and is its heaviest burden and responsibility (Metaphysics, gg6a). By contrast, as it is commonly used in much contemporary decon-structive discourse (e.g., de Man and his uncritical followers—unlike Jacques Der-rida, who has written explicitly on some of the term's complexity in Aporias: Crossing Aesthetics [1993], trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993]), “aporia” today widely means simply “insurmountable impasse.” And so it is that the (ancient Greek) terminus a quo or birth of philosophy has become philosophy's (postmodern) terminus ad quern or death. If there be any “epistemological break” in history, this is it. [BACK]

11. That Gadamer is aware of the problem of esotericism should go without saying (see, e.g., Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Dialektik und Sophistik im siebenten Platon-ischen Brief” [1964]; GW6:90–115). The question however, remains: did Gadamer also use esotericism? [BACK]

12. The Lacanian thesis that “there is no metalanguage” is shared by both Der-ridean poststructuralism and Gadamerian hermeneutics, albeit, in Lacan's own case, “in a way that is completely incompatible with post-structuralism, as well as hermeneutics.” Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 153. [BACK]

13. One might say that one of the most basic impulsions of Waite's engagement with Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism is derived from a single remark by Trotsky: “How can a corpse be entrusted with deciding whether Marxism is a living force? No, I categorically refuse to participate in that kind of endeavor.” Leon Trotsky, “The Future of Partisan Review: A Letter to Dwight MacDonald” [1938; first published 1950], in Leon Trotsky on Literature and Art, ed. Paul N. Siegel (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 101–3; here 103. [BACK]

14. See DDe here, esp. 52–54, and Lawrence K. Schmidt, “Introduction: Between Certainty and Relativism” (SRi-ig, esp. 12–13). Incidentally, the reason Waite normally puts the terms “right” and “left” in scare quotes is in the attempt (failed it appears) to preclude a Zuckert from removing them to assert, say, that “Waite locates Gadamer on the right on the basis of Orozco's article [but also her book].” The scare quotes are intended by Waite to indicate that in certain cases, like the case of Nietzsche, the “right” and the “left” are part of an unacknowledged consensus in important respects, hence that there is no distinction between them, hence no real left, though perhaps therefore a real right. (“Vulgar Marxists,” in this view, are not merely economistic reductivists but also include those who ignore even the existence of the right's exo/esotericism.) One could add to this reason for the scare quotes that to be “left” or “right” in philosophy is not necessarily to be “right” or “left” elsewhere, say, in politics. [BACK]

15. See the hostile account of Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin's, 1988), but also the sympathetic account of Lawrence Lam-pert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). [BACK]

16. Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit

17. See, for example, Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy? [1955], in What Is Political Philosophy 1? and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 9–55- [BACK]

18. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 234. [BACK]

19. Rzdiou, L'etre et I'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 312. [BACK]

20. Gadamer, “Oberflachlichkeit und Unkenntnis: Zur Veroffentlichung von Victor Farias,” in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gesprdch, ed. Giinther Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 152–55; here 153. See, further, Victor Farias, Heidegger und der Nazionalsozialismus, trans, (from the Spanish and French) Klaus Laermann, introduction byJiirgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1987). It was of course the publication of Farias's book that launched the most recent, ongoing version of I'affaire Heidegger. Because Gadamer has been subsequently implicated, it is important to say something about this affair and his reaction. The main title of Gadamer's indignant response in Antwort: Martin Heidegger im Gesprdch translates as “superficiality and ignorance,” which would likely be his retort to attempts to embroil him in the same controversy. In any event, Gadamer joined in the outright rejection of Farias that cut across the ideological spectrum, forming a united front of Gadamerians, Derridians, and Levinasians, among others. Two claims made by this consensus are noteworthy, i) Farias's work was nothing more than an opportunist succes de scandale. Arguing guilt by association, when not based on factual errors, it contributed “nothing new” to what had long been “common knowledge” about Heidegger's “brief” political involvement in National Socialism. 2) Farias's work lacked any conceptual merit, and thus was unable to articulate the political to the philosophical in any convincing way. In particular, Heidegger's masterpiece, Being and Time, remains wholly unsullied by the (merely alleged) political

