the working over of animal instincts—the drive is not instinct but its “denaturalization.” There is, however, a deeper logic to this paradox: from within the established human universe of meaning, its own founding gesture is invisible, indiscernible from its opposite, so that it has to appear as its opposite. This, in simple terms, is the basic difference between psychoanalysis and Christianity: while both agree that the life of the “human animal” is disrupted by the violent intrusion of a properly meta-physical “immortal” dimension, psychoanalysis identifies this dimension as that of (specifically [in]human) sexuality, of the “undead” drive as opposed to the animal instinct, while Christianity sees in sexuality the very force which drags humans towards animality and prevents their access to immortality. Such is the unbearable “news” of psychoanalysis: not its emphasis on the role of sexuality as such, but its rendering visible the “meta-physical” dimension of human sexuality. The paradox of Christianity is that, in order to uphold its edifice, it has to violently suppress this meta-physical dimension of sexuality, to reduce it to animality. In other words, this violent de-spiritualization of the key dimension of being-human is the “truth” of the Christian elevation of human spirituality. Unfortunately, Hegel does the same in his theory of marriage—as does Heidegger too. The standard idealist question “Is there (eternal) life after death?” should be countered by the materialist question: “Is there life before death?” This is the question Wolf Biermann asked in one of his songs—what bothers a materialist is: am I really alive here and now, or am I just vegetating, as a mere human animal bent on survival? When am I really alive? Precisely when I enact the “undead” drive in me, the “too-much-ness” of life. And I reach this point when I no longer act directly, but when “it” ( es )—whose Christian name is the Holy Spirit—acts through me. At this point, I reach the Absolute. The next, and crucial, step is to see how this “stuckness” is not just a consequence of our human deficiency or finitude, of our inability to grasp pure Being from our partial perspective (if it were, then the solution would lie in a kind of Oriental self-effacement, an immersion in the primordial Void); rather, this “stuckness” bears witness to a strife at the very heart of Being itself. Deeply pertinent here is Gregory Fried’s reading of Heidegger’s entire opus through the interpretive lense of his reference to Heraclitus’s polemos (struggle—in German, Krieg , Kampf , or, predominantly in Heidegger, Auseinandersetzung ) from the latter’s famous fragment 53: “War is both father of all and king of all: it reveals the gods on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.”32 It is not only that the stable identity of each entity is temporary, that they all sooner or later disappear, disintegrate, return to the primordial chaos; their (temporary) identity itself emerges through struggle, for stable identity is something that must be gained through an ordeal—even “class struggle” is already present here, in the guise of the war which “makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other.” There is, however, a further step to be taken with regard to polemos : it is easy to posit struggle as “father of all” and then elevate this struggle itself into a higher harmony, in the sense that Being becomes the hidden concord of the struggling poles, like a cosmic music in which the opposites harmoniously echo each other. So, to put it bluntly, is this strife part of the Harmony itself, or is it a more radical discord, one which derails the very Harmony of Being? As Davis perceptively notes, Heidegger is ambiguous here, oscillating between the radically open “strife” of Being and its reinscription into the teleological reversal of Danger into Saving in which, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, “‘discord’ is at best what makes ‘unity appear’”

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