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Anarchy as an End to Metaphysics

Historicity and Deconstruction in the Work of Reiner Schrmann

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

This is just a preliminary and very tentative first reaction to

the work of Reiner Schrmann. In what follows I shall attempt to
do three different things. 1) A short presentation of the main lines
worked by Schrmanns confrontation with western philosophy. 2)
A brief commentary on how Schrmann reads Heidegger and why
this reading seems relevant today. 3) An interrogation related to our
specific occasion or why reading Schrmann today could be a
decisive intellectual initiative for us -and who is this us that seems
so natural, anyway? Of course, the complexity and richness of
Schrmanns thinking could not be reduced to a single
presentation, because what is at stake in it is not just a particular
idea or system of ideas, concepts, formulations, hypotheses, but a
reading of the whole philosophical tradition in order to make
possible, even logical, his particular intervention. To read
Schrmann is to read, through him, the western philosophical
tradition and to punctuate this tradition, its history, according to
his emphases.

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I would say that here we already have a first problem: how

the history of western philosophy, as the constant forgetting of
being (and this is already an interpretation we have consented to
even if not actively), reaches its own realization and how this
realization allows us to ask again the question of being in a non-
traditional way? Furthermore, how, in its most radical moment, the
history of metaphysics opens itself, through its realization that is also
its exhaustion (a withering away of principles), to being? In other
words, what is the logic of this apparent paradox and what are its
mechanisms? Do these mechanisms belong to reason and its
strategies, critical practices, subjects? Finally, what does it mean
that metaphysic reaches its own finality in and as modern techn, not
only technology to be sure, but the Cartesian constitution of
philosophy and subjectivity as the kernel of modern thinking? Let
me proceed then according to my plan.

*****

Reiner Schrmann is a consistent thinker. Besides a series of

articles that have been incorporated into his main books -or are
waiting for a critical edition, we can consider five relevant books: his
memories (Les Origins 1976); Wondering Joy (1978); Heidegger. On
Being and Acting. From Principles to Anarchy (1982), his posthumously
published Broken Hegemonies (1996), and the recently published

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volume entitled On Heideggers Being and Time (2008), which

corresponds to an unfinished manuscript on Heideggers Sein und
Zeit and two complementary pieces by Simon Critchley that attempt
to en-frame Schrmanns interpretation of Heideggers main
book.

It is a fact, therefore, that the main reference in his works is

Martin Heidegger. But, it wouldnt be fair to reduce Schrmann to
the condition of a Heideggerian scholar, even if he might be one
of the most important Heideggerians of the 20th century. His
engagement with western philosophy moves from Aristotle to
Aquinas, from Meister Eckhart to Luther, From Plotinus to
Schelling, from German Idealism to Heidegger, and from Nietzsche
to Foucault, Derrida, and Hanna Arendt. From his first publication
to Broken Hegemonies, we perceive a double movement of deepening
and expansion of his particular understanding of philosophy as an
epochal organization of the history of being, where a philosophical
epoch is organized around a series of first principles that work as
nomic injunctions or hegemonic configurations of meaning,
articulated by a fantasmatic referent (The One, Nature,
Consciousness). Most important than these historical-
transcendental referents is the very mechanics associated to the
hegemonic articulation of meaning which reduces the history of
being to a sort of logic of recognition that brings to presence the
heterogeneity of being through the hermeneutical and normative
force of those referents. For Schrmann, the force of the referents

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consist in their ability to give sense, to give reason if you like, to a

particular historical reality; but this donation is also a translation of
the diversity -even, the radical heterogeneity- of being to the
principial economy that norms such an epoch. This is the force of the
principle of reason, and defines the labor of professional philosophy.
But here lays also the tragic component of philosophy, which is the
sacrifice of the singularity of what it is to the condition of a case,
that is to say, the conversion of the singular to the particular that is
already meaningful thanks to its constitutive relationship with the
universal. In fact, this universal is no other thing than the process of
universalization of the nomic injunction that articulates the
hegemonic order of an epoch.

