"In a speech to Harvard graduates in May 2017, Mark Zuckerberg told his public: “Our job is to create a sense of purpose!”—and this from a man who, with Facebook, has created the world’s most expanded instrument of purposeless loss of time! One really gets tired of this mode of coincidence of the opposites and begins to long for the good old imperialist brutality. To get to the more basic dimension of the coincidence of the opposites, let us turn to a quite different example, to one of the legends of World War II, the killing of Reinhard Heydrich.

"Early in 1942, the Czechoslovak government- in-exile resolved to kill Heydrich; Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík, heading the team chosen for the operation, were parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. On May 27, 1942, alone with his chauffeur in an open car (to demonstrate his courage and trust), Heydrich was en route to his office; when the car slowed at a junction in a Prague suburb, Gabčík stepped in front of the car and took aim at it with a submachine gun, but it jammed. Instead of ordering his driver to speed away, Heydrich called his car to a halt to confront the attackers. At this moment, Kubiš threw a bomb at the rear of the car as it stopped, and the explosion wounded both Heydrich and Kubiš. When the smoke cleared, Heydrich emerged from the wreckage with his gun in his hand; he chased Kubiš for half a block but became weak from shock and collapsed. He sent his driver, Klein, to chase Gabčík on foot, while, still with pistol in hand, he gripped his left side, which was bleeding profusely. A Czech woman went to Heydrich’s aid and flagged down a delivery van. He was first placed in the driver’s cab of the van, but complained that the van’s movement was causing him pain, so he was placed in the back of the van, on his stomach, and quickly taken to the emergency room at a nearby hospital. (Incidentally, although Heydrich died a couple of days later, there was a serious chance that he night have survived, so this woman could very well have entered history as the person who saved Heydrich’s life.) While a militarist Nazi sympathizer would emphasize with Heydrich’s personal courage, what fascinates me is the role of the anonymous Czech woman: she helped Heydrich who was lying alone in blood, with no military or police protection. Was she aware who he was? If yes, and if she was no Nazi sympathizer (both the most probable surmises), why did she do this? Was it a simple half-automatic reaction of human compassion, of helping a neighbor in distress no matter who he or she (or ze, as we will soon be forced to add) is? Should this compassion have won, over the awareness of the fact that this “neighbor” was a top Nazi criminal responsible for thousands (and later millions) of deaths? What we confront here is the ultimate choice between abstract liberal humanism and the ethics implied by radical emancipatory struggle, and this choice is again structured like a Möbius strip: if we progress to the end of the side of liberal humanism, we find ourselves condoning the worst criminals, and if we progress to the end of partial political engagement, we find ourselves on the side of emancipatory universality—in the case of Heydrich, for the poor Czech woman to act universally would have been to resist her compassion and try to finish the wounded Heydrich off…"

Sex and the Failed Absolute

Scholium 3.1 The Ethical Mobius Strip