The Unapproachable Reiner Schürmann - A Phantasmatic Philosopher: Film Without Why: Part One✦

1.   Prologue: Flight

‘Life without why’ is Reiner Schürmann’s refrain – drawn from Meister Eckhart.

Schürmann’s own life is formed of such radical contingency. “Fuir. Je fuis.” he writes in Les Origines.  He fled his German birth – “ghosts (…) more tenaciously alive than the living” who “impose laws on us that hold longer than those made by states or ideologists.”, (Reiner Schürmann, Origins, Zürich-Berlin, 2016, p.5). But is not this flight itself prefigured in a German poetic unconscious? Hölderlin’s “flight of the Gods” destitutes the world.   Schürmann rarely mentions music – unlike Nietzsche through whose thought he tries to evade Heidegger.   But doesn’t the restless movement of Schürmann’s thinking and writing hide an almost Wagnerian musicality – the never resolving harmonies, the febrile suspensions of Tristan and Isolde – der Liebestod? Des hégémonies brisées – Schürmann's Geburt der Tragödie is also an epic of shattered love.

Schürmann’s other grand flight is when he leaves the priesthood. He was a novitiate in Paris during the ‘6os – a time of revolutionary upheaval and ‘doubt’ inside the Dominican order.  Out of this time of collective heresy he constitutes the “an-archic self”.  In New York Schürmann teaches his students like a Zen master to “kill the teacher”.

Film without Why traces Reiner Schürmann’s aura to some of his chiasmatic outposts in Paris, Greece and New York – like Wakis, the wandering priests of Japanese Noh Theatre we gather the enigmatic signs of his afterlife from former students, colleagues, interpreters, 

strangers, Dominicans, archives, hearsay, locations, ambiences, speculations and topologies.

2.  The Mirror of Dionysus

Killing the teacher is an an-archic method or transgressive way to the an-archic self.  Schürmann’s pedagogy is ancient, Hellenic, Socratic but there, at a site where it veers into the East of Zen.  For Schürmann Meister Eckhart is also Zen – as he writes in Loss of Origin in Soto Zen and Meister Eckhart: “The synthetic concept I wish to develop as standing at the core both of the experience in zazen and of Eckhart’s mysticism is the loss of the origin.” (in: The Thomist, 42, 2, April, 1978, p. 283)   He experienced the master-student relationship  with a Zen master at first hand “the only way to learn Zen” – time he spent in France with Master Deshimaru from Kyoto.  A typical Zen koan describes this relationship:  If you meet a holy man, kill him, if you meet a Buddha, kill him… 

Schürmann departs from the quasi axiom of contemporary philosophy – the self can only be conceived as a form of infinite obligation or near servitude to the specific Other (Derrida, Levinas) or any Other.  Instead Schürmann’s self emerges negatively, crawling out of consciousness in the form of its own an-archic other.
“The modern pathology places phenomena, and the self first of all, on disparate terrains, under the archic-anarchic double bind.  Within the subjectivist arena, the ego remains the other of the archic self. (…) A topic without a general topography places the self within the event of appropriation-expropriation and leads to the other as anarchic self.” (Broken Hegemonies, Indiana University Press, 2003, p. 533)

We meet Chris Long, Schürmann’s former student, at La Maison du Croque Monsieur, one of Schürmann’s haunts, around the corner from where the old graduate faculty building stood on east 13th street and 5th avenue.  Croque Monsieur is an old-fashioned tiny Parisian type café with an upstairs.  The walls are sepia coloured, dotted with cloudy gilt edged mirrors; at black bistro tables couples are wrapped in steamy embraces, next to students enthralled by laptops, huge pastries etc. 