In this context, Schrmanns confrontation with the

philosophical tradition is in tone with the Heideggerian task of
destruction of metaphysics. His particular destruction then moves in
the following way: first, identifying the principles articulating a given
epochality or moment in the history of being, say, the principles
that reduce being (its singularity) to a problem of meaning and
knowledge (to the relationship between particular and universal).
Second, understanding the way these principles work as productive
devices that give language to that epoch (in a way, these referents or
fantasms work in Schrmann as the Kantian categories1 ). Third,

1
We should consider, however, that this is just an analogy since in Kant those
categories mediate between the noumena and the phenomena, producing the
synthesis of knowledge. In Schrmann the referents are constitutive or
configurative of the real, but do not respond to a transcendental eschematism,
which is already a hypothesis, a subjective hypothesis introduced by Kant. The

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identifying the way in which professional philosophical discourses

work as translations and adjustments of the diversity of the sensible
experience, the world (facticity and thought), to the normative
configuration donated by the principles (the philosopher, and
Schrmann means the professional philosopher, brings to the fore
the principles as referents that enable the rationality of the real, its
legibility). In this sense, the work of the professional philosopher is
not just the corroboration of the hermeneutical force of the
principles, but also, and critically, the adjustment of reality to those
principles. Heideggers destruction of metaphysics becomes in
Schrmann a crucial interrogation of philosophy as a professional
practice of power, the power of a donation that is always a
reduction of being to meaning.

Accordingly, his understanding of destruction or

deconstruction (Abbau, and he also tends to translate it as
deconstruction over dismantling) implies a new task for thinking, or
if you want, a new tension between philosophy and thinking (as a
practical activity anarchically articulated around the constellation of
being). To put it in other words (and keeping in mind Heideggers
1966 piece entitled The End of Philosophy and the Task of
Thinking), if the task of thinking is the deconstruction of
principial economies that capture normatively the being of be-ing, in
order to access a sort of releasement of being without a why, this

same thing should be said regarding Structuralism and Foucaults epistemes, even if
there are some similarities, Schrmann claims that they refer to a particular
region of being and not to being as a permanent tension between concealment
and unconcealment.

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thinking is not concerned with the history of thought or with the

meaning of that history, neither with a critical engagement or with
an exegetical reading of the main texts of the tradition. On the
contrary, thinking thinks being, and being is not an entity, neither the
first nor the more important referent, but a constellation of
presencing that unconceals or discloses itself in our confrontation
with the world (in effect, Schrmanns destruction leads to a
topology of being)2. Thus, the world as the constellation of being
does not point toward a hidden structure, a final reason, a secret
teleology, but to its anarchic presencing to Dasein. The task of
thinking therefore is not the clarification of Daseins existential
conditions to access the transcendental site of a rational subjectivity
(the line that goes from Descartes to Hegel, and from Kant to
Husserl), and this would be the difference between the
phenomenological epoch and the destructive epoch, if we might put
it this way. In Schrmann the epoch opens to an-arch and this an-
arch interrupts the pros hen as a distinctive philosophical operation.
This is possible, of course, because Schrmann reads the
Heideggerian epoch as a sort of inversion of the Husserlian epoch,
an inversion of the parenthesis that was meant, in the first case, as a
suspension of the natural attitude. With that inversion, the
parenthesis now suspends the philosophical subjectivity and its
transcendental intuitions, freeing the world from the infinite tasks of

2
What is the relationship between this presencing and the metaphysics of
presence once the very structuration of metaphysics as history of being and as an
ongoing and evolving process articulated by he succession of different ephocalities
has been deconstructed? In other words, how Schrmanns releasement from
being as meaning makes possible to reinstate the question of historicity? Sure we
will need to come back to this later.

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the rational consciousness (translation and adjustment) and freeing

thinking from the subject (transcendental consciousness).

