Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language, and the Politics of Calculation
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in Italian, and maybe western, capitalism, but his attempts at theoretical totalization render certain of his conclusions Eurocentric and incomplete. These problems do not, however, affect the fundamental significance of these texts, which is in the insistence on autonomy and social transformation in response to domination, an insistence that is as vital today as when the texts were written. Andrew Robinson University of Nottingham, UK Speaking Against Number: Heidegger, Language, and the Politics of Calculation Stuart Elden Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006, xv þ 192pp. ISBN: 0 7486 1981 X Contemporary Political Theory (2007) 6, 378–380. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300295
Stuart Elden has produced a textually rich, logically rigorous, always erudite, and ultimately quite significant book that takes on the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and ‘the political’. For a rather large group of scholars and students, this text must simply be essential reading; that group includes all Heidegger scholars (the largest subset) along with anyone who has grappled with Heidegger’s thought in relation to the concerns of the field of political theory. This is a powerful and important yet sometimes puzzling text. The text proves puzzling — and perhaps productively so — because of the title: it tells you where the book winds up, but does not quite describe what the book is ‘about’. And because the text eschews a linear logic of argumentation, one does not quite know where one is headed until one gets there. To put this differently, the three main chapters of the book, despite generally following chronology, fit together like pieces of a puzzle. In Chapter one, Elden provides a detailed reading of Heidegger’s early lecture courses (from the mid 1920s) on Aristotle. Against the prevailing view in the literature that Heidegger has no proper political thought, Elden convincingly demonstrates that Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle opens up a productive thinking of the political. This encounter with the political emerges most strikingly in the form of a concern with being-together (Mitsein), thought not as being-in-the-world but as being-in-the-polis. However, contends Elden, Heidegger does not pursue this promising line of thought, both because he restricts his treatment of Aristotelian phronesis to the ontological level — thereby covering over the particular political rendering of phronesis in Aristotle — and because Being and Time drops the thinking of being-in-the-polis. These are the lacunae that render Heidegger’s political thought during the Nazi period — the subject of Chapter two — problematic for reasons that go Contemporary Political Theory 2007 6
Book Reviews
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well beyond his own political actions. Elden rejects the inclination to exonerate Heidegger for his role in the Nazi party based upon arguments about the importance of Heidegger’s philosophical contributions. And, perhaps more importantly, Elden refuses to reduce Heidegger’s thinking of the political to the political choices that Heidegger
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