Filozofski vestnik | Letnik XXXVI | Številka 3 | 2015 | 43-91
Alan Bass*
The Heideggerian Thing
The Handkerchief and the Fetish
Fetishism enters Being and Time as a temptation to be avoided. How? Why?
We are in Division One, the long analysis of Dasein as being-in-the-world. The aim is to prepare the analysis of Dasein and temporality. To restate the well known themes: Dasein is always already in a world, a world which is not objectively present for a subject. Rather the "worldliness" of world-what the "in" of being-in-the world means- is itself constitutive of the existential structure of Dasein. Introducing the analysis of worldliness, Heidegger asks the question of where to take his point of departure: "Which beings are to be our preliminary theme and established as a pre-phenomenal basis? / We answer: things" (1996, p. 63). While it would be a mistake to equate Dasein with "mind," Heidegger's point of departure is nevertheless related to my fundamental theme: the relation to things.
The fetish as thing will be discussed as a possible example of this point of departure, a possibility to be dismissed. The reasons for this dismissal will also concern another fundamental theme: the history of the European encounter with fetishism. This history is always a conception of the "primitive." Heidegger is no exception, so one must attend to his remarks about the role of ethnological data in the existential analytic. The context is his justification for the analysis of everyday Dasein, which will eventually yield the structure of care, Dasein's being. He asks whether everydayness is a "primitive stage of Dasein, that we become acquainted with empirically through anthropology" (p. 47). The answer is no, because everydayness is "a kind of being of Dasein" even in "a highly developed culture" (ibid.). Nonetheless, "primitive Dasein" has its own forms of "noneveryday being... and its own specific everydayness" (ibid.). There might be an advantage to orienting the analysis of Dasein toward "the life of primitive peoples": "...'primitive phenomena' are often less hidden and complicated by extensive self-interpretation on the part of the Dasein in question. Primitive
*New School for Social Research, New York
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Dasein often speaks out of a more primordial absorption in 'phenomena' (in the pre-phenomenological sense)" (ibid.). In other words, primitive absorption in phenomena is free of the objectifying, theoretical relation to phenomena, the kind of relation that obscures the existential analytic. (This is not so far from Comte on fetishism as non-metaphysical, direct engagement with things.)
But our knowledge of "primitive peoples" is compromised by its source, ethnology itself.
...ethnology already moves in certain preliminary concepts and interpretations of human being in general... We do not know whether commonplace psychology or even scientific psychology and sociology, which the ethnologist brings with him, offer any scientific guarantee for an adequate possibility of access, interpretation, and mediation of the phenomena to be investigated... Ethnology itself already presupposes an adequate analytic of Dasein as its guideline. But since the positiv-istic sciences neither 'can' nor should wait for the ontological work of philosophy, the continuation of research will not be accomplished as 'progress'; but, rather, as the repetition and the ontologically more transparent purification of what has been ontically discovered (ibid.).
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From within the entire project of the "destruction" of metaphysics, this is a clear point. If the history of metaphysics is the history of the forgetting of being, then any empirical discipline which does not engage its metaphysical presuppositions inevitably repeats that forgetting. All anthropologies, including the great ones of Kant and Hegel, participate in this structure. They "presuppose an adequate analytic of Dasein" which they do not possess. Thus, they will have to misconstrue "primitive Dasein," because they do not understand Dasein itself. The ethnological data requires ontological "purification". This "purification" is not the acquisition of more data, but rather the rehearsing, the repetition, of that data from the ontological point of view. Hence, it is an "illusion" to think that knowledge of the "most exotic and manifold forms of existence" (p. 48) will itself be of any use in elaborating the conception of world necessary for the analytic of Dasein. Here, the "primitive" is not excluded from the existential analytic; excluded, rather, is the compromised knowledge we have of it.
The brief discussion of fetishism itself will be a complement to the discussion of primitive Dasein. It will be introduced by a knot in a handkerchief. The knot
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will be an example of everyday Dasein's relation to things, Heidegger's point of departure.
Things are in the world. The worldliness of the world is revealed through the analysis of things as tools or equipment. Everyday Dasein always already is in the mode of using things-I use the doorknob to open the door. Phenomenological access to beings encountered this way must reject the "interpretational tendencies" that cover over "'taking care' of things in general, and thus even more of beings as they are encountered of their own accord in taking care" (p. 63). Calling the things we encounter in taking care "useful," Heidegger says that there is "no such thing as a useful thing" (p. 64). Rather, there is a totality of useful things, of things used "in order to" do something. "In order to" always contains a "reference of something to something" (ibid.). In other words, because reference itself is not a specific being, yet belongs to the totality of useful things, (the world), the structure of reference is ontological; it reveals the worldliness of world.
To sharpen this point, Heidegger uses the example of a broken tool, an unusable thing. A broken hammer is just there, in its "unyielding objective presence" (p. 69). Apparently the referential structure of the "in order to" is disturbed.
But in a disturbance of reference-in being unusable for...-the reference becomes explicit... circumspect noticing of the reference to the particular [i.e. ontic] what-for makes the what-for visible and with it the context of the work, the whole 'workshop' as that in which taking care of things has always already been dwelling. The context of useful things appears not as a totality never seen before, but as a totality that has continually been seen beforehand in our circumspection. But with this totality world makes itself known (p. 70).
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Heidegger consistently uses this kind of argument: a global disturbance of what something is reveals what it is. The apparently "unyielding objective presence" of the broken hammer does not demonstrate that usefulness and reference are attributes added to objective presence. Rather it demonstrates that world as reference is "always already disclosed for circumspection" (p. 70). "Disclosure" itself means "'to unlock'-'to be open'" (ibid.). Anyone familiar with Being and Time will grasp the portent of this remark. Heidegger is preparing the analysis of truth as disclosure, which always means the understanding of "opening" as the existential space for the possible encounter with the thing.
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Heidegger now defines being-in-the-world as "circumspect absorption in the references constitutive for the handiness of the totality of useful things" (p. 71). Because "reference" is the pivotal concept, and reference points to something beyond specific use, i.e. to usefulness in general, Heidegger looks at the "sign structure" of reference. Signs themselves are "useful things with manifold references ...the sign structure itself yields an ontological guideline for 'characterizing' any being whatsoever" (p. 72). By "signs" as useful things Heidegger means things that indicate, such as signposts, flags, the directional signal of a car. Indication is the "ontic concretion" of the ontological determination "of the useful thing as a useful thing" (p. 73). Signs, then, are "useful things which explicitly bring a totality of useful things to circumspection so that the worldly character of what is at hand makes itself known at the same time..." (p. 74). Because reference and signs reveal the "worldly character of what is at hand," and because the structure of worldliness is constitutive of Dasein as being-in-the-world, they intimate the structure of existential space, the "in" of being-in-the-world. "Signs address themselves to a specifically 'spatial' being-in-the-world" (ibid.).
Heidegger then envisages an inevitable objection. What is taken as a sign, (e.g. the south wind as a sign of rain), must have become accessible first before the sign is established, (there has to have been a south wind). Yes, he says, what is taken as a sign does indeed have to "be there in some way or another" (p. 75). But what is essential is not to assume that something present at hand which is not yet a sign is something "merely objectively present" (ibid.).
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As an example, Heidegger takes making a knot in a handkerchief as a reminder of something to do. (Stambaugh renders Heidegger's "Knopf in Taschentuch" as a "'string on one's finger'" [p. 76], which is more familiar to the English reader, but loses the feel of the example.) One might, however, forget what one is supposed to remember. The "knot" then does not entirely lose its "sign character, but rather acquires the disturbing obtrusiveness of something near at hand" (p. 76). The broken tool was also a disturbance of the structure of reference, a disturbance which could mislead one into assuming the priority of objective presence. Instead, this very disturbance illuminates the ontological status of reference.
The disturbing knot is the hinge to fetishism. Let us consider it. Heidegger wants to show that something unusable that is apparently "just there" cannot be divorced from the sign structure of useful things. Even if I have forgotten why I put
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the knot in the handkerchief, I know that I wanted to use it as a reminder, just as I know that the broken hammer was a useful thing. But Heidegger seems to gloss over a difference between the broken hammer and the perplexing knot. If I forget what I have put the knot in the handkerchief for, but of course know that I wanted to use it as a reminder, I am reminded of why I put a knot in the handkerchief in the first place: I might forget something. I know that memory is fallible. I might be able to compensate for this fallibility with a thing. This could certainly reinforce Heidegger's point about the sign structure of useful things. But it also raises the question of the relation to the memory aid.
The psychoanalyst will always wonder whether forgetting what one wanted to remember is a slip. If so, then the perplexing knot is another kind of sign-a sign that for reasons I am not aware of, I might not want to remember what I intend to remember. (Heidegger would reject this point, as he makes clear in his refutation of the Freudian theory of slips in the much later Zollikon Seminars.) The knot in the handkerchief is then a symptom in the fabric of the mind. Whether for psychoanalytic or putatively non-psychoanalytic reasons, the knot then refers to mind referring to itself. I know that my mind is not consistently reliable. In fact, it is so unreliable that I might even forget how I have tried to compensate for that unreliability. I cannot remember why I put the knot in the handkerchief. There is nothing like this in the example of the broken hammer.
After the knot, new paragraph, first sentence: "One could be tempted to illustrate the distinctive role of signs in everyday heedfulness for the understanding of the world itself by citing the extensive use of 'signs,' such as fetishism and magic, in primitive Dasein" (p. 76). "Primitive" immediately alerts one to the earlier discussion of ethnological data. Heidegger at first seems to follow his previous line of reasoning, stating that "the establishment of signs that underlies such use of signs does not come about with theoretical intent and by way of theoretical speculation" (ibid.). He is typically describing a relation to things not obscured by the theoretical distancing which assumes that things are objectively present. The use of signs in fetishism and magic "remains completely within an 'immediate' being-in-the-world" (ibid.). But the temptation to use fetishism and magic as an illustration of the sign structure is to be avoided: "... when one looks more closely, it becomes clear that the interpretation of fetishism and magic under the guideline of the idea of signs is not sufficient at all to comprehend the kind of 'handiness' of beings encountered in the world of primitives" (ibid.).
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If reference and sign disclose the worldliness of world, and if the handiness of fetishism and magic cannot be a sign, then there is no possible ontological status of fetishism and magic. This is what Heidegger goes on to explain, using a variant of the argument of the broken tool:
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With regard to the phenomenon of signs, we might give the following interpretation, that for primitive people the sign coincides with what it indicates. The sign itself can represent what it indicates not only in the sense of replacing it, but in such a way that the sign itself always is what is indicated. This remarkable coincidence of the sign with what is indicated does not, however, mean that the sign-thing has already undergone a certain 'objectification,' has been experienced as a pure thing and been transposed together with what is signified to some region of being of objective presence. The 'coincidence' is not an identification of hitherto isolated things, but rather the sign has not yet become free from that for which it is a sign. This kind of use of signs is still completely absorbed in the being of what is indicated so that a sign as such cannot be detached at all. The coincidence is not based on a first objectification, but rather upon the complete lack of such an objectification. But this means that signs are not at all discovered as useful things, that ultimately what is 'at hand' in the world does not have the kind of being of useful things at all. Perhaps this ontological guideline (handiness and useful things), too, can provide nothing for an interpretation of the primitive world, and certainly for an ontology of thingliness. [Macquarrie and Robinson render this sentence: "Perhaps even readiness-to-hand and equipment have nothing to contribute as ontological clues in Interpreting the primitive world; and certainly the ontology of Thinghood even less" (p. 113)] But if an understanding of being is constitutive for primitive Dasein and the primitive world in general, it is all the more urgent to develop the 'formal' idea of worldliness; namely of a phenomenon which can be modified in such a way that all ontological statements which assert that in a given phenomenal context something is not yet or no longer such and such may acquire a positive phenomenal meaning in terms of what it is not (pp. 76-77).