Chris Long and the Author at La Maison du Croque Monsieur, NYC, April 2017

In a previous life the old graduate faculty building had been a pale relentlessly plain quadrangular Bauhaus/Neue Sachlichkeit type of department store for ladies’ hats.  When this enterprise failed the New School bought it cheaply and in 1968 revamped it for the Graduate Faculty.  They kept the escalator and the appearance of an austere commercial fortress. The Graduate Faculty building was torn down in 2011 to make way for the sparkling zeppelin shaped glass tower of the New School’s global fashion department.  Back to ladies’ hats… 

Schürmann spent most of the last 18 years of his life (1975-93) in or around this address, as self-contained as a couvent or a priory.  The Graduate Faculty was in walking distance of his big fifth floor loft apartment in Noho near Washington Square on Broadway and Bond Street, which he shared with his partner the artist Louis Comtois.  The ‘loft’ buildings of the area are ornate neoclassical monuments, relics from the gilded age of manufacturing and retail in Lower Manhattan.  Built in Greek Revival Style or Queen Anne style or Victorian eclectic the buildings are decorated with colonnades, their facades and filigree dazzle in deep red terra cotta, luminous white marble and ornamental cast iron.  By Schürmann’s time manufacturing and commerce had long since left for the suburbs and artists and their diverse undergrounds moved into the lofts.  Robert Mapplethorpe’s first studio was in a loft on Bond Street.  Louis K. Meisel Gallery where Louis Comtois exhibited his large colour field abstract paintings was nearby on Prince Street.  It’s still at the same address today.

On his way to work, Schürmann would have walked down Broadway through a dilapidated downtown Manhattan, in those days a bleak urban war zone, primed and blasted with graffiti.  Schürmann’s New York was still the junky and nark town of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, full of crumbling flophouses and peep shows, but already bleeding tax breaks into the high rent shell game of Donald Trump.   “Sometimes you can see maybe fifty ratty-looking junkies squealing sick, running along behind a boy with a harmonica, and there is The Man on a cane seat throwing bread to the swans, a fat drag queen walking his Afghan hound through the East Fifties, an old wino pissing against an El post, a radical Jewish student giving out leaflets in Washington Square, a tree surgeon, an exterminator, an advertising fruit in Nedick’s where he calls the counterman by his first name.” (William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, The Restored Text, London, 2005 p. 7)

By an uncanny coincidence our film shoot is on April 14th – the same date as Schürmann’s final lecture of his last spring course in 1993 – the subject was Heidegger’s Being and Time, the sections 48-50 on ‘being towards death’.  In the words of T S Elliot: “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land...” (The Wasteland)  It was Schürmann’s very last class on earth.  Finitude was palpable.  Chris Long was one of his teaching assistants for that final course.  Schürmann gave the lecture course that term in the Swayduck Memorial Auditorium, a large auditorium (of 225 seats) on the first floor of the Faculty named after Edward Swayduck, a labour union boss whose Amalgamated Lithographers of America Local One donated 25,000 dollars to the New School.  As expected attendance had packed the hall to the eaves, it was standing room only.  Everyone knew Schürmann was dying of Aids.

Schürmann was already in a state approaching ‘exination’, a neologism he formed from the Latin exinanio: to empty out, to exhaust or exinanitio: to void.  One almost longs for a scene similar to Kafka’s  Das Urteil – when the bedridden father suddenly rises in bed to his full height, shedding his old man blankets and covers and condemns the son who had tried to cover him up too soon to death by drowning.  But there would be no such return to the vigour of paterfamilias for Schürmann – instead his self-proclaimed ‘successors’ or ‘heirs’ flock to his final class, his last show on earth.  Schürmann does not disappoint them.

Stepping into the river (New York’s East, or the Hudson Bay) of Reiner Schürmann’s work – it is never the same, I seldom really know where I am. Sometimes I use Broken Hegemonies like an oracle – the way the Persians read a random page of Hafiz.  Burroughs comes to mind again – an unreliable Virgil: “ ‘Come back, kid!! Come back!!’ and follows his boy right into the East River, down through condoms and orange peels, mosaic of floating newspapers, down into the silent black ooze with gangsters in concrete, and pistols pounded flat to avoid the probing (pussy sm) finger of prurient ballistic experts.” (Naked Lunch, ibid. p. 5)

