THE TRANSLATORS WOULD like to thank first and foremost John Sallis and Dee Mortensen for their support of this project from its earliest stages. Initial planning began for the project in discussions with Professor Sallis and with Dee Mortensen, senior sponsoring editor at Indiana University Press. We are grateful that Professor Janicaud endorsed our plan to undertake the translation from the outset, and for the encouragement that he addressed to us in his paper “Toward the End of the ‘French Exception’?” delivered at the meeting of the Heidegger Conference in New Haven, in May 2002; it was subsequently published in French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception.1 Dominique was to die tragically later that summer in Nice. Subsequently, we attended a Colloque in Dominique’s memory in Nice in 2003, and met with his family at that time. We are grateful that we received their blessings to go forward with the translation. We would like to thank especially Françoise Dastur, who organized the Colloque in Nice and facilitated our discussions with Dominique’s family.
Based on these early discussions, we were committed to keeping our promise to Dominique to complete the translation of his book, and our commitment to that promise sustained our efforts over the years. This was indeed a massive undertaking, given the size of the two volumes to be translated. The final manuscript numbered nearly 1,000 pages with 1,500 footnotes. We are therefore deeply grateful to a number of colleagues and friends who contributed to the early stages of the work by helping with the production of first drafts of some of the chapters and interviews. We thank John Castore, Cathy LeBlanc, Gregory Recco, Hakhamanesh Zangeneh, and Suzanne Zilch, in this respect. Cathy LeBlanc, in particular, helped further with an early review of a substantial part of the manuscript and some of the interviews, and for this we are grateful. Additional essential editorial assistance was received from a number of graduate students and scholars at Louisiana State University (LSU) and elsewhere, including Michael MacLaggan, Nadia Miskowiec, and Jim Ryan. We would also like to express our appreciation to Heidegger scholars in France who were consulted on various translation questions, including Jean Greisch, Pierre Jacerme, and Joseph O’Leary, all of whom actually appear in Dominique’s book as part of the history of the reception of Heidegger in France.
David Pettigrew would like to thank Southern Connecticut State University for the support he received over the course of the translation, including from the Philosophy Department, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Provost. Such support included a sabbatical, research-reassigned time, and research grants. In addition, David would like to thank Cathy LeBlanc and her family for their hospitality in Aniche, France, as well as his friends at Hotel de Senlis in Paris, and at Hotel Saraj in Sarajevo, all places where much of the work of translation and revisions was undertaken over the years.
For the support he received at Louisiana State University, François Raffoul is grateful to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at LSU for granting him a Manship Summer Research Fellowship in 2012 to work on the translation, as well as Delbert Burkett, department chairperson, and Gregory Schufreider, from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is thankful to Luis Daniel Venegas for his hospitality and Charlie Johnson for his friendship. Last but not least, he is deeply grateful to Melida Badilla for her unconditional support.
Finally, we have been grateful for the support and patience of Indiana University Press, and for the profoundly important contributions of many colleagues and friends. It has been an honor to have had the opportunity to bring Dominique Janicaud’s extraordinary book, Heidegger en France, to an English-language readership. We would like to think that we have kept our promise to our friend and colleague, Professor Dominique Janicaud, and in this way, that we have honored his memory.