In this sense, Schrmann dwells at the end of professional

philosophy which task was, among others, the elucidation of the
history of philosophical knowledge according to epochal principles.
But to dwell at the end of philosophy is also to suspend its
professional task (clarification), understanding that every new
moment in the philosophical history of being produces, through a
particular idiom, its own fantasmatic reverse. In fact, to dwell at this
end is also to resist the temptation of transitioning to a new -most
modern- language, to a new categorical institution, even if the
transition is done in the name of Humanity (reason, justice, peace,
etc.), as in Husserls self-appointed task.

This is, therefore, his question: what is to be done at the end

of metaphysics? Which is not to be understood as a nave question
that takes for granted this end as an empirical phenomenon. The
end of metaphysic is not a fact; it is, on the contrary, the historical
moment in which the modern principles articulating the hegemonic
order of thinking breaks away or, even better, withers away. This
sort of exhaustion of the hermeneutical and normative force of the
principles interrupts the ability of the philosophical discourse to
reproduce ad infinitum its meaningful configuration, and opens up
to anarchy as a new relationship with being. This is the moment
when thinking topologically the pre-sencing of being leads to a sort

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of radicalization of Heideggers existential analytic, that is to say, to

the analytic of the ultimate quasi-principles (among them, the
principle of equivalence).3

On the other hand, before addressing the complex status of

this anarchy, it would be important to understand Schrmanns
project as a very idiosyncratic confrontation with metaphysics that
cannot be reduce to Heideggers destruction, Nietzsches genealogy
or Foucaults archeology. Schrmann himself makes clear his
resistance to the general endorsement Derridas deconstruction has
received in France and elsewhere, and of course, this is already a big
problem we need to address at some extent one day, particularly
because of their (Schrmann and Derridas) different relationship to
Heidegger and to Husserl. However, for now let me just quote him
briefly here:

To deconstruct hegemonic fantasms, one cannot trust in

interpretative throws of the dice, nor let this be produced by
a fortuitous collision of signifier and significance, nor attack

3
This is, in other words, the historical modulation of the ontological difference
that is problematic in Schrmanns work. Not only the question of the ontic
status of this ontological anarchy is what matters here, but also the very
articulation of the ontic-ontological question and the problem of the co-belonging
of being and its multiple worldly manifestations. If this anarchy were to be read
only at the ontological level, we would be re-introducing an ontological hierarchy
even if only to break away with it. But, if ontology as first philosophy is
deconstructed (which was the task of destruktion), then the homologation of
anarchy and politics needs more elaboration. This is attested by the tension
between Lefort-Castoriadis-Abensours savage democracy and the idea of an
anarchic politics one could read in Schrmann, but this is also the tension
between biopolitics (as a politics still articulated around the given condition of
life and the self-presencing of power) and infrapolitics.

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the texts from their margins. It is necessary to go straight

into the ticket-to the theses upon which a text as well as an
epoch rest, theses that get themselves twisted up as soon as
they are declared to be legislative. (BH 15)

Instead of entertaining oneself by playing with the flexibility of the

signifiers, with the polysemy of the text, the archi-writing and the
trace of meaning in the a-grammatical order of history, Schrmann
proposes to assume the almost impossible task of deconstructing the
hegemonic organization of metaphysic as history of thought. And
right here one might wonder up to what point this hegemonic
configuration is, itself, already a fantasmatic insemination necessary
to trigger the (his) task of thinking. I am not only thinking the
difference between diffrance and hegemony, between the fantasmatic
referent and the specter (as an incalculable or excessive remainder of
presence), but also the way in which the hegemonic configuration of
metaphysic could be read as a retro-projection done form the modern
ontological anarchy as a strategy to justify a historical-transcendental
hypothesis about the realization of metaphysics (after all, what this
realization implies is something we still need to interrogate). This
realization, not a vulgar teleology to be sure, however, imposes
itself as a particular economy of reading, a particular reading of the
tradition, the texts of the tradition, emphasizing in them the
principial articulation of meaning (the ticket-to the theses upon which
a text as well as an epoch rest) and not what we might call the
heterogeneous play of signification dwelling at the absent center of

