Between Nothingness and Death: Protecting a world endlessly persecuted by fundamentalist «onto-ideologies»

Abstract

Inspired by the decisive analyses of such dissimilar thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Althusser and Foucault, we have attempted to provide a realist theoretical framework within which the misunderstood phenomenon of fundamentalism can be interpreted as a phenomenon in the existential sense of the term. That is to say, a phenomenal reality which affects the existence of the modern individual in its historical contingency. The latter both presupposes and highlights man’s unavoidable metaphysical fragility as a mortal being. A being («Dasein») whose existence often abandons itself to its restriction and impoverishment by the evasive covering of death. A covering of death whose critical questioning opens («Erschliessen» in the celebrated Heideggerian sense in «Being and Time») a mortal being to the horizon of its finite singularity. The function of fundamentalist ideology is conceived, following the critique of Althusser, as that of assigning man to a «permanent residence». In other words, a rigid conceptual framework in which a mortal «Being» lets a fundamentalist onto-ideology persecute it («Sich Nachsellen des Seins») as underscored by Heidegger in his Bremen Lecture, «The Danger» («Die Gefahr»). Protecting our world from fundamentalism thus presupposes a new «art». One whose practice presupposes a movement of freedom of being whose universal promotion is the chief task of contemporary philosophy.