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Lacoue-Labarthe and [[Jacques Derrida]] have both commented extensively on Heidegger's corpus, and both have identified an idiomatically Heideggerian National Socialism that persisted until the end. It is perhaps of greater importance that Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, following Celan to a degree, also believed Heidegger capable of a profound criticism of Nazism and the horrors it brought forth. They consider Heidegger's greatest failure not to be his involvement in the National Socialist movement but his "silence on the extermination" (Lacoue-Labarthe) and his refusal to engage in a thorough deconstruction of Nazism beyond laying out certain of his considerable objections to party orthodoxies and (particularly in the case of Lacoue-Labarthe) their passage through [[Nietzsche]], [[Hölderlin]], and [[Richard Wagner]], all taken to be susceptible to Nazi appropriation. It would be reasonable to say that both Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida regarded Heidegger as capable of confronting Nazism in this more radical fashion and have themselves undertaken such work on the basis of this. (One ought to note in due course the questions Derrida raised in "Desistance," calling attention to Lacoue-Labarthe's parenthetical comment: "(in any case, Heidegger never avoids anything)").
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Lacan makes considerable reference to Heidegger's thought, and specifically 'to the 'existentialist' Heidegger of Being and Time. It was with the publication of this book, his first major work, in 1927, that Heidegger reworked Husserl's original method and gave phenomenology an existentialist orientation. Instead of asking what does it mean to know, he asks what does it mean to be? Later, in the 1930s, Heidegger's thinking underwent its famous 'turn' from a phenomenology of human existence, based on a concrete description of man's moods and projects as a being-inthe-world, to a phenomenology of language which stressed the priority of the word of Being over the human subject. In this later work Heidegger argues that language functions poetically as 'a house of Being' where genuine thinking is fostered. In his view we do not represent language to ourselves; language presents itself to us and speaks through us.
According to Heidegger I am not some free-floating disembodied cogito, but inherit a world that is not of my making, a world into which I have been thrown. I remain free to choose how I will reappropriate the meanings of this world for myself in order to project them into an open horizon of futural possibilities. Heidegger argues that Man is not a fixed object among objects, a selfidentical entity; he is a being who is perpetually reaching beyond himself towards the world, towards horizons of meaning beyond his present given condition. The essence of human being is temporality, for we can only understand ourselves in the present by referring to the temporal horizons of our existence, that is by recollecting our past and projecting our future.
In Heidegger's view, human thought can never elevate itself from its immersion in the past into a position of panoramic survey. He believes that our attempt to grasp our own rootedness in the past is driven by the urgency of a need to establish an authentic relation to our still-to-be-realised possibilities of being. Heidegger's stress on the temporal dimension of the future is shared by Lacan. In this view the actions of the subject cannot be seen as causally determined by his or her past; what is important is the interpretation. For Lacan,
38 Jacques Lacan
it is the way in which we understand our past which determines how it determines US.II But this understanding is itself intimately related to our orientation towards the future.
Heidegger in Being and Time considers temporality as 'being towards', an anticipatory mode of being.Iz In Lacan's theorisation of the mirror phase there is also a temporal as well as a visual dimension. In the mirror phase the illusory or alienating natUre of the ego's identifications involve an anticipatory, futural dimension.
The centre of Heidegger's concern is the meaning of Being. This quest leads him to language where Being manifests itself. Language speaks Being as thinking. Thinking in Heidegger, especially in the later works, reveals that language speaks Being. And Bein~ssucIr,dwells in language. Heidegger and Lacan have the following similarities: they both reject the traditional view that language is an instrument for the extension of man's will. They would agree with the statement, 'Man acts as though he were the~haper and master of language, while in fact language remains the ma~er of man.'13 Both suggest, in their different ways, that we are locke in a prison house of language. Neither Heidegger nor Lacan is int ~:~~_ i~_rnere explanation; both are far more interested in eluciuil~ il-
lumination. They want not to inform but to evoke. - _
I think Lacan's reading of Heidegger had a considerable impact on his thinking about language. Let me give an example. Lacan's notion of empty and full speech owes something to Heidegger's Gerede (idle talk) and Rede (discourse). While Gerede is associated with gossiping and chatter, Rede is to do with the disclosure of truth and Being.14 Lacan believes that empty speech is alienated, inauthentic speech; full speech means ceasing to speak of oneself as an object. These concepts will be discussed fully in the next chapter on language.
==Notes==