Heidegger here repeats the major aspect of the European encounter with fetishism: the fetish is what it indicates. The rock is the god. As in the entire tradition, Heidegger understands the fetish as not detached from, not free from, what it seems to signify. It does not have the sign structure of replacement. Whether from a philosophical or a psychoanalytic point of view, the consistency of this description cannot be avoided. The point is always to see what happens when
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it enters thought. We have seen the contrasting views of De Brosses and Comte. For De Brosses it is a question of both an "excess of stupidity" that precludes reason, and of the aporias of accounting for the relation of the concrete and the abstract. For Comte it is a question of a non-metaphysical absorption in things which could yield a scientific "subjective synthesis". For psychoanalysis, it is the analogous question of "concreteness" (Bass).
For Heidegger the primitive cannot even have a metaphysics of objective presence. The fetish that is what it indicates is not a transposition of something objectively present to something else objectively present: there is no objectification at all. One might think that this would be all to the good for Heidegger; he has already accredited the non-theoretical, immediate "being-in-the-world" of primitive fetishism and magic. However, the lack of objectification means that signs themselves are not discovered as useful things. In other words, a sign that indicates only itself-the constant theme in the history of fetishism-lacks the referential structure which is essential to understanding the worldliness of the world. This is why Heidegger says that "Perhaps this ontological guideline (handiness and useful things), too, can provide nothing for an interpretation of the primitive world, and certainly for an ontology of thingliness." But, extending the earlier remarks about the Dasein of primitive peoples, there has to be some way of conceptualizing their being-in-the-world. There has to be a "'formal'" idea of worldliness. Such a formal idea could yield positive ontological knowledge in terms of what it is not-as for the broken tool, or even the perplexing knot.
I will outline two readings of this passage.
The first might see Heidegger blindly repeating the entire history of the ethnology he rejects. In this history of fetishism the self-referential, concrete nature of the fetish precludes the abstraction of symbolization. This is what Mauss called the "immense misunderstanding". In this view, the fetish cannot co-exist with symbolic structures. There is no possibility of symbolization, of the sign as replacement, in the primitive world. The ethnologist then overlooks the complex symbolic structures that co-exist with apparently non-symbolic fetishism. Analogously, Heidegger says that there is not even objectification in the primitive world, so that signs cannot be discovered as useful things. The self-reference of the fetish precludes reference. This is why Mauss protested: "The object which serves as a fetish is never, no matter what has been said about it, just any given
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object, chosen arbitrarily; rather it is always defined by the code of magic and religion" (p. 216). In other words, the fetish is never exclusively self-referential.
And how could it be the case that "primitive Dasein" completely lacks the sense of the handiness of things as tools "for something"? Would "primitive Dasein" be unable to understand the south wind as a sign of rain, without confusing it with rain, even if wind or rain themselves might be worshiped? Or, inversely, would Heidegger say that even in an "advanced state of culture" there are no self-referential structures? The psychoanalyst encounters patients who simultaneously do not conflate signs with what they indicate, and yet who do resist symbolic interpretation, forming a fetishistic transference to the analytic process. And where does Heidegger get the idea that there simply is no "objecti-fication" for "primitive Dasein"? He could be making the historical point that for "primitive Dasein" the "object" in the modern sense, which emerges out of the work of Descartes, does not yet exist. But he seems to be saying something broader: the conflation of indication and indicated precludes any possible ob-jectification in the sense of ob-ject or Gegen-stand: that which stands against one, and hence is separate from one-"free," in Heidegger's sense.
From a Nietzschean point of view one could say the opposite. When Nietzsche says that "metaphysics begins in dreams," he means that the dream experience, the feeling of being visited by apparently real "spirits," initiates belief in a second, transcendent world. Historically the argument about fetishism has always been that it has no possible relation to transcendence. However, it was precisely the persistence of fetishistic formations in modern religions, with their belief in an abstract god, that led Hume to his statement about the universal error of objective presence. In other words, wherever there is belief in either real "spirits" or transcendence, there is conviction of a "world" apart from oneself, and hence some form of objectification. This is why Nietzsche ironically spoke of belief in the primacy of consciousness and in the reality of a second world as metaphysical fetishes.
One can extend Nietzsche's thought about dreams and transcendence to Freud's conception of the dream experience (1900). To explain the "reality effect" of the dream, Freud emphasizes its hallucinatory nature. To experience a hallucination is to have the feeling of experiencing something objectively real. Hallucinatory reality is a product of what Freud calls perceptual identity and temporal
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immediacy. If I see something now that is identical to something I have seen before, it is objectively real for me-even if it is a hallucination. The primal example is the hungry baby who hallucinates the image of the breast that previously fed it, an image stored in unconscious memory. Freud's conception of hallucination provokes the vexing problem of reality testing: to see something now cannot be the ultimate criterion of reality, because this is also true for hallucinations. But it also says that once there are dreams, there is always a version of objective pres-ence-which would also have to hold for "primitive Dasein". Integrating Mauss, Nietzsche, and Freud, to construe the fetish only in terms of lack of reference, transcendence, and objectification would be evidence of blindness to anything other than immediate self reference, a blindness based on both prejudice and failure to consider how the fetish is constructed. Particularly from Freud's point of view, any symptom-whether in neurosis, in the slips of the psychopatholo-gy of everyday life, or in the construction of a fetish-is a compromise between knowing and not knowing. This is why at the end of his life he extends the construction of the fetish backward to account for the action of mind on itself that produces symptoms or slips.
But, one could object, if Heidegger says that the fetish is not yet a sign, just as the broken tool or the perplexing knot are no longer signs, then there would have to be a link between the self-reference of the fetish and the reference of the unusable thing. The fetish which is not yet a sign has to be capable of becoming one. This too, is a question examined throughout the history of fetishism. De Brosses' universalization of fetishism put him in the awkward position of having to account for the possibility of abstract monotheism across an apparently unbridgeable divide; recall his argument about the sons of Noah. Derrida commented on this issue in Glas, via Kant and Hegel. For Kant the "teleological horizon of 'true and unique religion' is the disappearance of the fetish" (p. 207). For Hegel, the fetish as African is foreign to historical consciousness. It belongs "to an unconscious that does not let itself be dialectized as such, that has no history... But this nondialecticalness, this ahistoricity can always be interpreted as negativity, as resistance proper to the dialectic economy, and consequently interned in the speculative process" (ibid.). Although Heidegger is making an argument about worldliness, not religion, like Kant and Hegel he sees the fetish as both foreign to reference, and as destined to reference, in its not-yetness. This is why there has to be a "formal" structure of worldliness that could account for "primitive Dasein," which does not yet encounter things as referential. If the
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fetish is poised between not being a sign and potentially becoming a sign, then the sign structure cannot be completely foreign to it. But does Heidegger explain how this is so? Or is he unable to do so, and hence the dismissal of fetishism? Is the fetish a perplexing knot for Heidegger?
If one grants this argument, there is a second way to read the passage. Heidegger does say that the fetish's lack of referentiality, even more than the broken tool or the perplexing knot, contains the possibility of an ontology of things that is wider than the one elaborated on the basis of handiness. Is Heidegger momentarily considering the universality of fetishism? "One could be tempted to illustrate the distinctive role of signs in everyday heedfulness for the understanding of the world itself by citing the extensive use of 'signs,' such as fetishism and magic, in primitive Dasein" (p. 76 [my emphasis]). He imagines the possibility of an ontological status of the fetish, but resists it for the traditional reason of its self-referentiality, while knowing that there has to be a "formal structure" of be-ing-in-the-world that would have to include the primitive. What if his resistance were misguided? Whether ethnologically or clinically, apparently non-abstract and closed self referential structures always co-exist with apparently abstract and open symbolic structures. One cannot simply say that the fetish is foreign to symbolism. This is the problem of self-reference: is it ever simply closed in on itself, ever simply concrete?
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This is the central question: can the self-reference of the fetish open onto other ways of thinking what we usually call "mind" and what we usually call "thing". Recall the perplexing knot, the thing that is both no longer a sign of what one was supposed to remember, and that is a sign of mind's fallibility, its action upon itself-which Heidegger does not consider. Heidegger would justifiably suspect the traditional concept of mind, but his point of departure from things to elucidate Dasein's being rethinks "mind" and "thing" in terms of their relat-edness. And this relatedness is always a question of finitude, a question itself always related to how "mind" acts on itself (This will become clearer via Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.) As finite being-in-the-world, as always already related to things, the existential structure of world and things are Dasein.
And vice versa, when being-in-the-world as care becomes the structure of time. Care is temporality because both care and time are simultaneously being ahead (the existential future), being already (the existential past), and being together
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with (the existential present)-but not as a future present, a past present, and a present present or now. If that were the case, time would occur and elapse in an objective present, making time itself something objectively present-which it cannot be. Hence, Heidegger writes: "Temporality 'is' not a being [i.e. something objectively present] at all. It is not, but rather temporalizes itself... temporality [is] the ekstatikon par excellence. Temporality is the primordial 'outside' of itself... [I]ts essence is temporalizing in the unity of the ecstasies" (1996, p. 302). To paraphrase: the way in which Dasein exists only as outside itself, as being-in-the-world (existential space), as ek-static, as always already outside itself, is the structure of time as the reaching out toward each other, the ek-stasis, of past, present, and future. Since none of this is objectively present, is not a being, is neither a subject acting on an object nor vice versa, time is this "outsiding". But although time is not an objectively present being, nonetheless, it is a kind of thing-the ekstatikon par excellence. This non-present thing is an auto-affective process-temporalizing itself.
Two critical strands come together here. The first is the understanding of the being of being-in-the-world. Since being-in-the-world is always a relation to things, but things not objectively present, worldliness or thingliness must be integrated with the structure of time. Hence the paradoxical noun form of time temporalizing itself: the ekstatikon par excellence. The second is the understanding of time itself. If existential space is existential time, if being-in is being-outside, and if time itself is this "outsiding," then time has to have a non-objectively present spatial aspect. As spatial it is thingly, is a kind of thing-again, the ekstatikon par excellence. This kind of thing is auto-affective. Is the auto-affective thing completely foreign to the self-referential thing? Could being as time, as auto-affective thing, as care, as being-in-the-world, simply exclude fetishism?
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From a psychoanalytic point of view, everyday universal phenomena such as dreams and slips reveal the basic structure of mind. Eventually, and unwittingly, Freud joins a long tradition in universalizing fetishism, to say more about the basic structure of mind (1940). Heidegger is tempted by fetishism, but then rejects it, based on the false premises that have characterized the metaphysics he wants to "destroy". Does the temptation speak to an intuition that fetishism does open onto the crucial ontological questions of the thing and time? What if Heidegger had known of the anthropological finding of the universality of fetishism? And had also known of Mauss' critique of traditional analyses of fetish-
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ism, had known that the apparently exclusive self-reference of the fetish always exists in the context of a symbolic code? And had been able to question the usual conceptions of the "primitive"? Could he have yielded to his temptation, and used fetishism to expand his ontology of thingliness? And could this have been a place where Freud's universalization of fetishism would have had to encounter Heidegger on the thing?
The Transcendental Imagination: The Iridescent Thing
The questions of the relation to things and the auto-affective structure of time are sharpened in Heidegger's reading of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. To understand how, and to begin to examine the consequences, require a detailed examination of that work.
Heidegger gives a clear indication of his "method" in general when he writes in KPM: "...with any philosophical knowledge in general, what is said in uttered propositions must not be decisive. Instead, what must be decisive is what it sets before our eyes as still unsaid, in and through what has been said" (p. 140). One can restate this in terms of Kant's guiding question in CPR: how does man, a finite creature, have knowledge of things he has not created, since creation of things belongs to the infinite reason of God? By ferreting out the unsaid in Kant's answer to this question, a question about the relatedness of mind and thing, Heidegger will make Kant's conception of mind and thing ontological, i.e. temporal. My contention will be that Heidegger's controversial reading of Kant has crucial resources for the psychoanalytic conception of "mind"; I began to lay this out in Interpretation and Difference (2006, pp. 77-83), and will have to return to that here. And because my major point is that Freud's late generalization of fetishism would have to affect his entire conception of unconscious processes, I am attempting to demonstrate that Heidegger's analysis of the unsaid in Kant is essential to the unsaid in the theory of fetishism, and even to the dismissal of fetishism in Being and Time.
