Heidegger, Caesar, and the Violent Disclosure of Being in the Roman Context

Heidegger’s critical reading of Rome foregrounds the assumptions of Roman metaphysics as they come to light in language. I contend in this paper that this critique is problematized by Heidegger’s own account of the violent reciprocity of being and Dasein in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. In unduly emphasizing the properly “philosophic” activity of Rome, Heidegger seems to pass over what is definitive for Rome with respect to being. Roman Dasein is essentially political, and its political activity correctly understood is no less disclosive of being than is philosophy. This activity occurs most profoundly in the person and work of Julius Caesar. In order to read in Caesar the radical consummation of Roman political violence, we will look to the portrait provided by the Greco-Roman Plutarch. Plutarch’s Life of Caesar will provide particularly fecund soil for our Heideggarian analysis insofar as it connects the nature and problematic of Caesar’s self-appointed task with the violence of being and the tragic uncanniness of human greatness. Caesar will be shown to stand in the extreme possibility of Roman Dasein as one who turns finally and definitively against Rome itself.