21. Compare also this remark: “Where Heidegger's startlingly nihilistic thinking places no barrier in his way toward Nazism and may even encourage him, Gadamer's thinking most certainly places a barrier in his way. Everything in Gadamer's thinking points him away from Nazism, not in the direction of mass popular democracy certainly, but surely in the direction of the well-integrated political community. If Gadamer did have a flirt with Nazism, it can only be accounted for in terms of the career ambitions of a young German academic.” Robert R. Sullivan, Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 180–81. Of course, the contradiction in this judicious-sounding remark is that if someone “flirts” with something, then it cannot be—logically or psychoanalytically—that “everything” in that person points away from that object of flirtation; too, “career ambitions” cannot be so neatly severed from “thinking” if it is to more than a merely academic pursuit, and if “the well-integrated political community” in question is to exclude “mass popular democracy.” Similarly, what evidence is there, exactly, that the Gadamer who, in Sullivan's words, “wrote in an Aesopian political language similar to Bakhtin … until the collapse of the German state in 1945” (p. 187), did not persist in writing in such a language after 1945? This question is aside from the notorious problem haunting current

22. Gadamer, “Oberflachlichkeit und Unkenntnis,” 153. [BACK]

23. Catherine H. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 103. [BACK]

24. See Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918], Collected Works, various translators (Moscow: Progress, 1972), 28: 227–326; here 235. [BACK]

25. Zuckert, Postmodern Platos, 276. [BACK]

26. Contrast Zuckert's own position with a thesis from the recent history of science: “There is no idea, however ancient and absurd that is not capable of improving our knowledge. The whole history of thought is absorbed into science and is used for improving every single theory. Nor is political interference rejected. It may be needed to overcome the chauvinism of science that resists alternatives to the status quo.” Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchist Theory of Knowledge [1975] (Verso: London, 1978), 47. [BACK]

27. Gadamer, “Reply to Karl-Otto Apel” (PHGGg4-g7; here 97). [BACK]

28. For a recent discussion of this distinction and its import, see Zizek, “Multi-culturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (Sept./Oct. 1997): 28–51; esp. the conclusion. [BACK]

29. If Waite can be forgiven his momentary lapse, in the footnote alluded to, into humanism (with regard to the question of his “sadness” concerning the Gadamer case), we can continue with the structural problem at hand. Undoubtedly Waite could and certainly should have been more clear: Orozco's suggestion that Gada-mer's writings in the Third Reich constituted an “art of allusion” would, Waite believes, have been strengthened by more attentiveness to the long tradition of philosophy in which Gadamer was arguably working, and by more consideration both of how Gadamer and this tradition strive to implement this “art” rhetorically (the illocutionary level) and also of how this implementation is successful (the perlocu-tionary level). By distinct contrast, the use-value of Zuckert's discussion of “postmodern Platos” is almost obviated by her failure to take adequate stock of this tradition. In other words, generally and specifically, Orozco's argument would be strengthened by attentiveness to the Straussian technique of reading, which is not the Strauss Zuckert appears to know. In short, Waite is in basic solidarity with Orozco's attempt to develop a methodology adequate to grasp the exo/esoteric tradition, though he thinks it could be elaborated; he is not in solidarity with Zuckert's apparent lack of interest in this entire problematic. Certainly, Zuckert nowhere follows Strauss's great dictum, articulated with regard to Plato but also more generally binding, that “One cannot separate the understanding of Plato's teaching from the understanding of the form in which it is presented. One must pay as much attention to the How as to the What. At any rate to begin with one must even pay greater attention to the ‘form’ than to the ‘substance,’ since the meaning of the ‘substance’ depends on the ‘form.’” Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 52. [BACK]

30. For a preliminary attempt to identify, analyze, and criticize Heidegger's version exo/esotericism, near its public inception, see Geoff Waite, “On Esotericism: Heidegger and/or Cassirer at Davos,” Political Theory 26, no. 5 (Oct. 1998): 603–51. [BACK]