Heidegger has to begin by contesting the traditional understanding of the CPR as an epistemological work. That understanding derives from Kant's well known idea that the metaphysical foundations of natural science provide the means to understand the possibility of man's knowledge of things he has not created. However, when Kant says that the purpose of the Critique is to lay "the ground
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for metaphysics as a whole" (KPM, p. 8), Heidegger takes him at his word. To lay the ground for metaphysics as a whole means "unveiling in the inner possibility of ontology" (ibid.). Specifically, it means that Kant's most general question about the possibility of knowledge-how are a priori synthetic judgments possibles-is itself the question of "the inner possibility of ontology."
This is why Heidegger consistently inflects Kant ontologically. For Kant, pure reason, reason which does not depend upon experience, is a faculty of knowing according to a priori principles. The issue is to determine how a priori synthetic judgments-i.e. judgments which add to knowledge-are possible. Heidegger says that this means that Kant is concerned with the "quiddity"-the whatness-of the thing, an ontological question. Quiddity, then, is itself a question of experience free synthesis. "...bringing forth of the determination of the Being of the being is a preliminary self-relating to the being. This pure 'relation-to...' (synthesis) forms first and foremost the that-upon-which and the horizon within which the being in itself becomes experiencable..." (p. 10). Why "self-relating"? Because every judgment, according to Kant, is an "I connect" (ibid.). Heidegger here is looking at Kant in terms of process. Whatever the content of the "I connect," it is a process of "mind" relating to itself. Heidegger's entire argument seeks to demonstrate that self-relating is actually the possibility of a priori synthesis, "access" to the being, the thing. The demonstration itself will be guided by the auto-affective nature of time. To follow the complex structure of Heidegger's argument it is useful to know this in advance.
Continuing. Because human reason is finite, Heidegger zeroes in on Kant's initial statement about finite knowledge: "'In whatever manner and by whatever means a knowing may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it relates itself immediately to them and upon which all thought as a means is directed'" (p. 15). Heidegger comments: "In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily intuiting. From this it at once becomes clear that the new interpretation of knowledge as judging (thinking) violates the decisive sense of the Kantian problem. All thinking is merely in the service of intuition" (ibid.).
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If we know in advance that Heidegger will be concerned with auto-affection, we can see why he starts with Kant on intuition as a "knowing" that is an immediate relating of itself to objects. But, to return to the order of Heidegger's
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argument, he is "hammering" in the point about intuition to justify the weight he will give to the very short transcendental aesthetic that begins the CPR. Intuition is sensory in the Greek sense, aisthesis. Kant, of course, is not concerned with empirical intuition, but with experience free, a priori intuition: hence the transcendental aesthetic. Heidegger makes a crucial point about the necessity of a transcendental aesthetic:
The essence of sensibility exists in the finitude of intuition... With this, Kant for the first time attains a concept of sensibility which is ontological rather than sen-sualistic. Accordingly, if empirically affective intuition of beings does not need to coincide with 'sensibility,' then the possibility of a non-empirical sensibility remains essentially open... if finite intuition is now to be knowledge, then it must be able to make the being itself as revealed accessible with respect to both what and how it is for everyone at all times (p. 19).
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There is an enormous amount embedded in this comment. By taking Kant at his word Heidegger approaches the "unsaid" in his thought: the paradoxical concept of "non-empirical sensibility" is the key to a new understanding of intuition as the primal relation to the thing. In combined Kantian and Heideggerean language: "...the synthesis of thinking and intuiting accomplishes the making evident of the encountered being as object..." (p. 20). Heidegger always questions the encounter of the "being as object". But by analyzing this encounter in terms of the "synthesis of thinking and intuiting," Heidegger will go beyond the being as object-and man as subject.
This takes us to the next crucial step of the argument. Kant famously characterizes thinking and intuiting, concept formation and sensory reception, as the "'two basic sources of the mind,'" other than which there are "'no others'" (p. 25). How can they be synthesized? Heidegger cites Kant from the beginning of the Critique: "'...there are two stems of human knowledge, sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring forth from a common, but to us unknown, root'" (ibid.). He juxtaposes this statement with one from the conclusion of the Critique, in which Kant says that he has begun where "'the common root of our power of knowledge divides and throws out two stems, one of which is reason'" (p. 26). Kant explicitly says that the purpose of the Critique is to "outline the architectonic of all knowledge arising from pure reason'" (ibid.). This is why the
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Critique is usually read as an epistemological work. Heidegger, however, hears in these statements an opening to the unsaid:
...the 'sources' are understood as 'stems' which spring forth from a common root. But whereas in the first passage the 'common root' was qualified with a 'perhaps,' in the second the 'common root' is reputed to exist. Nonetheless, in both passages this root is only alluded to. Kant not only fails to pursue it further, but even declares that it is 'unknown to us'. From this, something essential arises for the general character of the Kantian laying of the ground for metaphysics: it leads not to the crystal clear, absolute evidence of a first maxim and principle, but rather goes into and points consciously toward the unknown... (ibid.).
The rest of KPM will be a demonstration that the "common root" indeed exists, that Kant himself has embedded an explanation of it in the CPR, but that this explanation undermines his entire architectonic. It will be something from which Kant has to "recoil". My aim will be to show the importance of Heidegger's delineation of the common root for the psychoanalytic conception of mind in relation to fetishism.
If there could be a common root, it would have to explain the synthesis of the elements of pure knowledge-pure intuition and pure thinking (p. 27). This would have to be a demonstration of the possibility of a pure, experience free, transcendental synthesis which requires "clarification of the original ground for the inner possibility of this synthesis" (ibid.). This original ground is what Heidegger means by "ontological". One knows that if it is ontological it will depend upon the forgotten question of being (time) itself. This is why Heidegger says about the demonstration of a transcendental synthesis is a "projecting freeing of the whole, which an ontology essentially makes possible". It thus "brings metaphysics to the ground and soil in which it is rooted as a 'haunting' of human nature" (p. 29).
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"'Haunting'" is a citation; Kant's word is Heimsuchung. Richard Taft adds an important translator's note about it: "The German Heimsuchung is translated by Kemp Smith [the translator of the CPR ] as 'visitation,' but the term also connotes a haunting or an obsession. I render it 'haunting' to show the sense in which the questions Kant asks are an inescapable and lingering part of human nature. We should at the same time be attuned to the literal sense of the word, which
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suggests the seeking of a home" (p. 29, n. 57). Whether as visitation, haunting, obsession, or the search for a home, Heidegger is emphasizing Kant's word to show that the question of being, the forgotten or unsaid of metaphysics, cannot not be at work in a critique of pure reason. It cannot not visit a laying of the ground for metaphysics, but this visit can be a visitation, comparable to the way a spirit or ghost insinuates itself. It cannot not haunt, or obsess, any attempt to find the home of metaphysics-a home which is foreign to it. A foreign home: the unheimlich, the uncanny, which is such an important theme throughout Heidegger's work. The unheimlichkeit of this heim, the "unknown common root," will be the reason for what Heidegger will call Kant's "recoil".
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Let us return to the stages of the argument. From within Kant's framework, the possible common root of pure intuition and pure knowledge must be a transcendental synthesis. And if all thought is in service to intuition, the "transcendental synthesis must be an intuition, and as a priori knowing, it must be a pure intuition" (p. 30). Space and time are the pure intuitions of the transcendental aesthetic. Kant defines space as the pure external sense and time as the pure internal sense. Because Kant says that time "'is the formal a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever'" Heidegger says that time "has preeminence over space" (p. 34). Hence, he is going to show how "time shifts more and more to the forefront in the course of the individual stages of the laying of the ground for metaphysics, and hereby first reveals its own particular essence in a more original way than the provisional characterization in the Transcendental Aesthetic permits" (ibid.).
Heidegger justifies his approach:
If in general the grounding of the universality of time as pure intuition is to be possible, this can only happen if it can be shown that although space and time as pure intuitions both belong 'to the subject,' time dwells in the subject in a more original way than space. Time immediately reduced to the givens of inner sense, however, is at the same time only ontologically more universal if the subjectivity of the subject exists in the openness for the being. The more subjective time is, the more original and extensive is the expansiveness of the subject (p. 35).
One hears the echo of Being and Time. Existential space, being-in-the-world as the relation to things, yielded existential time, ecstatic time temporalizing itself.
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Heidegger cannot literally accept Kant's characterization of time as subjective. Rather he is pushing Kantian subjectivity to its limits, wanting to show how the temporality of the subject expands-or even explodes-it. (Again: this is the importance of the preliminary point about knowing as a self-relating to the being.) The overall aim is the integration of expansive time, which opens the "subject" to the thing, with the delineation of the common root. Let us already envisage the integration of the common root with expansive time, the very relatedness of mind and thing, as the possibility of fetishism.
Proceeding carefully, Heidegger says that intuition and thinking as the elements of finite knowledge demonstrate a "pull of the elements toward one another" such that "their unity cannot be 'later' than they are themselves, but rather that it must have applied to them 'earlier' and must have laid the ground for them. This unity unites the elements as original in such a way that even at first in the uniting, the elements as such spring forth" (p. 41). In other words, there has to be a "prior" synthesis of intuition and thinking that at the same time permits their distinction. The unity of intuition and thinking "may be sketched out initially in such a way that it shows how each of these elements structurally supports the other. They indicate seams [Fugen] which point in advance to a having-been-joined-together" (p. 43).
A seam joins and articulates. The seam of intuition and thinking indicates ahead of them that they can be separate. The seam, then, precedes what it joins. The seam is the "unknown common root". It is a synthesis that is "neither a matter of intuition nor of thinking" (p. 44). Heidegger cites Kant on synthesis itself: "'Synthesis in general, as we shall hereafter see, is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no knowledge whatever, but of which we are seldom conscious even once'" (ibid.).
"Seldom conscious even once." The psychoanalyst can wonder: unconscious? In the usual sense, no. Kant is not talking about anything like a dynamic unconscious in the Freudian sense, an unconscious that is the source of drives and wishes that inevitably place the mind in conflict. Rather, he is talking about a possibility of conscious knowledge, a possibility which itself does not operate consciously. In another sense, however, there is a link to Freudian thought. In an unusual passage of the paper on "The Two Principles of Mental Functioning"
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(1911, p. 221) a passage that I have referred to in both Difference and Disavowal and Interpretation and Difference, Freud speaks of "originally unconscious thought." The passage is unusual in that Freud speaks of an unconscious source of the possibility of conscious knowledge. This is the source of secondary process, which itself is the inhibition, the binding, of the tendency toward the immediate discharge of the primary process. In other words, it is the possibility of delayed gratification. Delay itself implies increase of the tension that discharge would release. "Originally unconscious thought" is not thought in the usual sense, involving connection to words. Rather it is the unconscious tendency toward binding of tension. And this unconscious tendency toward binding is synthetic. Freud specifies that as tension raising delay, originally unconscious thought also binds the relations of unconscious memory traces of "objects" (Objekteindrucke). This is a unique moment in Freud's thought, whose many possible implications he does not pursue. Is originally unconscious thought a "blind but indispensable function of the soul"-Seele, psyche-of which we are never conscious? Has it any possible connection to a rethinking of time? For the moment, these are only questions.
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To return to Heidegger on Kantian imagination and synthesis, he predictably speaks of them temporally. Time as the pure internal sense for Kant is synoptic, the a priori unification of time as succession. If pure knowledge itself is synthetic, and pure time synoptic, a "pure synthesis of the power of imagination" would not simply join together intuition and thought. As per his conception of the "seam," Heidegger sees pure, i.e. transcendental, imagination as the structural center in which "the pure synopsis and the pure, reflecting synthesis meet and join together... [which is] the original, rich wholeness of one which is composed of many members" (p. 45). One "composed of many members" recalls the structure of care as time-an articulated whole of ek-static future, past, and present which is itself the ekstatikon. This temporal "thing," we saw, is a process. The transcendental imagination as the possible unknown common root that is a temporal, articulated whole would also have to conceived in processive terms.
The essential unity of ontological knowledge cannot be the conclusion, but must instead be the correct beginning of the laying of the ground for ontological knowledge. This ground-laying has been transformed into the task of bringing to light pure synthesis as such. But because it is an action, its essence can only become apparent to the extent that it is itself traced out in it springing-forth (p. 46).