One time it is Kant who is washed to the surface – the Kant who “was undoubtedly the first to detect the work of desire in reason”,  just as Schürmann injects desire qua natality into the austere house of being.  (later abandoned for the so-called topology of being).  The desire Kant ‘detected’ in reason  - is the desire to know – too much – a transgressive knowledge/desire punished by the Fall.  The work of the philosopher of reason is to set barriers, limits – teach finitude in the thrust of reason, “keep in check that work and its accompanying megalomania: (RS implies that hegemonic thrust is within reason itself, not in epochs, regimes or their representatives)  “The life [of reason] is nothing but the faculty of desire in its minimal exercise.”  Kant sought to teach a minimizing sobriety to the maximizing thrust.  Reason always “wants to be satisfied.” But utter satisfaction is not useful.  “There is so much that I have absolutely no need to know.” (from Kant’s Reflexionen (Anthropologie) no 1034)  It was necessary to train reason in finitude, a task to be taken up ever anew.”  writes Schürmann at the beginning of Broken Hegemonies. (ibid. p. 12)   Here Kant is reminiscent of Socrates in the agora – there are so many things I don’t need – things and knowing are both acquisitions – there is a greed to know which one has to resist – Mehdi Belhaj Kacem calls this a pleonectic urge, pleonexia – the opposite of anorexia.

Perhaps the claims Schürmann’s students stake upon his teaching, his oracular counsel are pleonectic – the possessive reverence of the cult, showing a lack of Socratic restraint, of sophrosyne, phronesis.  Simon Critchley sees himself at the opposite end – “I don’t want a maitre – nor do I want to be one.”  In the subway, on the way to our film shoot I scribble down: “Question for Simon – do you also provide your students with knives to kill the teacher?”

Before I could even ask him (when we meet in his office on the 11th floor of the Albert and Vera List Academic Centre) what he thought of Schürmann’s Zen like imperative – of ‘knives against the teacher’ – he suddenly describes his own teaching as if reading my thoughts: “You have to set yourself up to be killed. Parricide is part of the philosophical tradition.  Aristotle killed Plato, Plato the tragic poets, the tragic poets killed myth and Homer etc.”

Simon Critchley and the Author at the New School, NYC, May 2017

Schürmann’s free floating auratic religiosity affects his students – inspires a sort of idol worship.  (Critchley refers to a death cult.) But the rule of “knives against the teacher” transforms the cult into a martyrology and quasi-parricide. Perhaps the parricide Critchley speaks of - the inevitable act of "setting oneself up to be killed" by the students - is another way of saying the students perform sparagmos on their orphic teacher?  A quasi-omophagic act immanent to the progress of philosophy?  Schürmann refers to the “mirror of Dionysus” in Broken Hegemonies citing Plotinus’ Enneads – as an “Orphic symbol of dismemberment” (ibid., footnote p. 649), another name for the bacchantic act of tearing apart the living god.  Is this also a ritual of rebirth - a species of 'natality'?

“(…) tragic truth arises from a desire that affirms life”, Schürmann writes in his typewritten Nietzsche lecture notes, continuing his thought in handwriting in the margin: “be it as disrupting as Dionysian dismemberment…” (Vol. 4 Lecture 3, Part 1, p. 20, Inventory established by Pierre Adler, January 1994 in List Center Library, New School, New York City)

One former student – who did not want to be ‘subjected’ to filming – passed on a koan like anecdote about Schürmann, which he had been saving up for some kind of use.

This student – call him KB – writes:
“I have only a short anecdote to contribute, namely:

The setting: Office hours.

KB: Professor Schürmann, I’ve come into some money. I’ll be able to sit out the summer either soaking my head in Heidegger or subjecting myself to the Greek course on offer at the Latin/Greek Institute. (—Or words to that effect.)

RS: If you study the Greek, you’ll be happy for the rest of your life. (—No disclaimer.)