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every text. For this heterogeneity complicates the principial

organization of meaning, bringing to the fore the counter-forces and
resistances that are always working through the text and its different
interpretations. These resistances distort the conventional
identification of the text and the principles, perverting the
philosophers donation of meaning while opening the texts to
another donation, to another an-economic economy, which does
not take place in the continuum temporality of the tradition,
neither within the margins of professional philosophy.4

Let me dwell here for one more minute. The hegemonic

articulation of metaphysic as practiced by Schrmann would be
itself nothing else than a reading enabled by the post-hegemonic
condition of anarchy. But, if the texts themselves are always
something else than just the economy of principles that articulates
them, if the texts present resistance to the main law of interpretation
that articulate them, wouldnt this then imply that post-hegemony is
nothing else than an a hypothesis formulated to control, to conjure,

4
Wouldnt this be the defining relationship deconstruction establishes with the
tradition and its texts? Not an exegetical or critical reading, neither a reading in
which the text becomes monumentalized and homogenized according to a
principial economy, since in each text, in each occasion of reading, a singular an-
economy of forces, resistances, significations and counter-significations would
always take place. Deconstruction seems to differ, and to defer, from the
principial reading of the tradition while also differs and defers from disciplinary
criticism (from the conversion of deconstruction itself in a practice of liturgical
criticism). Nonetheless, Schrmanns critique of the principial economy of
metaphysics and deconstruction seem to converge at the same post-hegemonic (or
an-hegemonic) topology, which is, of course, something that we need to explore to
a greater extent.

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to exorcise another phantasm in Schrmann himself, the specter of

diffrance?

To be sure, I am not claiming that philosophy is an open-

ended battle of interpretation, a battle that implies leaders and
generals, caudillos and pastors of being, since this is, precisely, the
history of metaphysic from which Schrmann, through Heidegger,
wants to depart. But, what I am questioning is the very relationship
between the finality, the realization of metaphysics, its temporal
status, and the notion of post-hegemony that produce the idea of
an after hegemony. I would even dare to say that the way out of
this problem lays in the problematization of the question of anarchy
and its relationship to techn. Since it is in the technical (not only
the technological) subsumption of life where we also find its
disarticulation from principles. Technic as the realization of metaphysic
already contain an indomitable anarchy. Therefore, when Schrmann
reads the tradition, there is always a double register, a double reading:
one pointing towards the way in which principles work through the
texts, enabling them, giving them language; the other reading,
performed from anarchy, always reads the suffering of the texts, the
way the principles extort and conjure texts and thoughts according
to their laws of constitution and interpretation. If destruktions
positive aspect is always more important than its negative one, then
in Schrmanns double register what matters most is not the critique
of the principial economy that works as an hegemonic articulation
of metaphysics, but the releasement of that reading into a Gelassenheit

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or serenidad, which implies a relation to being other than the

metaphysical (a being without a why).

Clearly, I have just presented this problem without giving a

convincing solution, but I did so on purpose, since what matters for
me now is showing how the reading of the so-called tradition is
already a crucial issue in Schrmanns works. This leads me to my
second point, his reading of Heidegger.