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This process or action is the possibility of the relation to the thing for finite knowledge. "Finite creatures need this basic faculty of a turning-toward... In this original turning-toward, the finite creature first allows a space for play [Spielraum] within which something can 'correspond' to it. To hold oneself in advance in such a play-space, to form it originally, is none other than the transcendence which marks all finite comportment to beings" (p. 50). This is a complex point. Heidegger is saying that if we follow Kant on the finitude of human reason, then the "finite creature" structurally, transcendentally, needs something that makes possible any relation to a thing. This transcendental need is "fulfilled" by a process, the action of pure synthesis, itself a function of the transcendental imagination. This process itself, like the spatiality being-in-the-world, is the opening to the thing, a play-space.
Heidegger does not immediately justify calling this opening a "play-space". If one is familiar with the rest of his work, one knows how important a notion play is, from the essence of truth as the freedom compared to the play at the center of a wheel, to the commentary on Heraclitus on time as play. In the immediate context of KPM one can at least be struck by the oddness of putting play at the center of the Kantian architectonic, whose aim is to lay the metaphysical grounds for deterministic science. But we already know that Heidegger wants to show how the Kantian architectonic has to undermine itself. Once the self undermining is demonstrated, Heidegger will say more about the Spielraum.
Proceeding step by step toward this undermining, Heidegger asks whether the pure synthesis of intuition and thought, a necessary Kantian question, has a place within the Kantian system:
...pure synthesis falls neither to pure intuition nor to pure thought. For this reason, the elucidation of the origin of pure synthesis which is about to begin can be neither a transcendental-aesthetic nor a transcendental-logical one... But to which transcendental discipline, then, does the central problem of the possibility of ontology fall? This question remains foreign to Kant (pp. 46-47).
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The foreignness of the question is precisely why Kant can envisage a common root, but say both that it is unknown, and that it is "a blind but indispensable faculty" of "which we are seldom conscious, even once". Heidegger insists that if one reads the CPR without considering these issues, then it will always be
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understood as an epistemological work. "But precisely for this reason, the interpretation must free itself from the Kantian architectonic, and it must make the idea of transcendental logic problematic" (p. 47). The implications of this statement are large. If the transcendental logic is the metaphysical ground of Newtonian science, then Heidegger is saying that the transcendental logic cannot really account for its own ground. The possibility of the relation to the thing would be foreign to the conceptual framework of Newtonian science. Psycho-analytically, one can extend this statement: the possibility of something like fetishism, a relation of mind and thing, cannot be conceived in terms of the logic of "classical" science. Is there any possibility that this could have to do with Freud's "originally unconscious thought"? Or with time?
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Proceeding further toward the integration of time with the transcendental imagination, Heidegger undertakes an analysis of the transcendental deduction, one of the most difficult sections of the CPR. His daring move is to show that the transcendental deduction itself can be clarified via the relation of imagination to time, even if this "appears to contradict Kant's own explicit explanation of what deduction means" (p.53). The issue, as always, is the pure synthesis of pure intuition and pure thought, but from the point of view of the formation of the "play-space" which a finite creature needs in order to encounter any being at all. Here we come to the question of the transcendental apperception, the Kantian cogito, the "I think," (described above as an "I connect"), which Kant calls "'pure, original, unchangeable consciousness'" (p. 55). Kant also says that the transcendental apperception "'presupposes a synthesis, however, or includes one'" (p. 56). Recall that Kant has already established that synthesis itself is a function of imagination-the non-conscious, blind, but indispensable faculty. The pure synthesis of pure intuition and pure thought cannot represent anything empirical. Rather, it is "formative a priori, i.e. purely productive" (ibid.). Again, this pure synthesis is an action, a process. Crucially for Heidegger, Kant says: "'Thus the principle of the necessary unity of the pure (productive) synthesis of the power of imagination, prior to apperception, is the ground for the possibility of all knowledge, especially of experience'" (ibid.). Heidegger can then remind us that if pure synthesis unifies a priori, a priori unification itself is a question of the pure intuition of time as synopsis. The elements fall into place: "...the intuition which in advance is pure, given, and universal, and which takes things in stride is time. Hence the pure power of imagination must be related to it essentially. Only in this way is the pure power of imagination unveiled as the
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mediator between Transcendental Apperception and time" (p. 57). Since Kant also says that "'all modifications of the mind... are subject to time... as that in which they must all be brought... into relation with another'" (ibid.), Heidegger can now say that it is "striking" that Kant does not explicitly pursue "the a priori essential relationship of the pure power of imagination to time" (ibid.). He is implying that Kant could not pursue the relation of imagination to time because it is the "foreign home" of his entire system.
Kant himself registers discomfort: "'That the affinity of appearances... only becomes possible by means of this transcendental function of the power of imagination is indeed strange...'" (p. 58). Heidegger intensifies the strangeness via time as the "pure universal intuition... wherein things can be joined in general and [as] that wherein it is possible to form connections" (ibid.i). Following the implications: if the "I think" is allegedly unchangeable, not subject to modification in time, but if it requires, as Kant says, "'a pure power of imagination... which serves as basis for all knowledge a priori,'" and if the transcendental imagination as synthetic has to be relative to time-can the cogito really be unchangeable, timeless?
Heidegger moves more directly toward a temporal cogito when he looks at Kant's highest synthetic principle: "'the conditions for the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions for the possibility of objects of experience'" (p. 84). Heidegger says that "at the same time" is more important than the italicized words. "At the same time" expresses "the full structure of transcendence," as the "horizon of objectivity in general," i.e. the relatedness to the being, the thing. This relatedness is "a going-out-to..., which was previously and at all times necessary in finite knowing, and thus is a constant standing-out-from... (Ecstasis)... In itself, transcendence is ecstatic-horizonal. The highest principle gives expression to this articulation of transcendence unified in itself... The grounding principle... is the expression of the most original phenomenological knowledge of the innermost, unified structure of transcendence" (p. 84).
Heidegger is here integrating his reading of Kant's conception of time as the possibility of the relation to things with the analysis of time itself as ekstasis, i.e. the "outsiding" which accounts for Dasein as being-in-the-world (Being and Time). And we can ask again: would this not also be the possibility of fetishism, of the relatedness of mind and thing?
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Heidegger then takes up the faculty of imagination itself. Kant says that the laying of the ground of metaphysics belongs to the human soul, so Heidegger looks at the discussion of imagination in the Anthropology. This recourse to the Anthropology will provide an essential insight into imagination, which Heidegger will then seem to disqualify, and then again to revalidate. The structure of this twisting argument is itself essential to understanding the relation of the transcendental imagination and time.
In the Anthropology Kant defines imagination as "'a faculty of intuition even without the presence of the object'" (p. 90). Heidegger reframes this definition: "imagination 'can' intuit, 'can' take the look of something in stride, without showing the intuited which is referred to..." (p. 91). "'Can'" is in scare quotes to emphasize that the Kantian faculty is always a capacity, a power, an ability to do something. Here, it is the ability to "see," to take in a "look," without actually seeing anything. Heidegger: "...we find in the power of imagination... a peculiar non-connectedness to the being" (ibid.). This leads him to a critical point about imagination, a point whose methodological status he will have to question:
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The power of imagination can hence be called a faculty of forming [Vermogen des Bildens] in a peculiar double sense. As a faculty of intuiting, it is formative [bildend] in the sense of providing the image [Bild] (or look). As a faculty which is not dependent upon the presence of the intuitable, it fulfills itself, i.e. it creates and forms the image. This 'formative power' is simultaneously a 'forming' which takes things in stride (is receptive) and one which creates (is spontaneous). In this 'simultaneously' lies the proper essence of its structure. But if receptivity means the same as sensibility and if spontaneity means the same as understanding, then in a peculiar way the power of imagination falls between both. [Heidegger's footnote: Already in Aristotle's De Anima, book G3, phantasma stands 'between' aisthesis and noeisis.] This gives it a remarkably iridescent character... (ibid.).
If, following Kant, intuition is receptive-passive, and thought, concept formation, spontaneous-active, then imagination, in its power to "see," to form an image without actual presence, is receptive-spontaneous, active-passive. Iridescent. Shifting its color in and of itself.
But the Anthropology, unlike the CPR, is an empirical, not a transcendental investigation. "The way of Kant's Anthropology, which at first appears to be self-evi-
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dent... has revealed itself to be the wrong way" (p. 94). Nonetheless, "reference to transcendental structures always already lies in the empirical interpretation of the faculties of the soul, which properly speaking, can never simply be purely empirical themselves" (ibid.). If the iridescent imagination of the Anthropology is to have any relation to time, the "reference to transcendental structures" will have to be demonstrated.
Returning to the CPR Heidegger isolates an important contradiction. As transcendental, imagination is the pure synthesis of intuition and thought. There are three basic transcendental faculties-sensibility, imagination, thought. But we know that Kant also says that there are "'two basic sources of the mind, sensibility and understanding,'" and that "'aside from these two sources of knowledge, we have no others'" (p. 95). Using a significant word, Heidegger says that the "transcendental power of imagination is homeless. It is not even treated in the Transcendental Aesthetic where, as a faculty of intuition, it properly belongs. On the other hand, it is a theme of the Transcendental Logic where, strictly speaking, it may not be as long as logic remains confined to thought as such" (p. 95; my emphasis). Heidegger then cites other passages in which Kant speaks of three original faculties.
Two or three? Is Kant inconsistent? Relying on the previous analysis of the transcendental imagination as the original unification, the seam of intuition and thought, which also allows their separation, Heidegger makes the essential point: "What if this original, formative center was that 'unknown common root' of both stems? Is it an accident that with the first introduction of the power of imagination Kant says that 'we ourselves, however, are seldom conscious [of it] even once'?" (ibid.). In other words, the "homelessness" of the transcendental imagination makes it the necessarily "unknown," foreign, home which "haunts" the CPR [Heimsuchung].
Is it iridescent? To answer, Heidegger returns to the transcendental aesthetic, where the transcendental imagination, as intuition, "properly belongs". Space and time are pure intuitions in that they do not allow any beings to "spring forth" (p. 99). Rather, they "pro-pose [Vor-stellen ] the look of time and space in advance as totalities which are in themselves manifold" (ibid.). Heidegger calls this in advance pro-posing of time and space "the formative self-giving of that which gives itself" (ibid.). Note the self-relating: the self-giving of that which
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gives itself. Because what is "given" here cannot be a present being, as per the Anthropology it belongs to imagination, but of course, a pure, transcendental imagination. Technically, the look of time as a purely intuited manifold totality is "synoptic," according to Kant's conception of synopsis as the temporal intuition of the whole of time as succession. As the self-giving of that which gives itself, this synopsis is formative intuition-which "is only possible in the transcendental power of imagination, and that is all the more so as this [transcendental power of imagination] is in general the origin of all that is 'synthetic'" (p. 100). The co-implication of time-synopsis-and the a priori synthesis at the heart of knowledge draws closer, but via the transcendental imagination (p. 101). Which means that "that which gives itself' is an "ens imaginarium," not in the sense of an imaginary being, but in the sense of a "some-thing" which cannot be a present object (ibid.). Call it the non-sensuous sensuous thing, the thing of time itself: time as the ekstatikon par excellence (Being and Time). This is what the discussion of iridescent imagination in the Anthropology could not encompass.
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How to conceive the self-giving of the ens imaginarium? Returning to the transcendental apperception, the "I think" which accompanies all thought, Heidegger looks at the status of the "I." The ego of the cogito as concept forming, as pure understanding, is a "representing, forming spontaneity". This pure thinking as "representing, self-orienting-toward" clearly is not judging in Kant's usual sense, but is "thinking in the sense of the free, forming and projecting conceiving of something" (p. io6)-a something which is not objectively present. This is the thinking of the ens imaginarium. In a startling statement, Heidegger says: "This original 'thinking' is pure imagining" (ibid.). Spontaneity, however, "constitutes but one moment of the transcendental power of imagination" (p. 107). As pure intuition, it is also receptive. "And it is receptive, moreover, not just apart from its spontaneity. Rather it is the original unity of receptivity and spontaneity" (ibid.). This is the transcendental, i.e. ontological, justification of the iridescence of the imagination, as per the Anthropology. Heidegger had asked if it was an "accident" that Kant had introduced the transcendental imagination as that of which "we are seldom conscious even once". He is now alleging that as the "iridescent seam," the foreign home, of the CPR, the transcendental imagination cannot belong to Kantian consciousness, to the ego of the cogito. Rather, this "I" itself can only be thought in relation to the transcendental imagination: "... original 'thinking' is pure imagining".
