Polemos

Polemos, the Greek term for conflict as war, is central to Martin Heidegger’s account of struggle as more than competition between partners. In the book’s reading, it names an antagonism that can disclose and organize a people’s existence, including its internal relations of rank and domination. The concept therefore carries a political danger: when conflict is treated as fundamental, the search for an enemy can become a project of identifying and eliminating those cast as threats from within.

Polemos and agon

In his reading of fragment 53, Heidegger distinguishes polemos from agon. Agon is a contest between opponents who remain partners within a shared framework; polemos is a serious struggle in which the opponent is an enemy. The distinction is not merely a difference in intensity. It changes the relation between the parties: the opponent is no longer someone with whom one competes under common rules, but someone understood as threatening the existence of a people and its members.

Heidegger defines the enemy as a source of essential threat, while insisting that the enemy need not come from outside. An external adversary, he says, may be less dangerous than one located within the people itself. The absence of an obvious external enemy does not settle the question; it can make the work of finding, exposing, and opposing an enemy seem more urgent. In the passage’s most unsettling turn, the enemy may be imagined as lodged in the innermost root of the people, acting against its proper essence. Struggle then involves not only confrontation but also a sustained effort to identify the supposed threat and prepare against it.

From struggle to annihilation

The book emphasizes the severity of the language Heidegger uses in the 1933–34 discussion. The struggle may be difficult precisely because the enemy is said to be concealed, or because the community is thought to be under threat without recognizing its source. Heidegger’s formulation extends from detecting and disclosing the enemy to remaining ready to attack and preparing for the enemy’s complete annihilation. The argument thus gives conflict an expansive reach: a perceived threat can require not a bounded contest but an ongoing political readiness directed toward total destruction.

The author draws attention to the metaphor of an enemy installed within the people like a parasite. This image makes the division appear internal and intimate, while presenting the enemy as something that feeds on the community and must be removed. The issue is not only that such rhetoric endorses force against an opponent. It also makes the identification of an opponent a political necessity: if the enemy is hidden within, the community must keep searching for one. The passage situates these claims in 1933–34, when Heidegger was politically engaged and public writing was explicitly identifying enemies. Its criticism rests on the fit between the concept of internal threat and the call to cultivate readiness for annihilation.

Conflict, hierarchy, and social order

Heidegger’s reading of the same fragment also connects conflict to rank and dominance. He rejects a sentimental picture of the Greek polis that would suppress slavery and other relations of unequal power. What ranks higher, he argues, is stronger; Being and logos are not equally accessible to everyone. A harmony achieved by eliminating tension, in his account, risks becoming mere leveling rather than a disclosure of order.

The book treats this move as an ontological grounding of social domination. Hierarchy is not presented simply as an accidental arrangement imposed on an otherwise equal society: Heidegger’s interpretation links rank to the way Being is disclosed. That connection matters because it lends the existing or asserted order a deeper authority. Polemos here is not only a name for hostility between groups; it belongs to a vision in which struggle, strength, and unequal rank help determine what can appear as a meaningful communal order.

Gelassenheit and the persistence of struggle

A central question in the book is how this militant account relates to Heidegger’s later emphasis on Gelassenheit, or letting-be, and on listening to the disclosure of Being. A common interpretation treats the later stance as a withdrawal from, or disappointment with, political engagement. The author argues instead for a strict dependence between the two positions. The later language of humble receptivity does not simply replace the earlier image of heroic confrontation; the two are presented as related aspects of Heidegger’s thought.

The author’s criticism is that Heidegger does not fully affirm struggle as primordial and constitutive. Instead, struggle is subordinated to an encompassing One that gathers opposed forces together. On this reading, the demand to annihilate an enemy and the posture of letting-be are not straightforward opposites: the latter can sustain intense engagement in the realm of beings even while invoking submission to Being. This interpretation makes Gelassenheit politically consequential rather than an uncomplicated retreat from force.

Polemos in the book’s broader argument

The book’s account of polemos resonates with its broader treatment of opposition and non-reconciliation. In its discussion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Kant, it presents a gap not as a temporary obstacle awaiting a higher synthesis, but as a condition internal to reality. Positing the division as such can itself transform how the opposition is understood, without appealing to an additional reconciliation beyond it. This is not identical to Heidegger’s polemos, but it provides a wider framework for reading why the book resists reducing conflict to a stage on the way to harmony.

Its account of concrete universality likewise turns on tension between levels and on exceptions that reveal the limits of a supposedly complete order. Read beside these arguments, polemos stands as a politically charged case in which struggle discloses relations that a language of neutral unity might conceal. The book does not celebrate every conflict as liberating: it distinguishes the constitutive force of a break or antagonism from Heidegger’s enemy-centered demand for annihilation. That distinction keeps the concept open to critique. Polemos reveals how an order is built through divisions, but when the division is organized around an enemy presumed to threaten the community from within, the claim to disclose order can become a justification for domination and violence.