I left. I did. I’ve been.
KB”

With this last flourish hinting at veni vidi vici – the author of the letter seems to suggest that he left – not Schürmann’s office, but Heidegger alias philosophy – which possibly had made him unhappy, enrolled in the Greek course and has spent the rest of his life being happy. Wittgenstein was known to have had the same magical-surgical effect on students of luring them away from philosophy - even years later. One Oxford don gave up philosophy to become a plumber – he collapsed and died on the way to a plumbing job.  Both Wittgenstein and Schürmann were pied pipers who didn’t really want anyone to follow them.
When I asked Vishwa Adluri, another former student, his reaction to this Schürmann apocrypha, he was moved.  He said the story was genuine; it made him feel “the presence of Reiner”.

For some of those witnessing his very public demise, Schürmann’s own figure, gradually merges with Socrates:  Vishwa imagines himself as Phaedrus walking with Schürmann-Socrates in the countryside outside Athens. Although emaciated and marked by the fatal illness – his eyes emit a brilliant light and his voice can still mesmerize his listeners. “Knowing Reiner in his last days was nothing more and nothing less than what walking with Socrates must have been for Phaedrus.” (from Vishwa Adluri, Parmenides, Plato and Moral Philosophy, London/New York, 2012, p. 5) Schürmann, he told me, saw philosophy and the work of a philosopher as a holy sacrifice – that a philosopher should give his life to his work.  St Francis and the monastic life of poverty remained his ideal.

Vishwa Adluri and the Author in Madison, New Jersey, April 2017

Johannes Fritsche, a colleague from the New School, too recalls though that Schürmann was known to espouse a pedagogy rooted in auto-destruction, self-sacrifice.  He writes in the In memoriam Reiner Schürmann issue of the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal:
“As Aaron Garrett  (another former student of Schürmann’s sm) mentioned once, Schürmann understood teaching as Socrates did and was convinced that a good teacher should provide the students with the knives to kill the teacher.” (New School for Social Research, Vol. 19 No 2-Vol. 20 No 1, 1997, p. 202)
Schürmann’s teaching sounds an acephalous note, an an-archic imperative.  He assigns his students the work of destroying him.  How successfully do they complete their assignment?  I asked Chris Long if he had also heard Schürmann speak of sharpening knives against the teacher.  He had.  Schürmann, he feels, gives him permission to undo some of the darkness of his thinking – move in a more ‘nuptial’ optimistic track rather than the direction of Schürmann’s tragic singularizing mortality. He wields his philosophical dagger bequeathed by Schürmann to act out a sort of ‘killing with kindness’.

In the essay Care of Death: On the Teaching of Reiner Schürmann (in Philosophy Today, online January 2017) he pays homage to Schürmann’s teaching on the cusp of his own death.  Schürmann like Socrates in the dialogue Phaedo - comforts and heals his disciples in his prison cell “on the prescribed day of his death” (ibid. p. 1).   He cites Agnes Heller, who in her speech at Schürmann’s memorial service similarly casts Schürmann as Socrates – except instead of dying for philosophy – he died for something better - for love.

Emma Bianchi who also attended that last class on Heidegger describes the hushed silence in the auditorium when Schürmann entered, leaning on his cane, wearing his long leather coat, walking with painful slowness to the lectern.  “He looked noble.  I drank the Kool-Aid,” she told me.

Reiner Schürmann in New York City

But how close was Schürmann really to the Socrates of Phaedo in his own ‘theatre of death’ – the last class on Being and Time?  And even more perplexing– is Socrates’ teaching in Phaedo comparable to Heidegger’s doctrines of being-toward-death and Dasein’s ontological attunement to finitude?  Schürmann emphasizes in the last sentence of the lecture notes for that spring term - not so much ‘care of death’ – but being-toward-death as an instrument or condition to retrieve the thought of being as time, Dasein’s temporality.   But this is Schürmann interpreting Heidegger – not his thinking sans phrase. Schürmann of Broken Hegemonies is not identical with the Heidegger of Being and Time: life without why is constituted by a topological double bind or differend structured as much by natality as it is by mortality – what he calls the ultimates.  But that still leaves Socrates of Phaedo and with him Schürmann dangling in a Heideggerian no man’s land of philosophical euthanasia. In Chris Long’s recollection, Schürmann’s last class sounds almost like a branch of Dignitas: “Schürmann, like Socrates, always urged us to follow close along with him in examining the logos.  So too, in that last lecture, he healed us well by directing us back to the text where we encounter the question of being and how we might cultivate practices of authentic care and devote our lives to the practice of philosophy as care of death.” (ibid., p. 11)