31. On the fascists' self-definition as “relativists” (explicitly opposed to National Socialist racist essentialism), see Waite, Nietzsche's Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 211–12; on the link of both to what he calls “the fascoid” and “the fas-coid liberal,” see 71–76. For his part, Waite adheres to what Zizek, developing a point argued by Badiou, calls “Lenin's premise—which today, in our era of postmodern relativism, is more pertinent that ever,” namely, “that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: the universal truth of a concrete situation can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position; truth is, by definition, one-sided.” Zizek, “Afterword: Lenin's Choice,” 177. (To be sure, the undergirding thesis here is little more than a plausible interpretation of Heraclitus's fragment 641 [Diels-Kranz] when we include its site of enunciation: “Listening to the Logos, and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are one.”) Yes, this position is mutatis mutandis—that is., formally—similar to the position against relativism in adamant favor of “standpoints,” as taken by Heidegger in the Third Reich. See, especially, Heidegger, Logik alsdieFragenachdem Wesen der Sprache [Freiburg winter semester 1934], ed. Wilhelm Hallwachs, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 38: 79–80. On the other hand, as is clear from public lectures delivered by Heidegger in 1934 (first published only in 2000), he understood the content of National Socialism—indeed its very “essence”—to be the reproduction and preservation of (pro-Nietzschean and anticommunist) “order of rank” (Rangordnung). Heidegger, “25. Jahre nach unserem Abirturium” [May 26–27, 1934] and “Die deutsche Uni-versitat” [August 15–16, 1934], both in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 16: 279–84 (here 282) and 285–307 (here 304), respectively. It would have been interesting to know what Gadamer's own position in 1934 on this problem was in detail, since he cannot not have had one. If the following remark is true of political theory it is mutatis mutandis true of all theory. “The theoretician of the political must be a political theoretician. A treatise about the political can only be … a political treatise, determined by enmity and exposing itself to enmity.” Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue [1988], trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. [BACK]

32. Fully two-thirds (66 percent) of German philosophy professors were members of the combined NSDAP, NSLB, and NSDDB (National Socialist Lecturers Union). Breaking down the Thousand Year Reich into three periods (1933–37, con ~ solidation of power; 1933–42, stabilization; and 1943–45, collapse), it has been noted that between May 1933 and May 1937 new membership in the NSDAP was practically closed. Anyone joining after May 1937 had had to petition several years earlier; anyone joining between January 1933 and May i, 1933, had to have undergone two years of trial membership in order to be admitted (otherwise one's political commitment was held suspect). See George Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext: Ge-samtuberblich zum NS-Engagement der Universitdtsphilosophen, trans. Rainer Alisch and Thomas Laugstien (Hamburg: Argument, 1993), 17–27; on Gadamer specifically, see 40–41. Other useful historical surveys of the situation and activities of German philosophers during the Third Reich include: the anthology Deutsche Philosophen 1933, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Hamburg: Argument, 1989), esp. Haug's introductory

33. See Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext, 20–22. [BACK]

34. Johannes Maria Verweyen, a professor of medieval philosophy at Bonn, joined the NSLB in June 1933. He had fought on the front in World War I, had publicly supported the German Socialist Party (SPD) (though was not a party member), and had remained a Freemason and a Catholic. After he was expelled from the NSLB in 1935, largely for the latter reason, his response was to give a public speech against Nazi racist ideology in Dresden. After several warnings and restrictions, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941. First interred in Sachsenhausen, Verweyen died in Bergen-Belsen shortly before the liberation, in March 1945. [BACK]

35. Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext, 105 n. i. Unbescholten, translated here as “respectable,” also signifies several senses of “guiltless” and “innocent.” In German legal discourse, unbescholten sein is “to be free of any prior conviction”; in sexual discourse, ein unbescholtenes Mddchen is “a chaste or pure girl.” (Though of course the NSLB charter referred to masculine teachers and educators only.) Thus one might say that the Nazis and their affiliates combined legal with sexual terminology to arrive at what in such charters was meant primarily and specifically as racial innocence, purity, or “respectability.” Presently we will hear Gadamer retroactively describing himself in the Third Reich as “ein politisch Unbescholtener.” [BACK]

36. Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext, 40. The DNVP had been instrumental in bringing Hitler into legal power on January 30, 1933. Indeed, initially the NSDAP and the DNVP held power jointly, until the latter was deemed redundant, dissolved, and absorbed into the NSDAP in the spring of 1933. In the words of Leaman, “The DNVP was a conservative, anti-communist, and anti-parliamentarian oriented party, which had many objectives in common with the Nazis: the revocation of the Treaty of Versailles, the rejection of the Weimar Constitution, and the founding of authoritarian central rule. It was a militant National Socialist organization, which just like the Nazis was convinced that Germany had only lost the first world war because liberals, socialists, and Jews had ‘ambushed’ the Imperial regime and its army … ; it supported the building of concentration camps for domestic opponents of the regime and the laws against the German Jews” (Heidegger im Kontext, 18). [BACK]

37. Ibid., 40 [BACK]

38. Ibid., 40, 105. [BACK]

39. Ibid., 105. [BACK]

40. In 1938 Gadamer, who tells only part of this story himself in Philosophische Lehrjahre (Philosophical apprenticeships) and elsewhere, became visiting professor at Leipzig, replacing Gehlen (who became section head of the Amt Rosenberg, and was later chair of the German Philosophical Society). With Gehlen's approval, in

41. For the complete list of signatories from the philosophy profession, see Lea-man, Heidegger im Kontext, 100. [BACK]

42. Hugo Ott has argued that Heidegger's signature on this declaration, combined with his speech on its behalf (Gadamer did not go this far), was “the worst publicly expressed aberration of the philosopher.” Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographic (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988), 196; emphasis added. [BACK]

43. In addition to Gadamer, other professors granted the much-desired and difficult-to-obtain privilege of foreign travel included Hans Freyer (who was not officially in either the NSDAP or the NSLB, but, as Gadamer also notes, was an avid supporter of the regime), Nicolai Hartmann (a member of neither organization), Hans Heyse (a member of both organizations), and Erich Rothacker (also in both organizations). Gadamer was also granted the privilege of publishing during the Third Reich: between 1934 and 1944 he published two books and some eleven articles. [BACK]

44. Gadamer, as cited in the interview “’ … die wirklichen Nazis hatten doch iiberhaupt kein Interesse an uns': Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gesprach mit Dorte von Westernhagen,” Das Argument 182 (July-Aug. 1990): 543–55; here 551. [BACK]

45. Laugstien, Philosophieverhdltnisse im deutschen Faschismus, 186. [BACK]

46. Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? 125. It should go without saying that for now this question must remain unanswered (hard enough to pose it). [BACK]

47. Gadamer, “Reply to Herta Nagl-Docekal” (PHGG2O5–6; here 206). [BACK]

48. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 70. But also consider the popular adage, “Cunsigghia siminari, ma tu nun siminari” (recommend sowing but don't you sow); or, more germanely translated, “recommend dialogue, but don't enter into real dialogue, and thus sow your monologue surreptitiously.” Which in turn follows another adage (the thought is at least as “old” as Sun Tsu and at least as “new” as Nietzsche and Heidegger): “Cui nun sapi finciri nun sapi vinciri” (he who doesn't know how to feign, doesn't know how to win). Finally, note that when Zuckert attributes to Waite the “[insistence] that ‘philosophy’ consists in a monologue designed to form the thoughts and deeds of others, by any means available,” he should modestly decline the attribution of this position to himself and a fortiori decline any claim of having invented it—out of deference to Plato, just for starters. [BACK]

49. Gadamer, “Reply to Robin May Schott” (PHGGsoS). [BACK]

50. Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 4. [BACK]