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All of this permits a summary statement:
This original, essential constitution of humankind, 'rooted' in the transcendental power of imagination, is the 'unknown' into which Kant must have looked if he spoke of the 'root unknown to us,' for the unknown is not that of which we simply know nothing. Rather, it is what pushes against us as something disquieting in what is known. And yet, Kant did not carry through with the more original interpretation of the transcendental power of imagination... On the contrary: Kant shrank back from this unknown root (p. 112).
Heidegger here is describing something like philosophical disavowal: the registration and repudiation of the disquieting in the known, the disquieting which pushes against the known, that which makes the known other than what we think it is. This is the structure Freud discovered in fetishism, such that the fetish itself is a "monument" to what it apparently repudiates. For Heidegger, the Kantian cogito is a "monument" to the transcendental imagination.
Can one go further in this direction? Here I must return to the question of the "unsaid" in Freud's theory of fetishism. Just as Heidegger gains access to the unsaid via a contradiction in Kant-two or three transcendental faculties?-so I have insistently tried to gain access to the unsaid via a contradiction in Freud. He says that the reality the fetish repudiates is the reality of castration (1927). If Freud contends that the fetish disavows reality by using fantasy as a "patch" over that reality, then the contradiction is flagrant: castration is itself a fantasy. Freud does not notice that his own theory implies that the entire fantasy structure of phallic monism-sexual difference equals phallic or castrated-is the "patch" over the reality of sexual difference. And just as Heidegger contends that the transcendental-ontological questions are always at work in the empirical ones, so I have contended that something of that order is at work within the disavowal of empirical sexual difference. Likewise, I wondered above if Freud's singular mention of "originally unconscious thought" could have anything to do with Heidegger's contention that the origin of Kantian thought is in a faculty of which we are not conscious even once. We will have to follow the rest of Heidegger's argument about the CPR, and what Kant had to disavow-shrink back from-to pursue this question.
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Heidegger examines the differences between the A and B editions of the CPR in the treatment of the transcendental imagination to strengthen his point about Kant's recoil. He summarizes:
Will not the Critique of Pure Reason have deprived itself of its own theme if pure reason reverts to the transcendental power of imagination? Does not this ground-laying lead us to an abyss?
In the radicalism of his questions, Kant brought the 'possibility' of metaphysics to this abyss. He saw the unknown. He had to shrink back. It was not just that the transcendental power of imagination frightened him, but rather that in between [the two editions] pure reason as reason drew him increasingly under its spell... The problematic of a pure reason amplified in this way must push aside the power of imagination, and with that it really first conceals its transcendental essence (pp. 117-118).
What is the transcendental essence that pure reason must push aside? If this has to be an ontological question, then of course it must be a question of time. Heidegger reframes his entire effort to this point. As the common root, the transcendental imagination must
make possible something like a pure, sensible reason. Pure sensibility, however, namely in the universal meaning according to which it must come to be grasped in the laying of the ground for metaphysics, is time.
Should time as pure sensibility stand in an original unity with the 'I think' of pure apperception? Should the pure I, which according to the generally prevailing interpretation Kant placed outside of all temporality and all time be taken as temporal? And all this on the grounds of the transcendental power of imagination? How in general is this related to time? (p. 121)
One could insert all of Being and Time at this point. Suffice it to say that Heidegger demonstrates that the pure intuition of time cannot be confined to the current now, but must concern the sequence of nows such that each now looks ahead and looks back-synopsis. Recall the temporality of care, and recall "the self-giving of that which gives itself," the non-sensuous sensuous of the ens im-aginarium. Heidegger says: "In pure intuition, the self-giving which takes things
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in stride is in principle not related to something which is only a presence and is related least of all to a being which is at hand" (p. 122). Rather, he wants to demonstrate how the transcendental imagination allows time as the sequence of nows to "spring forth," and "as this springing forth" is "original time" (p. 123).
The demonstration is quite detailed. It winds up at the question of time as both the subjectivity of the subject and as that wherein all connections are made-the possibility of synthesis itself (p. 131). If, as Kant says, space and time as a priori intuitions always "affect" the representation of an object, then as the pure internal sense, time itself is to affect us. But affection implies a relation to something at hand, something outside. How, then, can time affect us?
Time is only pure intuition to the extent that it prepares the look of succession from out of itself... This pure intuition activates itself with the intuited which was formed in it, i.e. which was formed without the aid of experience. According to its essence, time is pure affection of itself... As pure self-affection, time is not an acting affection that strikes a self which is at hand. Instead, as pure it forms the essence of something like self-activating. However, if it belongs to the essence of the finite subject to be able to be activated as a self, then time as pure self-affection forms the essential structure of subjectivity (p. 132).
Being and Time: time temporalizing itself is care; care is being-in-the-world as the relation to things. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: time as pure self-affection is the transcendental imagination; the pure intuition of the transcendental imagination is the intuition of the ens imaginarium. The idea that pure intuition is pure auto-affection is actually derived from Kant. Heidegger says that the following passage from the transcendental aesthetic can only be understood in the light of everything that he has said so far. Kant writes:
Now that which... can be antecedent to every act of thinking anything, is intuition, and if it contains nothing but relations, it is the form of intuition. Since this form represents nothing except insofar as something is posited in the mind, it can be nothing other than the way the mind, through its own activity... comes to be affected through itself... (p. 133).
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Freud: originally unconscious thought, the "antecedent" to secondary process, conscious verbal thought, is the tension raising binding, synthesis, of relations
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between memory traces of "objects." What are such memory traces? They express what Freud understands to be a basic property of the unconscious: to be permanently affected without the participation of consciousness. To be affected is to be differentiated. One must add to this conception something like a Freudian conception of "care." Freud himself says in the "Two Principles..." that the infant might look like a monadic "chick in the shell" because it appears unrelated to the maternal care that surrounds it. He does not pursue the question very far, but consistent with his conception of unconscious memory traces, particularly with his theory of the memory trace of being fed, (the experience of satisfaction), the unconscious is always "affected," even if in traditional terms it is not yet a subject related to objects in the usual sense. Is it stretching Freud too far to read his idea about unconscious binding of the relations between memory traces of "objects" to mean traces of relation, relation before a subject-object structure? Traces of the relation to "the self-giving of that which gives itself" (the "breast" of the experience of satisfaction)? If the infant is not a subject and the breast not an object, is this a relation to an ens imaginarium? And thus, an intuition of "pure" relation, of "mind" acting upon itself in relation to that which gives itself? And if so, does this have any relation to time-the ekstatikon? Does it bring the Freudian unconscious close to Heidegger's iridescent transcendental imagination?
Considering "mind" itself, Heidegger says:
...time as pure self-affection is not found 'in the mind' 'along with' pure apperception. Rather, as the ground for the possibility of selfhood, time already lies within pure apperception, and so it first makes the mind into the mind... Time and the 'I think' no longer stand incompatibly and incomparably at odds; they are the same (p. 134).
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Thus, despite Kant's stated intent, there can be no timelessness of the cogito.
This conclusion is what led Derrida to say that one would have to read Freud's repeated statements about the timelessness of the unconscious the way Heidegger read Kant on the timelessness of the cogito (1978, p. 215). I have previously examined Freud's own step in this direction in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In another unusual passage, he momentarily wonders about the possibility of an unconscious time that would challenge Kant's conceptions of time and space (p. 28). Significantly, Freud situates this possibility in the context of his recon-
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sideration of trauma, and even wonders whether conscious time, the time in relation to which the unconscious is "time-less," might itself be the defensive response, the "stimulus barrier," to a traumatic unconscious time. Trauma in Freud always means raised tension levels. In fact, in Beyond... the unconscious possibility of trauma leads Freud to envisage a "before" of the pleasure principle. This "before" is itself the binding of tension-especially the too much tension of trauma. Such binding is a prerequisite for the regular functioning of the pleasure principle. And at the very end of Beyond..., Freud wonders whether binding itself has to be understood as a tension poised between pleasure and unpleasure in relation to "units of time".
In "Two Principles..." Freud envisaged binding as unconscious thought. Is there any possible relation between Freud on binding, unconscious time, and unconscious thought, and Heidegger's deconstructed Kant, for whom auto-affective time and mind acting upon itself are the possibilities of relation to the thing?
Heidegger has already established that a finite creature needs a play-space, a Spielraum, for any possible relation to a thing. In the discussion of the playspace above, we said that Heidegger would come back to it once the self undermining role of the transcendental imagination as time was established. It is now clear that "Original time make possible the transcendental power of imagination which in itself is essentially spontaneous receptivity and receptive spontaneity" (p. 137). In other words, "iridescence" is the joint unity and separation of active and passive. This has to be a quality of any auto-affective process, in which there is no subject-object structure, no opposition between action and acted upon. An auto-affective process has to have within it the Raum, the room, the space, for the play of iridescence. Heidegger writes:
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Kant wants to say: the encountering of the being itself occurs for a finite creature in a representing whose pure representations of objectivity as such have played up to one another [auf einander eingespielt]. This Being-played -up [Eingespieltsein] is...determined in advance in such a way that in general it can be played out in a play-space [in einem Spiel-Raum abspielen kann]. This [play-space] is formed through pure determinations of the inner sense. The pure inner sense is pure self-affection, i.e. original time (pp. 138-9).
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Hence, Heidegger can put "play" at the heart of the Kantian architectonic. If auto-affective time is the activating process of the finite self, it has to be spatial: "...like time, space in a certain sense also belongs to the self as something finite... this [self], on the grounds of original time to be sure, is essentially spatial" (p. 140). As in Being and Time existential space is existential time. Ekstasis, time temporalizing itself, is the ekstatikon par excellence, and the space for play intrinsic to auto-affection of KPM. The "I," the self, is as much the time-space of the ens imaginarium as the ens imaginarium is the thing, the space, of time. The space-time of the self-giving of that which gives itself.
At the end of his life, Freud jotted down the following sentence: "Being the breast precedes having the breast". Can one read this ontologically? Certainly, Freud had always said that in the oral phase, the libidinal relation to the object is incorporative, identificatory: one is what one loves. But when he distinguishes "being" from "having" Freud also implies that the breast is not initially something one can possess, is not yet an object. The baby is the breast in that it is related to it before a subject-object structure. Above we asked about this relation in terms of Freud's passing thought about originally unconscious thought, and in terms of the self-giving of that which gives itself, the ens imaginarium.
It is now necessary to answer these questions, via Freud's explicit examination of the auto-affective structure at the heart of his theory of sexuality. This is the relation of Freud's theory to KPM on the transcendental imagination that I began to examine in Interpretation and Difference (pp. 77-83). In "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (1915) Freud takes up an essential point in his theory of infantile sexuality. The "component drives," i.e. the sexual impulses of infancy, before their organization under the dominance of the genitals, are always pairs of opposites, an active and passive version of the same drive. For example, sadism and masochism are the active and passive versions of enjoyment of pain. When Freud examines voyeurism (scopophilia) and exhibitionism, he expects to find the same structure, but does not. To summarize a complicated development: sadism, which is always active, itself is not originally sexual. The task is to show how it becomes sexual, which for Freud is a consequence of what he calls turning around upon oneself. Voyeurism, also always active for Freud, (the exhibitionist is passive, looked at), unlike sadism, is originally sexual. But infantile sexuality is essentially auto-erotic. This is why Freud says, "the scopo-philic instinct is auto-erotic; it has indeed an object, but that object is part of
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the subject's own body" (p. 130). Freud calls this a "preliminary stage" of voyeurism, which is "the source of both the situations represented in the resulting pair of opposites" (ibid.). In the preliminary stage "oneself looking at a sexual organ" equals "a sexual organ being looked at by oneself" (ibid.). The first half of the equation ("oneself looking") becomes active looking at "an extraneous object" (the voyeuristic subject); the second half ("at a sexual organ") becomes a part of oneself passively being looked at by an "extraneous person" (the exhi-bitionistic object) (ibid.). In the preliminary stage of scopophilia the distinctions subject-object and active-passive do not hold. For this reason, Freud calls it intermediate. He is describing an auto-affective process.
