Being – Thinking – Acting

Our detour into the history of philosophy yielded the following conclusion: the line between philosophy and politics is drawn politically. For this reason, it will never be possible to clearly separate the former from the latter. Philosophy remains manifoldly traversed by political struggles. At this point of the argument, the two Heideggerian questions that have guided us converge and transform themselves into an utterly un-Heideggerian one.

Heidegger's ‘question of being’ – in Vattimo's profanised rendering: ‘What's going on with Being?’ – initiated our inquiry; and from the beginning our intuition was that something political – the political, to be precise – is going on. As soon as it is decided to approach the being question via the instance of the political, i.e. antagonism, instruments and methods of empirical research will prove insufficient. For what is under investigation is an ontological notion, and ontological notions cannot be measured by empirical means. When confronting the instance of antagonism, which points us to the abyss and ground of the social, audacity is needed in order to ‘think’ where ‘science does not think’. Yet ‘thinking’ must not be confused with intra-philosophical procedures of concept formation. By virtue of being a name, antagonism – our name for being – must not be squeezed in the Procrustean bed of the institutional discipline of philosophy. Antagonism is to be thought.

Therefore, a further question ensued: ‘What is called thinking?’ Once more, Heidegger loomed large in our response. Thinking, provided it is not – or not merely – envisaged in terms of cognition, is a way of actively occupying what is given to us, of refounding the place where we find ourselves. In other words, thinking, as finding, is founding. This is not without consequences. For what is given to us is, in the last resort, the political. And founding, i.e. the activity of laying penultimate grounds in the absence of an ultimate one, is a matter of politics in an enlarged sense of the term.