In the cosmological drama being played out in Schürmann’s last class  – Schürmann qua Socrates – the prototype of the philosopher condemned to death – prepares to die, whilst Heidegger the mortician looks on as the angel of death.

The subject of Phaedo though, Socrates’ last teachings, is not Dasein’s finitude or temporality nor being toward death – it’s the immortality of the soul.  He tells his pupils that he expects to ‘depart to some happy state of the blessed’, (Phaedo, trans. by Henry Cary, Everyman's Library, London/New York, 1913, p. 200), where he will be with better masters or gods – urging the poet Evenus ‘if he is a philosopher’ to follow him soon.   If Schürmann were the Socrates of Phaedo then he would have been similarly inviting his many listeners to that final course on Being and Time to follow him as soon as they can. 
(And yet … in an uncanny hint of ‘gallows humor’ Schürmann writes in the 1991 foreword to the English translation of Origins: “I often joked with Louis: were I to write more about us, the story would be entitled, “Follow Me If you Can”. (ibid.) )
Socrates himself is not physically ill –unless you regard the expectation of a violent sudden death as an illness.  He is a prisoner on death row.  His death is semi-voluntary; he probably could have escaped his ‘death sentence’ by going into exile to Megara or Bœotia. Socrates chooses to stay.  Schürmann has no choice. But death is death. Socrates’ mysterious last words, which so horrified Nietzsche (Gay Science, 340) – “Crito we owe a cock to Æsculapius, pay it therefore and do not neglect it” (Phaedo, ibid.) – imply that he saw life itself as the disease from which the hemlock cup was curing him.
As he says to Simmias: “because as long as we are encumbered with the body, and our soul is contaminated with such an evil, we can never fully attain to what we desire: and this, we say, is truth.” (Phaedo, ibid. p. 134).   Nietzsche on the other hand sees life as convalescence from Socrates’ other ‘disease’ –the disease of the West.  As Schürmann says in his lecture on Nietzsche: “Nietzsche’s thinking is preparatory – or, it is neither the language of sickness, not yet the language of great health, but the language of the convalescent.  (…) Nietzsche is still in the grips of the Western disease – willing truth at any cost – and already beyond it, “superficial out of profundity” (…)”  His philosophy is an ‘incipit’  – a beginning, says Schürmann, quoting Rene Char “Le poète, grand commenceur”. (ibid., p. 21) 
Nietzsche’s Fröhliche Wissenschaft as he writes in the preface, is his bacchantic, Dionysian release from premature infirmity/frailty – a “drunken revelry of convalescence” from the compulsion to know.  Instead we the convalescing knowing ones have learned to forget – we discover how good it is not to know – not as philosophers but as artists.  How could Schürmann – the ‘Nietzschean’ – not prefer Nietzsche’s euphoric convalescence from the archic disease, ‘the will to truth’, to Heidegger’s teleocratic/telic ‘care of death’? 
Or isn’t it Nietzsche who immunizes Schürmann against Heidegger’s later attempts in Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis to cast being as property or the act of appropriation-alienation (Ereignis), in which the self recursively cannibalises itself? 

✦ The Unapproachable Reiner Schürmann - A Phantasmatic Philosopher: Film Without Why (Parts 1-3) is an expanded version of our film project presentation and trailer premiere at the Reiner Schürmann Colloquium, Espace diaphanes, Berlin, November 2nd 2017.

© Shannee Marks and Peer Wolfram, Ulysses Productions, November 2017