*****

Of course, his reversed reading of Heidegger is totally

consistent with his reading of the whole philosophical tradition. But
not just consistent, it is a distinctive characteristic of his operation.
In fact, one could organize a reading of Schrmann in the same
way, and more than one of his colleagues have done so. It does not
matter, what actually matters for me here is what I would call a
prismatic reading of his works, a reading articulated in three main
centers or circles from which it disseminates everywhere. 1) His
reading of Being and Time (On Heideggers Being and Time). 2) His
reading of Heideggers oeuvre (Heidegger. On Being and Acting). 3) His
Heideggerian reading of the western metaphysic (Wondering Joy, Broken
Hegemonies). Whether you move from the general to the specific
contents of his works, or from the punctual to the widest reach of

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his elaborations, the circles seem to overlap each other. At the same
time, one should be attentive to the decisions enabling such
readings, since Schrmann is not an exegete neither a historian of
philosophy. In this sense, he brings to the fore a new relation with
the tradition, from Aristotle to Hanna Arendt, a relation expurgated
from lineal narratives and away form the idea of progress. For the
sake of time, I will contain myself here with making three points
regarding his reading of Heidegger. Regardless, it should be clear
that when Schrmann interrogates the tradition of western
philosophy he is not just reading it in reverse, but he is also bringing
the whole tradition to a place in which the conventional or vulgar
conception of temporality is suspended. Reading Heidegger in that
way is like reading the eventful condition of thinking once this
thinking reappears, de-articulated or re-activated, beyond the
normative nomos of the professional history of philosophy, in a time
other than the time of metaphysics.

I have used this term, re-activation, intentionally, to refer to

Schrmanns emphatic break with a transcendental phenomenology
and with the infinite task of a rational subjectivity that is able to
decipher the sense of the world ad infinitum. This is the insuperable
distinction between his reading and Simon Critchleys reading of
Heidegger. For Schrmann Heidegger parted waters with Edmund
Husserl by the publication of Being and Time, since his existential
analytic, more than just a continuation of Husserls phenomenology,
is rather a radical reorientation of philosophy. This is a

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reorientation that goes from phenomenological investigation to

what he calls a fundamental ontology -fundamental in the sense of
the founding economy of principles and not in the sense of the
classical question about the fundament. Thus, it is this displacement
from the infinite task of the transcendental subjectivity (from
Descartes and Kant to Husserl) that Schrmann emphasizes in
Heideggers finitude, a finitude that makes possible to move from
the question of being to the question about the meaning (truth) of
being, where the meaning of being not longer lays with the subjects
critical abilities. At this point Schrmann introduces the idea of an
ontology constituted by a historical modality, a modality of
presencing that cannot be reduced to transcendental syntheses and
subjective operations. Obviously, Schrmann is able to read Being
and Time in this way because of his emphasis on the turn and the
radical reorganization of Heideggers work after Being and Time.5 In
other words, Schrmann somehow is de-emphasizing the influence
that Husserl, the neo-Kantism and historicism has had on Heidegger
in the 1920s. (I would just add here the need to consider Derridas
initial reading of Husserl as a matter of interest for our discussion as
well as his 1964-65 seminar in which ontology itself withers away
when confronted with the question of being and history in
Heidegger, something that will take us too much time now).

5
I would dare to say that for him Heideggers turn (die Kehre) is not associated
with a particular moment or text, but is something that, in his reversed reading of
the Heideggers oeuvre seems to be always taking place, right after the mid-1930.
This explains the emphasis and the contrast Schrmann attempts to do in regard
with the first reception of Heidegger in America, headed by William J.
Richardson and his seminal book, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought
(1974).

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Thanks to all of this, Being and Time does not appear as a

failed attempt to break away from metaphysics, an attempt that
Heidegger would later abandon in the name of The poem of Being,
On the contrary, this idiosyncratic reading makes it possible to
understand the condition of that seminal book (Being and Time) not
by the logic of the evolution and development, but as a book which
questions would be ever present in Heideggers thoughts. Of course,
what is at stake here is the status of the meaning of Daseins
existence. Not the meaning in itself, but its status, whether it comes
from the infinite task of phenomenology or, alternatively, from the
worldly confrontation of Dasein with the historical conditions
defining its existence (and one should keep in mind here the
influence of Diltheys elaborations on historicity as well as
Heideggers reading of Aristotles factical hermeneutics)