Remarkably, this intermediate auto-affective process has a clear relation to the temporality, the historicity, of sexuality. Sexuality itself was the key to the unconscious history of the individual, the history at work in the formation of neurotic symptoms. Looking at this history Freud found not only that the component drives of infantile sexuality occur as pairs of opposites, but that the active version of the drive could always turn into the passive version, and vice versa. To account for this possibility, Freud postulates the intermediate, active-passive, subjective-objective source of the drive. Speaking specifically of scopophilia he says, "The only correct statement to make about the scopophilic instinct would be that all of the stages of its development, its auto-erotic, preliminary stage as well as its final active or passive form, co-exist alongside one another" (pp. 130-131). One may be a voyeur for a period of time; for another period an exhibitionist. These may appear to be distinct identities, but the fact that voyeurism can turn into exhibitionism is made possible by their common root. Freud concludes: "This reference to the developmental history of instincts and the permanence of their intermediate stages should make the development of instincts fairly intelligible to us" (p. 131).
Freud uses a geological metaphor to describe this history. Each apparently distinct period of sexual activity is like a volcanic eruption, leaving behind lava. The accumulated strata of "successive eruptions of lava" give the history of the development of the drive. The primary, intermediate phase, though, has to "accompany" each eruption, because it makes it possible for each stratum to appear distinct, but to become the other. To mix metaphors, the primary, intermediate phase is both the "volcano" itself and a Heideggerean "seam" which
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unites and separates active and passive. As an auto-affective, temporal, process it is never present. It is the non-sensuous sensuous of sexuality.
Heidegger had said that the more subjective time becomes in Kant, the more it expands the subject, opens it to the thing. Can one say something similar about Freud's "eruptive" intermediate drives? With interpretation I believe so. The interpretation concerns "being the breast," a relation without a subject-object structure. It is a relation in which mind is affected-an unconscious memory trace is formed. The trace of a relation in which "mind" is the thing-which "gives itself." Which gives itself periodically, in "units of time." Which can be reconfigured in terms of primary scopophilia. If one is the breast, then oneself looking at the breast is the breast being looked at by oneself. The originally sexual mind is auto-affective in relation to the self-giving, temporal thing.
At the beginning of his work, accounting for unconscious memory, and the origin of dreams, Freud had to conceptualize the trace of the experience of satisfaction-the baby being fed. At the end he spoke of "being the breast." In between, he postulated primary scopophilia, which in combined Freudian-Heideggerean language could be said to provide the "pure look" of the thing. An "iridescent" active-passive process opens the "play-space" of the relation to the thing.
Without noticing the connection, Freud hypothesized primal binding in relation to unconscious thought and unconscious time. In the former, raised tension levels and relations between memory traces are the possibility of the temporal delay of secondary process, conscious rationality. The latter is potentially traumatic; conscious time is the protective barrier against it. As the possibility of secondary process, delayed gratification, unconscious thought is the tension of the "spacing" within the relations between memory traces. As the possibility of conscious time, the tension of unconscious time meets the mind's tendency to reduce tension. The least one can say is that Freud's usual descriptions of "the unconscious" as timeless primary process becomes much more complex. The unconscious iridescent auto-affective processes of the primary, intermediate phases of the drives open the relation to the thing. They are "eruptive-expansive," related to the tension of unconscious thought and unconscious time. All of this is very close to Heidegger's understanding of the transcendental imagination as auto-affective time-the blind faculty of which we are seldom conscious even once; the abyss of metaphysics, from which Kant had to recoil.
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The possibility of fetishism in the usual sense, the universal capacity for worship of, or sexual arousal by, a thing, would then reside in the integration of unconscious thought, unconscious time, and primary scopophilia. That is, in the auto-affective unconscious process of "being the breast," i.e. mind acting on itself as the opening to the thing that it is. This is the temporal space of the ens imaginarium. The traditional motifs of the description of the fetish-its self-ref-erentiality, its "unity of opposites" (protective or harmful, phallic or castrated, good or bad)-are the recoil from its conditions of possibility, and from what they say about both mind and thing. Self-referential conflation of indication and indicated is disavowal of the auto-affective processes that constitute mind and thing. The "reality effect" of oscillation between opposites is disavowal of "iridescence". Apparently objective opposites are the conscious, closed versions of the unconscious opening of the relation to the thing. The non-symbolic, non-referential fetish is not exactly not yet a transcendental god, or an abstract sign. Rather, its complex structure of opening and closure show why open and closed structures, auto-affection and self-reference, always co-exist. Auto-affection is the possibility of self-reference.
Returning to fetishism in Being and Time: Heidegger could not follow through on his idea that what the fetish apparently is not could indeed yield a formal conception of being-in-the-world larger than the one based on the sign structure of useful things. Perhaps Heidegger evaded another aspect of everyday Dasein, which can always make the thing into a god or a sexual object. Freud, on the other hand, sees the opening to a general structure in sexual fetishism. But could he have rethought unconscious processes in terms of the relatedness of mind and thing, i.e. in terms of unconscious time and unconscious thought? These are the processes that are the unsaid of the transcendental imagination. Such processes themselves are the reality of the ens imaginarium, mind and thing in their auto-affective relatedness. This is the reality that is the "foreign home" of reality conflated with objectivity. It is the reality of uncanniness. Freud, then, is somewhat like Kant in Heidegger's reading. He does not pursue possibilities he envisages, possibilities that undermine some of his basic ideas. But he is also somewhat like Heidegger himself, in that he does glimpse these possibilities: binding before the pleasure principle, unconscious thought, unconscious time, primary intermediacy.
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Let us recall that Freud's own point of departure-how is it possible to have memories of which we are not conscious? what does defense say about mind?-is a question of mind acting upon itself. His most general answer is the theory of repression. When he generalizes fetishism and disavowal at the end of his life he says that he is returning to his point of departure, to something both "old and familiar, and new and puzzling". I think that he did not see how large the puzzle was, the puzzle of the general structure of fetishism. To remain on the terrain of Heidegger and Freud, let us also recall that the perplexing knot of Heidegger's handkerchief in Being and Time can indicate Freud's most enduring questions: what is mind, what is conscious, what is unconscious, if I can always forget what I intend to remember? And then what is mind if fetishism is its most general condition? Both questions trench upon mind acting on itself and upon the relation to the thing, whether as memory-aid, or as religious or sexual object.
A knot binds. This binding is a synthesis of mind and thing. When the apparent reference is forgotten-really disavowed-and the knot, like a broken tool, appears just to be there, like the fetish-and contra Heidegger-the binding of mind and thing is "indicated". But indicated the way one indicates that which cannot be indicated: the iridescence of the ens imaginarium. The uncanniness of auto-affective process.
In the paper on "Fetishism" Freud says that he will surely disappoint in saying that the fetish is a substitute for the penis. He then goes on to say that it is a substitute for the fantasized maternal phallus, the antidote to the possibility of castration. Similarly, I might surely disappoint by saying that the possibility of fetishism is the relation to the breast. However, I am claiming that this is a relation to an ens imaginarium in Heidegger's sense. I am also claiming that the possibility of the memory of the experience of satisfaction, of the opening of the unconscious, its capacity to be affected, is the auto-affective structure of mind "acting upon itself" in relation to an auto-affective, self-giving thing. This is why in both Difference and Disavowal and Interpretation and Difference I attempted to revise the basic theory of unconscious process to include "registration," tracing, of non-objectively present reality-summarized under the rubric of the reality of differentiating process.
It is essential to remember that the origin of fantasy in Freud's sense is the hallucinatory revival of the experience of satisfaction. In other words, the prior
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condition of fantasy is the registration of the ens imaginarium. One can understand fantasy in this sense as imaginary in the way Heidegger read Kant on imagination in the Anthropology-the bringing forth of the "look" of something without its actual presence. To which Freud of course would add that this bringing forth can be hallucinatory, such that there is an effect of actual presence without actual presence. But one would have to add to this Heidegger's understanding of the transcendental imagination, in which imagination itself is auto-affective time in its paradoxical synthetic capacity. Empirical imagination can be responsible for apparent self-reference, but transcendental imagination is responsible for its condition of possibility-auto-affection. To circle back to our constant theme: auto-affection as the opening to the thing, and as the possibility of symbolism, always co-exists with self-reference as the apparent closure of the possibility of symbolism. But co-exists in a structure of disavowal: paradoxically differentiating auto-affection is the uncanny, tension raising home of concrete self-reference.
In KPM Heidegger increasingly emphasizes the play-space of auto-affection. It fulfills the transcendental need of a finite creature for the relation to the thing. In Being and Time care is ecstatic time. "Care" itself always implies finitude and need, opening, relation to what is other than oneself. In Freudian terms, the need for care is the obvious empirical fact of the helplessness of the human infant, but it also has a more "transcendental-ontological" status in the theory of the drives. All of my previous work not only attempts to explore the import of Freud's generalization of fetishism, but also to rethink the question of therapeutic care in relation to Freud on need and drive. This is what led him to postulate the life-drive, Eros. To recapitulate quickly: In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud corrected his previous assumption of inherent conflict between self-preservation and libido, the mainspring of the original theory of repression. While there is such a conflict in neurosis, this is no longer a general condition of mind. Rather, one must think of a combined libidinal-self-preservative drive, a life drive. This drive combines three functions, all of which relate to everything we have seen in KPM: it synthesizes mind with environment, binds energy, and "introduces fresh vital differences" into the psyche. Because it raises tension levels, Eros itself has to be in conflict with the tendency of mind to reduce tension, the pleasure principle hypostasized into the death drive. Again, Freud postulates a primacy of binding, and again does not notice the connections to his other postulations of a primacy of binding. Nor does he see any connection to
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primary intermediate scopophilia, or to the question of "being the breast". Both the latter concern the question of care.
Eros as care is both self preservative and libidinal. What does this have to do with fetishism? The libidinal aspect of the fetish, the thing, clarifies why it can always be an object of sexual arousal or worship. In psychoanalytic terms, it is actually both, in that the sexualized thing is venerated, and the venerated thing sexualized. This raises the very large question of idealization, Freud's point of departure for his discussion of fetishism in the Three Essays (1905). But idealization can always be reversed, as consistently pointed out in the history of discourse on fetishism: the replacement of the the maternal phallus with the thing is a monument to the horror of castration; the worshiped thing can be harmful, persecutory. Each side of the equation can be taken as concretely real, as the result of the disavowal of the auto-affective process of Eros in its differentiat-ing-synthetic function. The fetish then oscillates between apparent opposites: sexuality and destructiveness, phallic and castrated, idealized and persecutory.
In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud offers an explanation of how this can come about. There, he said that "In the real world transitional and intermediate stages are far more common than sharply differentiated opposite states" (1937, p. 228). He is saying that apparent opposition is less "real" than one usually thinks. Later in the paper he uses his old theory of universal bi-sexuality as an example. He wonders about a clinical issue. While bisexuality itself is part of "normal mental life," some people experience it as "irreconcilable conflict". Why? Not for the reason one might expect: the castration complex. Rather, conflict over normal bisexuality illustrates an independent "tendency to conflict... [which] can scarcely be attributed to anything but the intervention of an element of free aggressiveness", the death drive in action. And Freud goes on to compare the life and death drives to Empedocles' philia (love) and neikos (strife). The implication is clear: intermediate, "iridescent" bisexuality becomes an apparently irreconcilable conflict over hetero- and homo-sexuality because of the destructive, tension reducing, dedifferentiating aspects of the death drive. Intermediate, universal bisexuality is an aspect of philia, Eros, care.
