The Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger’s entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking—in short, the ineffectual—are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work.
By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger’s response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality.
Heidegger’s conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism.
Tabella dei contenuti
Exordium | xiii
Preamble: The Ineffectual and the Instrumental | 1
1. The ineffectual | 1
2. The instrumental | 4
1 Introduction: What is the Ruse of Techne? | 10
3. The ruse of techne | 10
4. Metaphysical materialism (the metaphysics of morals) |14
5. The reception of Heidegger and the ruse of techne | 16
6. The repression of instrumentality | 31
7. The underground current of a materialism of instrumentality | 35
8. Effects of the ruse of techne (or, why the repression of instrumentality still matters today) | 39
9. On method | 42
2 The Problematic of Action Within a Single, Unified Being: Monism in Heidegger’s Thought | 44
10. Heidegger’s other path | 44
11. The first problem: How to be a different materialist? | 47
12. The second problem: How is action possible within a monist ontology? | 52
13. The third problem: Can monism provide qualitative distinctions between actions? | 55
14. Two kinds of monist materialism | 57
15. Two historical difficulties arising from Heidegger’s solution to the problematic of action in monism | 61
16. The double bind of the repression of instrumentality: Between the vacuous and the self-contradictory | 66
17. Why Heidegger’s solution to the problematic of action in monism matters | 72
3 The Conflation of Causality and Instrumentality: Phronesis and the Genesis of the Ruse of Techne | 76
18. Heidegger’s bildungsroman | 76
19. The truth of phronesis as the combination of calculation, emotion, and situatedness | 79
20. The two ends of action in Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 1139a32) | 82
21. Techne and phronesis distinguished through their ends | 86
22. The distinction between final and instrumental ends and the problematic of action in monism | 90
23. A Greek-hating philhellene | 91
24. The context of Heidegger’s interpretation of phronesis | 94
25. Heidegger’s mistranslations of the hou heneka | 98
26. Heidegger’s discussion of hou heneka and heneka tinos: The repression of instrumentality | 101
27. The genesis of the ruse of techne: sophia as the virtue of techne | 105 ■
28. Teleocracy | 112
29. Phronesis, resoluteness, and temporality: The “either/or” | 115
Excursus: Through the Looking Glass of the Distinction Between Causality and Instrumentality | 119
30. Acting and the other: The politics of instrumentality | 119
31. The repression of instrumentality in metaphysics | 126
32. Causal and instrumental ends in monist materialism | 133
4 The Concealment of Instrumentality: The Conception of Action in Being and Time | 144
33. The reason for focusing on the examples of action in Being and Time | 144
34. The epigraph and the problem of action in the Sophist | 146
35. Destruction and monism | 149
36. Inauthentic, indifferent, and authentic action | 151
37. Hammering and the concealing of instrumentality (Being and Time §15) | 155
38. The breakdown of ends (Being and Time §16) | 160
39. Sign and reference, understanding and interpretation (Being and Time §17) | 164
40. Dictatorship | 169
41. The temporality of death and the myth of Care | 172
42. Techne as the virtue of theory | 176
43. Subjectum absconditum | 184
5 The Ontology of Conflict: Conjuring Authority | 186
44. The “turn” and action | 186
45. Authority as the means to repress instrumentality | 189
46. Conflict and the three senses of techne | 193
47. The subjectivism of authority (Prometheus) | 196
48. The problem of the metaphysico-political conflict | 202
49. The historical decision and phusis (Oedipus Rex) | 204
50. Apolis and the spontaneous creation of authority (Antigone 1) | 208
51. The human as deinon and the repression of instrumentality (Antigone 2) | 213
52. A politics without reaction or an agonistic politics | 219
53. The preservers and the magical founding of the city | 222
6 The Ontology of the Ineffectual: The Purloined Letter of Instrumentality | 229
54. The reversal of the critique of monism | 229
55. The turn, the return, and the other turn (the critique of Sartre as self-critique) | 234
56. Transformations of the ruse of techne | 238
57. Instrumentality incorporated into causality (the first sense of techne) | 239
58. The ambivalence of the calculable and enframing (the second sense of techne) | 244
59. The killing power of the saving power (the third sense of techne) | 248
60. Metaphysical or materialist monism? | 252
61. The French appropriation of the repression of instrumentality | 256
62. The new Kantianism | 260
63. Technophobia and the repression of instrumentality | 263
64. The paradox of the final end | 266
Peroratio | 272
Acknowledgments | 279
Works by Martin Heidegger | 283
Bibliography | 287
Index | 301
Circa l’autore
Dimitris Vardoulakis is Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020); Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (2018); Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016); Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013); and The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010).
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