In this sense, the whole metaphysical tradition appears as a

permanent attempt to reduce the radical historicity of being to a
normative injunction emanated from the principles that organize
the epochs of beings history. It is a history that is subsumed to an
ongoing spacialization of temporality that would have reached its
realization in the modern age. What this realization means is
precisely the point here, since the full spacialization of temporality is
also the moment in which the very principial economy that
organizes metaphysics seems to wither away. The epoch of the
realization of metaphysics, the age of the image of the world, is not

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the epoch of its overcoming in a naive, analytical way, but it is the

epoch in which that very epochality enters into a radical crisis, a
demonic disjunction between the granted relationship of theory and
practice. Actually, the demonic crisis of principles triggers a sort of
anarchy, and this anarchy is not a state that happens at the end of
metaphysics, but something that happens to the whole history of
being, bringing it to presence in an way other than the metaphysics
of presence. Of course, we are talking about a presence that is not
the illusory aspiration for plenitude, but a presence (as we say,
beyond the metaphysics of presence) in which the world, the being
of the world, happens without a reason, without a why. By the same
token, this demonic crisis, this interregnum, does not point towards a
new economy of principles, a sort of reconfiguration of an even
better hegemony, attuned to the modern being; on the contrary,
this demonic crisis is the very suspension of the transitional logic
that put together the history of being as an evolving process. The
demonic condition of history is a topology of radical immanence
where there are no gods or salvation; a topology that appears as a
concern with the space beyond the metaphysical spacialization of
temporality and as the dissolution (withering) of any ontology (even
the object oriented, foam-like, and the plastic ontologies of
contemporary thought).

This is certainly a delicate moment, as it has already been

argued, since with this reading Schrmann is proposing a
historicized version of the ontological difference, a version in which

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the ontological status of anarchy does not seem to be sound to

understand the political. Is Schrmann actually supporting political
anarchy? What is the status of the auto-nomos injunction at the end
of metaphysics? Let me just say that I am not concerned with asking
from Schrmann what has been infinitely demanded form
Heidegger, an ethic that regulates being in the world. My concern
rests in the way in which this ontico-ontological difference tends to
disappears as the very destruktion of the principial economy
feeding metaphysics as onto-theology gives its place to the question
of being as a question of history (historicity). Certainly, this
withering away of principles, this exhaustion of the philosophy of
history, relates itself to the question of the political in a non-
normative way. I am thinking here in what Alberto Moreiras has
called post-hegemonic democracy and, in what John Krummel
elaborates when comparing Schrmanns anarchic ontology and
Cornelius Castoriadiss instituting imagination. I would just add
that here lays the relevance of Aristotle and the particular emphasis
Schrmann places on the Physic rather than on the Metaphysics. But,
I am in no condition to further elaborate this point here, as it
requires a confrontation with the nomos, its autonomy and its
heteronomy, a radical problematization of sovereigntys double bind.
In a way, this is the task of infrapolitical deconstruction or, at least,
this is the way this task appeals to me.

In other words, because of this double bind, sovereignty is

not something we can break away from in a definitive way, as if we

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were talking about an institutional order, a juridical discourse. The

suspension of sovereignty is not the result of a methodological
operation, a willing action, a step into the long way of endless
criticism. There is, to be sure, the factual (American) suspension of
sovereignty, the configuration of a world order that obliterates the
modern institutions and discourses of sovereignty, but sovereignty
itself is always something else than those institutions and discourses.
The suspension of the factual suspension of sovereignty leads us to
dwell on its double bind as a condition of possibility for a politics
different, a politics after the disjunction between theory and
practice, when philosophy of history withers away, opening the
present to a radical contingency, a contingency that is not the
categorical inversion of necessity, but a new relation to being and
time, to the world. A time venir, if you like, besides the protests
Schrmann himself could and/or would have voiced.

This is what makes of his work something relevant for our

infrapolitical interrogation, and my goal today was only to give a
general and tentative idea of a thinking that we still need to keep
close to us. Thank you very much.

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