51. Compare Paul Celan, “Schibboleth” [1954], in Von Schwelk zu Schwelk (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1955), 55–56. Originally the shibboleth of French soldiers at Verdun in World War I, Nopasaran! was adapted as battle cry in the Spanish Civil War by the Spanish Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) and subsequently by the Republicans and the International Brigade (see further Peter Horst Neumann, ZurLyrikPaul Celans [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968], 59). Gadamer does not mention this line in his commentaries on Celan. [BACK]

52. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 42. [BACK]

53. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy [1970], trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), 125. [BACK]

54. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960 [1986], trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 31 1–25. [BACK]

55. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction” [1 844], in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, various translators (New York: International, 1976), 3: 175–87; here 178. [BACK]

56. See Gadamer, “Wertethik und praktische Philosophic” [1982] (GW4: 203–15). [BACK]

57. As Zizek has correctly noted in related regard, “precisely as Marxists, we should have no fear in acknowledging that the purges under Stalin were in a way more ‘irrational’ than Fascist violence: paradoxically, this very excess is an unmistakable sign that Stalinism, in contrast to Fascism, was the case of a perverted authentic revolution.” Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism’? 127–28. [BACK]

58. Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 228. [BACK]

59. Althusser's relationship to Nietzsche is very complex, as is being revealed by the publication of his aeuvre posthume, and is part of his version of exo/esotericism (see note 62). Much needs to be said about this, on another occasion; suffice it here to say that this relationship should not be trivialized by ad hominem and self-serving anecdotes, as occurs in Derrida, “Text Read at Louis Althusser's Funeral” [1990], trans. Robert Harvey, in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993), 241–45; here 244. [BACK]

60. From an article by Gramsci in La Cittd Futura, 1917; as cited in Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary [1965], trans. Tom Nairn (London: NLB, 1970), 107. [BACK]

61. For one of many of Althusser's published criticisms of Stalinism, much the most succinct, see his introduction, “Unfinished History,” in Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science 1? The Case ofLysenko [1976], trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, [BACK]

62. See, for example, Althusser, “Le courant souterrain du materialisme de la rencontre” [1982], in Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome I, 539–79, and Sur la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). When one is aware of Althusser's “esoteric” commitment to the aleatory, however, all his published “exoteric” work takes on new meaning, since “aleatory” indications infuse it everywhere. [BACK]

63. According to Gadamer, “The stubborn clinging to prejudices or even the blind appeal to authority is nothing but the laziness to think. Nobody who thinks for himself will deceive himself about this” (“Reply to David Detmer” [PHGG287]). [BACK]

64. As even his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge acknowledged, not the least reason for Bonhoeffer's delay in resisting National Socialism was what Bethge calls the “theoretical anti-Judaism” that so deeply informed his thought (cited and discussed in Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. i: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 [New York: Harper Collins, 1997], 45–46). [BACK]

65. Cited from The Little Book of Famous Insults, 5 1. [BACK]

66. Compare also Gillian Rose's remark that “if the nothingness of death is presented in Heidegger as the ‘possibility of impossibility,’ and in Levinas as ‘the impossibility of possibility,’ and in Blanchot as two deaths, one possible, one impossible,

67. Gadamer, “Der Tod als Frage” [1975] (GW4:161–72; here 172). [BACK]

68. Gadamer, “Die Erfahrung des Todes” [1983] (GW4:288-94; here 294). [BACK]

69. See, for instance, Alfred Hitchcock's most explicitly “Nietzschean” film, Rope (1948). And most of the history of Western philosophy is haunted by the question of the precise nature of the relationship of Socrates to Alcibiades—was the “tyrant” exo/esoterically/oHowmg and/or betraying his teacher? Was he not, in either case, a corps/e—like all of Nietzsche's own corps/es centuries later? [BACK]