This conception can be generalized. Eros "begins" with "being the breast," a binding, tension raising, auto-affective-differentiating process, a relation to an ens imaginarium. It encounters two other aspects of unconscious process: the
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capacity to form memory traces which can be revived with hallucinatory intensity and the concomitant tendency toward tension reduction. When this occurs objective presence is conflated with tension relief: what I see now is supposed to rid me of pain, while I am unaware that this objective presence is the trace of the ens imaginarium. In other words, the structure of wish fulfillment is the disavowal of "being the breast". One must not confine this operation to the oral phase. Whenever mind "affects itself" with differentiating process, it is always possible that mind will "attack itself," with the result that the trace of differentiating process is disavowed via objective presence. This is the point at which intermediacy becomes opposition, such that opposite states appear discrete, but can turn into each other. Again: the fetish as phallus and castration, the breast as idealized and persecutory. Overall philia and neikos interact. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud briefly noted a primal tendency to respond to differentiation with aggression, but said he could not explain it. This is the explanation.
This attack of the mind on itself-a kind of auto-immune response-would result in the closure of the Spielraum, the temporal play space of auto-affective process. In psychoanalytic terms, it would be the closure of Winnicott's "transitional space," the origin of play. Winnicott famously calls transitionality a "third area of experiencing" between the subjective and the objective (1975, p. 230). The present participle, experiencing, can remind us of Heidegger's reading of Kant's highest synthetic principle-the condition of possibility of experience in general. Heidegger had said that when Kant claims that this condition is at the same time the condition of possibility of the object of experience, the simultaneity of experience and object itself expresses exactly what Kant had to recoil from-the Spielraum. Winnicott himself says that because playing occurs on the "theoretical line" between the subjective and the objective, it is "precarious" (1971, p. 50). This precariousness may lead to a "high degree of anxiety" (1971, p. 52). "Games and their rules" are then part of "an attempt to forestall the frightening aspect of playing" (1971, p. 50). Heidegger makes a similar point about Kant. The Spielraum is what a finite creature needs for any possible relation to a thing (p. 50). But Kant grants supremacy to the faculty of rules (pp. 52-3)-in Heidegger's reading the inevitable recoil from the auto-affective temporality of the Spielraum.
Winnicott in general has not much use for Freud's death drive. Clearly, though, the "high degree of anxiety" of the intermediate experiencing of play can pro-
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duce rule bound activity, which controls the "precariousness" of what is on "the theoretical line" between subjective and objective. In the context of Heidegger on Kant, of the Spielraum as the "abyss of metaphysics," Winnicott's sense of the anxiety of play requires a closer look at "transitional phenomena" themselves. He does not attend to Freud's "being the breast" or primary scopophilia, which are entirely relevant to his conception. But he comes close when he says that "two babies are feeding at the breast. One is feeding on the self, since the breast and the baby have not yet become...separate phenomena. The other is feeding from an other than-me source" (1971, p. 89). This division of the baby is an expression of differentiation within auto-affection: the baby is the breast, but the breast is also a thing that is not an object. (The memory trace of the experience of satisfaction is the trace of the ens imaginarium.) This division within the baby is the "third area of experiencing". For Winnicott, this is why all babies at some point make use of a thing that is "not part of the infant's body," yet is "not recognized as belonging to external reality" (1971, p.2). The baby moves from auto-affection of the body-"fist, fingers, thumbs" in the mouth-to attachment to a thing, typically soft and pliable. But while this thing comes from without for the observer, it does not for the baby. As intermediate, the transitional thing is akin to the division of the baby, both itself (feeding on itself) and not itself (other than me).
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This auto-affective, differentiating process is the origin of play in terms of space and time. "Playing has a place and a time. It is not inside by any use of the word... Nor is it outside, that is to say, it is not a part of...that which the individual has decided to recognize as truly external" (1971, p. 41). This is the "first use of a symbol and the first experience of play" (1971, p. 96). Winnicott expands on symbol, time, space, union, separation:
The object is a symbol of the union of the baby and the mother... This symbol can be located. It is at the place in space and time where and when the mother is in transition from being (in the baby's mind) merged in with the infant and alternatively being experienced as an object to be perceived... The use of an object symbolizes the union of two now separate things, baby and mother, at the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separateness (1971, pp. 96-97).
Rephrased: the space-time of transition, of play, of the relation to the thing, is the origin of symbolism as union-separation.
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Winnicott says that the transitional object is the "substance of illusion," in a strong sense: it is the "stuff" out of which all cultural activity, all art, science, and religious experience, emerges. But it can be delusion, or even madness, to insist on the objective reality of illusory, or play, experience: the communicant must always know that the wafer is not literally the body of Christ. If not, one has Hume's error of objective presence, magnified into possible insanity if one insists that others accept the reality of one's delusion. And one also has the possibility of a fetish, which Winnicott typically sees as an indication of environmental failure. He contends that "good enough" maternal care allows the extension of the transitional object onto the "entire cultural field". The fate of the transitional object is not to be lost or mourned, but to fade away. However, absent good enough environmental provision, the transitional object can become an infantile fetish, an object that always has to be present, that cannot fade away.
This is perhaps the point at which Winnicott's failure to consider the death drive is important. I have no dispute with his theory of environmental impingement, the impact of not good enough care. However, he does not take into account that in the situation in which the baby is the breast-mother, pain, or even trauma, is also auto-affective. Differentiation is then neikos. The play-space of transitional-ity becomes mandatory objective presence, or the threat of its absence. There is a Kleinian idealized good breast and persecutory bad breast. In fact, one could say that the Kleinian good and bad breasts are the fetishism of the oral phase, the disavowal of the differentiating "transitional" breast-again the ens imaginarium.
The distinction between transitional thing and fantasy object is critical here. Freud's brief account of philia and neikos potentially explains how intermediate thingliness becomes oppositional fantasy-with the proviso that each side of the opposition can become the other. This is why Freud and Klein, in their respective ways, theorize both splitting of, and oscillation between, phallic and castration, idealized and persecutory. The very possibility of this splitting oscillation is something like a Heideggerean iridescent seam. The transitional "object"-and here I think that "thing," or even Winnicott's "phenomenon," are the preferable words-is itself a "symbol" of transition. The mother and the baby are in transition from union to separateness; the breast that one is becomes the breast that one has. Transition itself is the Spielraum, the play of time and space, that is both union and separeness, being and having. As union and separateness are themselves differentiated, transitionality is "subjectivized". One becomes a
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separate subject in relation to a present or absent external object; the breast that one has can also be the breast one does not have. The potential anxiety related to any play on the border of the subjective and the objective becomes the destructiveness directed against tension raising intermediacy. The "rule bound" game of closed reference, of the conflation of fantasy and objective presence, apparently dominates. But it is always "haunted" by the auto-affective transi-tionality of oneself as thing. If this is so, then an integration of Winnicott on transitionality and Freud on primary intermediacy takes the theory of the unconscious further in the direction of Heidegger's conception of the transcendental imagination.
Sensation, Thinging, Fourfold
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Heidegger returns to the CPR in What Is A Thing? (1967). There is a kind of mea culpa to What Is A Thing? Heidegger says that his aim is make up for what KPM lacked (p. 125), namely the significance of the mathematization of physics (Newton) for the delineation of the a priori synthesis. As in KPM Heidegger begins with the question of the "quiddity," the thingness of the thing, and observes that every thing is "this particular" thing. (Recall the supposed singularity of the fetish.) But this is precisely what Kant is not interested in; for him the thing is an object of mathematical-physical science (p. 128). The thing is an object of experience to the extent that it is knowable according to axiomatic rules. Hence, Kant has "disregarded what is manifest (das Offenbare). He does not inquire into and determine in its own essence that which encounters us prior to an objecti-fication into an object of experience" (p. 141). The manifest is what has come into the open. Heidegger's consistent point is that the singular, particular thing is not an "object of experience," but rather an "experience" of what cannot be objectified, what cannot be conceptualized according to mathematical science: opening itself. What he called the Spielraum in KPM he here calls the Zeitraum, the time-space of opening, of non-objectifying encounter with the thing.
As in Being and Time and KPM Heidegger seeks the inner relation between the immediate, non-objectifying encounter with the thing via sensory reception and Zeitraum. Sensation, he says, "occupies a peculiar intermediate position between things and human beings, between object and subject" (p. 208), and "reflects the uncertainty of the relation between man and thing" (p. 211). Inter-mediacy and uncertainty: what rules cannot govern.
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In KPM Heidegger used the transcendental imagination in its relation to intuition and time as the lever to deconstruct the Kantian architectonic; here he uses Kant on "intensive magnitude" in a similar way. "Extensive magnitude" is the understanding of space as everywhere uniform, and so measurable: this is Newton. Again, this is why the principles of mathematical physics are the condition of possibility for objects of experience: all objects are extended and measurable. "Intensive magnitude," however, concerns the "quantity of quality": how brightly does the moon shine? Kant himself says that all appearances are extensive magnitudes as intuitions, and intensive magnitudes as sensations (p. 222). But, says Heidegger, this means that all sensory perception contains an "anticipation," a "reaching out" that makes it possible for sensation to be a "receivable, encountering this and that" (p. 22o)-i.e. a particular, qualitative encounter. Kant's discovery of anticipation in perception, says Heidegger, is "astonishing" in light of the role of mathematical physics in the a priori synthesis, because it puts the particular and the qualitative into sensory reception a priori.
Because Kant says that all appearances themselves are subject a priori to rules determining their relation in time (p. 228), Heidegger can use non-rule bound intensive magnitude, and its relation to time, to delineate another aspect of the "unsaid" in Kant. Time, says Heidegger, is the "connection" in which a priori rules themselves have anticipatory power (p. 229). Here, Heidegger enters into another detailed examination of aspects of the CPR, of what Kant says about time in relation to the analogies of experience. The latter are the rules that indicate the temporality of experience of an object (permanence, cause and effect, reciprocity) (p. 235). But Kant has also posited quantity, quality, relation and modality as the categories of thought-and quality, he has said, is a function of intensive magnitude (p. 236). Hence, if there has to be a unity of pure conceptions of understanding, (which has to be governed by rules), with space and time as forms of intuition, (with space itself presupposing intensive magnitude), then there is a "circle" in which the "rulable" and the "non-rulable" turn into each other. (Recall the relation between the Spielraum and the faculty of rules in KPM.) This circularity is the essence of experience: "Experience is in itself a circular happening through which what lies within the circle becomes exposed (eroffnet). This open (Offene), however, is nothing other than the between (Zwis-chen)-between us and the thing" (p. 242).
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Undermining Kant's stated intent, Heidegger now says that we cannot understand the CPR from the scientific viewpoint. The "between" itself "is not like a rope stretching from the thing to man," but is an "anticipation" that "reaches beyond the thing and similarly back behind us" (p. 243). He concludes:
Kant's questioning about the thing asks about intuition and thought, about experience and its principles, i.e. it asks about man. The question 'What is a thing?' is the question 'Who is man?' That does not mean that things become a human product (Gemuchte), but on the contrary, it means that man is to be understood as he who always already leaps beyond things, but in such a way that this leap-ing-beyond is possible only while things encounter and so precisely remain them-selves-while they send us back behind ourselves and our surface. A dimension is opened up in Kant's question about the thing which lies between the thing and man, which reaches out beyond things and back behind man (p. 244).
That the question "what is a thing?" is the question "who is man?" means that "who" and "what" are in a circular relation. They are open to each other, opening itself being the intermediacy-the transitionality-that "links" (binds) them. But binds them not as a rope ties together two pre-existing objects, but as a structural futurity, an "anticipation," which again means that the who is a who by means of its relation to a what. This anticipation takes us back to particularity: things remain themselves. This thing is not encountered according to any rule (Spielraum as opening to the thing). Such an encounter sends "us back behind ourselves and our surface." What does that mean? If our surface is our consciousness, then the encounter is "behind" it. Can one hear a reference to that of which we are not conscious, even once? To a non-conscious, non-rule-bound play (Winnicott) of a relatedness to the thing (the "what") that I (the "who") am? A play in which particularity cannot be abstracted away, leapt beyond? In other words, a play in which "my" singularity is the particularity of the thing?
Throughout the history of discourse on fetishism, particularity is the spoke in the wheel of reason. For Kant fetishism is the veneration of the "trifling" with no sense of the sublime (1960, p. 180). This includes any sort of "fetish faith" in which "clericalism" prescribes "certain formalities" as the means to have God satisfy one's wishes, tantamount to dismissing all recourse to an "in itself" (1960, p. 181). But such dismissal would also dismiss any understanding of a non-deterministic, non-conscious process in which particularity is transitional-
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ity or intermediacy. Or in which the "object of experience" is made possible by the relation to a thing which is not an object, a relation which itself is "behind ourselves and our surface".
