The Ruse of Techne

Heidegger’s Magical Materialism

Dimitris Vardoulakis

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781531506759
  9781531506742
• eBook ISBN:
  9781531506766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

The Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger's entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking—in short, the ineffectual—are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work.

By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger's response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality.

Heidegger's conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Exordium
• Preamble: The Ineffectual and the Instrumental
• 1. Introduction: What is the Ruse of Techne?
• 2. The Problematic of Action Within a Single, Unified Being: Monism in Heidegger’s Thought
• 3. The Conflation of Causality and Instrumentality: Phronesis and the Genesis of the Ruse of Techne
• Excursus: Through the Looking Glass of the Distinction Between Causality and Instrumentality
• 4. The Concealment of Instrumentality: The Conception of Action in Being and Time
• 5. The Ontology of Conflict: Conjuring Authority
• 6. The Ontology of the Ineffectual: The Purloined Letter of Instrumentality
• Peroratio
• Acknowledgments
• Works by Martin Heidegger
• Bibliography
• Index