5. Nur ein Gott kann uns jetzt Retten
IN HIS FAMOUS 1966 Der Spiegel interview, published (per his wishes) only after his death (1976), Martin Heidegger, with the memory (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) and prospect (mutually assured destruction) of nuclear disaster very much on his mind, declared: Nur ein Gott kann uns jetzt retten (Only a god can save us now). This phrase summarizes, succinctly, provocatively and resonantly, Heidegger’s longstanding fear of and overall dislike for technology. Technology could destroy like no other force in history, leaving human Sein (Being and being) nothing but a toxic dump. Into the hands of “a god”—ein Gott—Heidegger, a Catholic until his dying day (his long struggle with the church notwithstanding), commended the human race.
Out of the Milwaukee Bucks’ locker room, closed to the world, shut off from the media and other prying eyes and pricked ears, emerged a rather more hopeful iteration of Heidegger’s injunction. Heidegger’s was, with global destruction a real possibility, a desperate plea for some form of human intervention (against technology). Heidegger’s was a call for help in the project to stay technology and, for him, its deleterious effect. It was also, given Heidegger’s role in providing some philosophical ballast and solace for 1930s National Socialism, a barely disguised cry—but muted by his philosophical acuity—for some form of (individual, personal) absolution from history.
The bubble is no insulation against police brutality.
In the bubble things might even become more intense.
Life, as players such as Paul George (L.A. Clippers) attest (as he grappled with psychological issues), can prove debilitating in the bubble.
The bubble is no match for black athletic anger.
“Something is breaking in and something is breaking out.”
From out of the bubble in Orlando, Heidegger’s phrase was assumed a distinctly more responsible—so I like to insist—iteration. This variation, the product of George Hill’s formidable will (which Nietzsche might have admired), marked that moment when a new and determined incarnation of black athletic intellectuality came into being. A black conscience, a deep-thinking consciousness of what it means to be black in America. An attempt to forge a conscientious and felicitous relationship to the moment at hand, to the demands of a historic conjuncture. In pivotal historical moments, these have all been key attributes displayed by radicalized and radicalizing black athletes. This is a feature that marks black American athletes from Jack Johnson to John Carlos, from Jim Brown to Serena Williams.
In this regard, the work of constructing the second axis of dual power—how to organize society differently, how to construct an entirely new future, how to achieve greater perfectibility, in short—should be taken up by all for whom a radical imagining has long been the stuff of their, shall we say, dreams?
This second axis, Lenin’s revolution—the soviets, revolutionary councils, collective labor, redistribution of wealth, guaranteed minimum annual wage, universal health care, equal education for all, and so on—should fall to those for who, while engaged in determinedly pursuing the “politics of the instant,” recognize, either intellectually or intuitively (it matters not how this insight is achieved), the limits of representation (because it will reach that terminus we know as electoral politics) and, in so doing, reach for what is not-yet but what can, through a racial imagining, come-to-be.