Gary,

You’ve certainly been busy lately. And you certainly are taking the idea of provocation seriously.

I wasn’t dismissing Heidegger. He simply didn’t come up in what I was saying, but Deleuze did.

I was saying that Deleuze is similar to Adorno in that both have the same philosophical problem and that is the negation of the negation. I’m probably being unfair on Deleuze in saying that he simply bypasses the problem because I haven’t read the book in some years, but from memory he wants to adopt a form of positivity that he derives from Nietzsche. He wants to go beyond dialectical thinking. In this respect, perhaps he is not too far from Heidegger – but I’m not putting too much on this observation, although respond if you like.

With respect to Deleuze, Adorno doesn’t think that Hegel’s problem of identity can be bypassed through an act of will or intellect, or whatever it is. Enlightenment cannot be overcome through critique, as if we can say ‘blah, blah, blah, therefore that’s wrong and we need a different view’ and thereby bring about a post-enlightenment situation. These moves only ever create a new variant of enlightenment – more garbage for the heap, more dogshit, to use a term from Negative Dialectics.

An ethical problem frequently underlies this dispute. Let me explain: I act in the world but I am under no delusion that my actions are any more or less ethical than anyone else’s. There are others who seek something more from philosophy, a justification or even a sanctification of their actions. Religion performs a similar role in many people’s lives. I’m sceptical of all sanctity, all moral elevation. It’s reactionary, a return to Nietzsche’s first form of nihilism, when an abstract system comes between one and direct sensuous existence. We’ve moved on since then and it wasn’t a matter of choice. As Bonhoeffer somewhere suggests, we can’t avoid nihilism in Nietzsche’s second sense – incredulity towards all abstraction, all systematisation.

Abstraction takes people away from history. They try to do the right thing but it only makes things worse. I’ve been following the debate over the River Murray from a distance and what I’ve seen, among other things, is a restriction on water rights to be self-regulated by so-called communities, with not enough water rights to go around. People who were concerned only to do the right thing participated in this arrangement, which is nothing other than the corporatisation of water resources, while it is the corporations that dominate the use of these seriously threatened water resources. We are not solving the problem of the Murray; we are corporatising the control of the water – effectively, we are handing it over to the people who are most threatening this resource. Materialism is scepticism towards all grand plans and it looks at them with a focus on who benefits, who finally controls. From my perspective, that’s what is missing from this debate.

As I said, as a day-to-day activity we get out there and try to help the people who need it most, whether in the universities, the schools, the political arena, the public sector, wherever. We can blow our own trumpets if we like, but that’s usually associated with political manoeuvring, with power and control, and we’re right back where we started, with enlightenment. I’ve seen what Heidegger’s own interventions have done: they only made things worse. Okay, perhaps they didn’t make things too much worse than they would have been anyway but they certainly didn’t help. There’s not enough history in Heidegger, too much existence and not enough history – that at least is my lurking suspicion, my discomfort with his thought.

I guess that what I have been talking about could be called a ‘dwelling ethics’, although I wouldn’t use the term myself. All the same, I’m trying to find somewhere to live, something to ease the longing, and something that doesn’t make me feel too compromised. If I manage that I’ll be happy – for awhile.