Heidegger's own dismissal of fetishism in Being and Time, then, sounds Kantian. The fetish is only understood in terms of the conflation of indication and indicated, excluding it from the freedom of the sign structure. For Kant reason and moral law also are the guarantors of a certain freedom. But this freedom rests upon rule bound "leaping beyond" the thing, i.e. encountering the thing as an object of experience. Paradoxically, this is why there is always a "Kantian" aspect to fetishism. As Mauss made clear, a fetish never exists without reference to coded rules. And as Freud made clear, the fetish itself is an "object of experience," in that its "reality effect," as in dreams and hallucinations, depends upon the objectification of time and space (perceptual identity and temporal immediacy). Which is also why Freud himself had so many difficulties with the role of reality testing in his theory, especially in the theory of fetishism. (What is the reality disavowed by the fetishist?) But this would also explain why the fetishist as "Kantian" supports Heidegger's reading of Kant: rule bound objective reality is a disavowal of the play of intermediacy, which relates man and thing-behind ourselves and our surface. And relates them via singularity and sensation (intensive magnitude). But this also explains the disavowal structure of Heidegger's envisaging a possible opening to being-in-the-world in fetishism in Being and Time, and then repudiation of this possibility. He could not see that fetishism itself is possible because of the encounter with the thing in its sensation and singularity. But one must always recall Mauss' point about the coded nature of the fetish. Fetishism then would be precisely where singularity and the rule turn into each other-Heidegger's circle of experience in which the rulable and the non-rulable turn into each other.
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When Heidegger describes "experience as a circular happening through which what lies within the circle becomes exposed" the reader familiar with Being and Time will recall what he says there about the hermeneutic circle. Countering the usual understanding of it as a vicious circle-the project of interpretation presumes interpretability itself, so has no foundation-he says that the question is how to enter the circle in the right way. Similarly, in the concluding remarks of What Is A Thing? he is saying that Kantian "experience" unwittingly presumes a circular "happening," which Kant himself could not enter in the right way. Cir-
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cularity can be another way of describing auto-affection: concept and intuition, rules and play, have to move around each other, revealing the opening to the thing. Experience as this circular moving around becomes a circular mirror play in "The Thing."
Heidegger contends that things "have never yet at all been able to appear to thinking as things" (1971, p. 171). In other words, a thinking that does not participate in the forgetting of being, a non-metaphysical thinking, would be able to let the thing appear as thing, in its particularity. Quickly summarizing his understanding of the history of metaphysics, Heidegger says that this means that the thing would appear as neither Latin res, nor medieval ens, nor modern object of representation.
His example is a jug (Krug). The jug, he says, is a hollow vessel that holds liquid. It holds by taking what is poured in and keeping it. The pouring in and the holding are joined by outpouring from the jug: "The holding of the vessel occurs in the giving of the outpouring... the poured gift" (1971, p. 172). The gift of the outpouring is "drink for mortals," but may also be a "libation poured out for the immortal gods" (ibid.). The drink itself-say, wine-is the meeting of earth (what is grown) and sky (sun and rain).
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Mortals and gods, earth and sky dwell in the gift of the outpouring. In the gift of the outpouring earth and sky, divinities and mortals dwell together all at once. These four, at once because of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is present, they are enfolded into a single fourfold... This manifold-simple gathering is the jug's presencing. Our language denotes what a gathering is by an ancient word. That word is thing (Ding). The jug's presencing is the pure, giving gathering of the one-fold fourfold into a single time-space... The jug presences as a thing... But how does the thing presence? The thing things (Das ding bedingt). Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold's stay, its while... We are now thinking this word [thing] by way of the gathering-appropriating staying of the fourfold (1971, pp. 173-4).
The "gathering-appropriating," is not simply unification. Rather, "thinging" brings the remoteness of earth and sky, mortals and divinities, near to one another, but near in a way that preserves their distance (1971, p. 178). As always for
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Heidegger, relatedness is union-separation. This is why each of the four is itself because it reflects the other in a play of mirrors:
Each of the four [earth and sky, mortals and divinities] mirrors in its own way the presence of the others... Mirroring in this appropriating-lightening way, each of the four plays to each of the others. The appropriative mirroring sets each of the four free into its own, but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another. The mirroring that binds into freedom is the play that betroths each of the four to each... None of the four insists on its own separate particularity. Rather each is expropriated, within their mutual appropriation, into its own being. This expropriative appropriating is the mirror play of the fourfold... This appropriating mirror-play...we call the world. The world presences by worlding... the inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world's worlding lies in this, that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world's worlding... The thing stays-gathers and unites-the fourfold. The thing things world... we let ourselves be concerned by the thing's worlding being. Thinking in this way, we are called by the thing as the thing. In the strict sense of the German word bedingt, we are the be-thinged the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness (1971, pp. 178-81, passim; my emphases).
A passage like this can call for infinite commentary. I will pick out elements relevant to my argument so far. "Lightening" for Heidegger is opening that permits what one might call ontological seeing: the "light" required for "vision," of what is never objectively seen. This is the possibility of reception of the "non-sensuous sensuous," a kind of "experience free" intuition. Like the transcendental imagination in relation to time, this lightening is auto-affective: mirroring. But a mirroring of what is always simultaneously itself and other. Hence, it binds each to the other in such a way that each remains itself, in its particularity, as the relation to the other. Particularity is relation. This is a non-Kantian "freedom," because it is play (Spielraum). In other words, it is an a priori synthesis without rules, without cause or even ground. Hence, the deliberately paradoxical "mirroring that binds into freedom". The things that were the point of departure for the analysis of being-in-the-world in Being and Time now have "a life of their own," a "freedom" perhaps greater than the freedom of the referential sign-structure. Rather, things are the auto-affective structure of world itself: the thing "things world". Das ding bedingt. To be in the world, then, to be oneself as bound to things, is to be auto-affected by the auto-affective thing. Bedingen
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means "to be conditioned"-to be affected; to be differentiated. (Again Nietzsche on the madness of the metaphysics which derives the conditioned from the unconditioned.) To be in the world is to be conditioned a priori. To be conditioned is particularity, singularity. There is no possible "unconditionedness," no possibility of not being auto-affected by the auto-affective thing: the world.
Is this not a description of the possibility of fetishism as being the breast, as being the thing a priori, before subject and object, in an originally differentiating, auto-affective play?
The play of the fourfold in "The Thing" cannot be divorced from Heidegger's contemporaneous delineation of the fourfold play of time as space. The title of his late essay, On Time and Being itself indicates the relation to Being and Time. Returning to his earlier sense of ecstatic time as the reaching out to each other of the past, present, and future, and meditating on the givenness of time and space, that there is being (Es gibt Sein) and there is time (Es gibt Zeit), Heidegger says that past, present, and future are inter-related as
the presencing that is given in them. With this presencing there opens up what we call time-space... Time-space now is the name for the openness which opens up in the mutual self-extending of futural approach, past and present. This openness exclusively and primarily provides the space in which space as we usually know it can unfold... the unity of time's three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension. True time is four dimensional (1972, pp. 14-15; my emphases).
The play of the world as fourfold mirror play of the thing is the play of four dimensional time. The spatial thing, the extended thing, the particular thing, can only "bething" if it is temporal. The fourth dimension of time, opening, is space. Time as thing, the ekstatikon of Being and Time, is four dimensional play. This is world itself as time-space. Derrida has commented on this passage:
Whether it is a matter of Being, of time, or of their deployment in presence (Anwesen), the es gibt plays (spielt ) says Heidegger... The play (Zuspiel ) also marks, works on, manifests the unity of the three dimensions of time, which is to say a fourth dimension: The 'giving' of the es gibt Zeit belongs to the play of this
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'quadridimensionality'... The fourth dimension, as Heidegger makes clear, is not a figure, it is not a manner of speaking... it is said of the thing itself... (1992, p. 22; my emphasis).
That the thing itself is four dimensional time also means that as auto-affective mirror play the thing itself must be iridescent.
For Heidegger it is critical that before Plato, Heraclitus characterized time as play with a thing. Heraclitus' enigmatic Fragment 52 is given by Heidegger as "Time is a child that plays, shifting the pawns" (cited Schurmann, p. 42). The more literal translation is "Time is a boy playing, playingpessoi, kingship belongs to the boy" (Kurke, p. 265). Scholars do not know exactly what pessoi was, but from references in Homer and Plato, it seems to have been a game in which pieces were moved around, probably on a board. Some scholars think that "kingship" refers to a king piece in the game. For Heidegger, it is the movement of the thing, the "shifting of the pawns" by a playing child that characterizes time. Heraclitus is also the thinker of iridescence, the shifting of opposites (day and night, the living and the dead, the young and the old). In Fragment 52 he is specifically concerned with day and night as One, Hen-a one that is famously in difference with itself in and of itself, the hen heautoi diapherein. Heidegger says that there is no explanation, no reason why "the great child of the world-play seen by Heraclitus" plays (Schurmann, p. 42). Commenting on this play as time Schurmann writes:
Hen ...in the sense of...the oneness of day and night... [is the] 'originary form of the difference'... time is the simultaneity of phuein and kruptesthai, of breaking forth into presence and of retreating from the sunlight... This agonistic play...des-ignates the intrinsic motility of the One... [T]he temporality of presencing-absenc-ing, understood as a play, means that the One founds nothing. It is 'without why,' 89 'only play'... (pp. 178-9).
One can wonder whether Heidegger was too eager to ignore the possibility that Heraclitus' child was playing a game with rules, a game in which there is a king piece, perhaps like checkers or chess. Giving the fragment a psychoanalytic, or Winnicottian gloss, one can also wonder whether the pieces in the game are themselves the fetishes of transitional time, time as the iridescent hen heautoi diaphereien, the seam of presencing-absencing. In other words, the rules of a game which disavow the anxiety of what is on Winnicott's "theoretical line"
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between the subjective and the objective, the anxiety of the one in difference from itself in which the rulable and non-rulable turn into each other. Schurmann wrote that in general for Heidegger the "step back" to thinking presencing as the open and the between is quasi-traumatic. Such thinking "is abrupt since the resistances may suddenly vanish by which the 'rational animal,' the metaphysical animal, defends itself against polymorphous presencing as against its death" (1987, p. 42). Such "resistances" themselves have the disavowal structure that Heidegger attributed to Kant's recoil from the "abyss of metaphysics," the unsaid, or the unknown, that structures his work.
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For one can also think that Winnicott's divided baby, feeding from itself and something other than itself, is a version of the one in difference from itself. And in a Freudian sense, structured by a different version of a fourfold mirror play. What is the experience of satisfaction? The experience of four elements, each of which reflects the other: self-preservation, erotic arousal, feeding from oneself, feeding from the other. (The splitting of self-preservation and arousal, as discussed above, account for the fetish as religious or sexual object.) In a Hei-deggerian-Freudian-Winnicottian sense this auto-affective play is "perceived" in the passive-active sense of the relation to the thing in primary scopophilia. It conditions, "bethings," is traced in the "a priori synthesis" of originally unconscious thought and the inevitable tension of unconscious time as binding. Precisely because this is so, there will always be primal anxiety and recoil from this non-objective, non-rule-bound transitional reality. Philia meets neikos. In the auto-immune response to oneself as bedingt, objectification becomes the economical rule of tension relief. The iridescent thing becomes an idealized presence or a threatening absence.
Which is why one can ask what might appear to be an absurd question: is Heidegger's jug a breast? He does choose a thing which holds and gives liquid to describe the fourfold mirror play of the thing. Heidegger did not read Freud carefully enough to notice where auto-affection and other ways of thinking time entered his work. And Freud did not read Heidegger, particularly KPM, such that he could understand why his claim that psychoanalysis was not metaphysics, could not simply be a claim that psychoanalysis was science in the Kantian sense-precisely because that science was a defensive response to transitional, auto-affective time-space. And neither saw that the unavoidable question of fetishism has to be understood in these terms.
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