Gary,

I’m going to be away until Thursday, so if you don’t hear from me that is why. If you can manage the fort until then it would be great.

I know that it’s pretty much the received view that Heidegger’s politics were rotten but the rest of philosophy is okay, if not brilliant – the best thing to come out of the 20th century, but I want to disagree with everything in this claim if for nothing more than the sake of discussion.

Certainly, the view I was trying to represent – I won’t name the persons to whom I refer because I may not be getting them right – is one of an existentialist philosophy, there’s no doubt about that, that emphasizes what we might call ‘enabling’ (I don’t want to get into jargon) as constitutive in seizing the crucial moment that will allow one to enter into what might be called ‘authentic’ existence – i.e., in which you own your existence and it is not a slave to external forces. Existentialism is about completeness – man want to be God, says Gombrowicz says. If I’m getting the Heidegger story right as my storyteller is telling it, then want I want to argue is that if this is your approach to the world, then it could easily seem that fascism is offering the possibility of just such a moment.

I want to sum Heidegger up, not judge him. Karen Blixen taught me this distinction. I want to know where his philosophy ultimately goes. If it doesn’t go where I’m describing then I want to know where it does go. If you know, please tell me. It’s no good if I’m living under an illusion.

As far as existentialism goes, the brute I’ve described above, I’m with Gombrowicz and Bataille: humans seek incompleteness, rather than completeness. Ansell Pearson calls this a ‘superior existentialism’ (have a look in the library for this article). I’ve been calling it ‘surrealism’, for want of a better description.

Before I could judge Heidegger I’d have to ask myself what I might do, particularly as a young man, if I suddenly found myself the vice chancellor of a university in the middle of an anomie-creating period in history. I’d be the biggest fuckwit to ever grace the stage. Who knows what stupidity I’d blurt out before anyone could stop me. Shit! Afterwards I’d look a real bunny. War crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against nature, the whole bang and caboodle – anything’s possible. Please, try to remember that, in the end, I am like a child in this world. (I’m starting to sound like a Christian.)

We must always remember that the individual is never to blame. George Bush is a human being, just as Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin were individuals, or Saddam Hussein, et cetera. This applies to anyone who like to think of. We should weep to see what happened to them. We should weep for the terrorists, who have got things so wrong. There is no point in killing them or anybody else.

Once again, I agree with Gombrowicz: our struggle is with form. We have a terrible problem with organisation, with administration. All the crap about morality flows from it. Deleuze called it a problem of territorialisation the idea is his greatest contribution to our way of seeing the world. We are overwhelmed by this form that tries to form us. The other night one of the women in the reading group said that she felt so ignorant and I suddenly felt ashamed of myself because I had been the tool through which form had overwhelmed this person. According to Gombrowicz, when this happens we construct a refuge for ourselves out of the refuse of higher culture, a secondary domain of compensation, and it is here that a certain compromising beauty is created, a certain shameful poetry. We have entered the realm of pornography. But who thinks that the administered world is anything other than obscene? That’s the trouble with the place you keep going to in Canberra: it’s the administrative stage on which the infantilised are let loose. Mephistopheles is the director.