70. As the master of propaganda, Goebbels, memorably put it in March 1933, the strong state does not need overt propaganda, which indeed is a sign of weakness: “The best propaganda is not that which is always openly revealing itself; the best propaganda is that which as it were works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge at all of the propagandistic initiative.” Cited in Julian Petley, Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933–45 (London: BFI, 1979), 101 Note that Zuckert, in her response to Orozco and Waite, tends to reduce the historical phenomenon of Nazism to “brutal power politics” (to which Gadamer was quite obviously opposed, and certainly did not explicitly support)—a reduction that effectively conceals the complexity and success of National Socialist and fascist “hegemony,” or what Gramsci also called “non-coercive coercion,” and which enabled at least fascism to survive its defeat in war, within other forms of capitalism. [BACK]

71. See, again, Gadamer, “Reply to Robin May Schott” (PHGGsoS). [BACK]

72. Gadamer, Plato und die Dichter [1934] (GWs: 187–211; here 187). This monograph is of course one of Orozco's main exhibits, both in her essay in this anthology and in her book, Platonische Gewalt. [BACK]

73. Badiou, Ethics, 25, 20, 21. [BACK]

74. Is there a solution or an alternative to relativism? Is there any beyond the reversion to essentialism, fundamentalism, or totalitarianism? It helps to begin by reformulating the question in Althusserian terms. Referring to the apparent disjunction between the fact and the effect of Spinoza's ruthlessly deductive more geometrico, Althusser asks, “How then could dogmatism not only result in the exaltation of freedom but also ‘produce’ it?” (“The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza” [ca. 1985], in The New Spinoza, 3–19; here 4). The suggestion here would be that true philosophy (like the best science and mathematics) does not, and should not, begin and end with more or less vapid appeals to “dialogue” that conceal class and other interests, and thus are not genuine dialogues at all; rather, true philosophy begins dogmatically—but it is a dogmatism that is not, in principle, exo/esoterically disguised as “dialogue,” and only in order to prepare for more genuine, maximally free and accessible dialogues. For a very preliminary attempt to distinguish Marxist and communist “relativism,” “constructivism,” and “exo/esotericism” from other types, see Waite, “On Esotericism.” [BACK]

75. Sigmund Freud, “ZeitgemaBes iiber Krieg und Tod” [1915], in Gesammelte Werhe [1946], ed. Anna Freud et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1981), 10: 323–55; here 324. [BACK]

76. Note, in this context, the tightly linked trajectory formed in communist discourse: from Gramsci's vision from his fascist prison cell in 1930 that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 276); through Althusser's 1977 thesis, describing and appropriating Gramsci's Machiavelli, that what is necessary is not to “think the accomplished fact … but rather … the fact to be accomplished … and under extraordinary circumstances, since these are the conditions of the absence of any political form appropriate to the production of this result” (Althusser, “Machiavelli's Solitude” [1977], trans. Ben Brewster, Economy and Society 17, no. 4 [Nov. 1988]: 468–79; here 472–73); and, finally, to Antonio Negri's depiction of “the scandal of pretending to enact a revolution in the absence of all its conditions and the provocation of always telling a revolutionary truth that is unacceptable to the given conditions” (“Notes on the Evolution of the Last Althusser,” trans. Olga Vasile, in Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, ed. Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio [Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996], 51–68; here 54). [BACK]

77. Freud, “ZeitgemaBes iiber Krieg und Tod,” 355. [BACK]

78. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis [1970], trans. Jeffrey Mehl-man (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6. [BACK]

79. Ibid. [BACK]

80. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, preface to the first German edition [1867], ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International, 1967), i: 7–11; here 9. Marx concludes this preface by citing Dante (Inferno 5: 17): “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti” (Go your way, and let people talk). [BACK]

81. “In the evening for relaxation Appian's Roman Civil Wars in the original Greek. Very valuable book…. Spartacus emerges as the most splendid bloke [der famoseste Kerl] the entire history of antiquity has to show for itself. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, true representative of the ancient proletariat.” Marx to Engels, February 27, 1861, in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Der Briefwechsel, ed. D. Rjazanov (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 3: 14–16; here 15. (Alas, Garibaldi succeeded where Spartacus had not, to invade and conquer Sicily.) [BACK]