The Ruse of Techne

"This is a marvelous piece of work: fervently argued, written with great energy and with a propulsive argument that will attract much discussion both on Heidegger and on the metaphysical conditions of political life."-Anne O'Byrne, author of The Genocide Paradox: Democracy and Generational Time
"This book offers a genuine contribution to the study of Heidegger as well as of materialist philosophy. It not only offers an illuminating and compelling treatment of Heidegger's lack of a satisfying account of human action, but its basic thesis, that Heidegger presents a certain monistic ontology and should be viewed in light of that tradition, provides an intriguing new platform for fundamental ethical, practical, epistemological, and ontological questions in continental philosophy."-Sean Kirkland, DePaul University
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.
Dimitris Vardoulakis is Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University.