WHEN IT COMES to the climate, whether in meteorology or in philosophy, changes can be sudden. At the beginning of the 1960s, the bright spell Heidegger had enjoyed did not of course come to an end in one day. Heidegger’s influence continued to inspire original research.1 The work of translation—distinguished, in particular, by the publication of Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part,2 an important volume published only five years earlier in Germany—continued,3 but a few signs announced the end of the most favorable years. Furthermore, a page was also being turned in another domain. In politics, the Fifth Republic was being installed, and the Algerian war ended. With respect to the economy, a consumer society was taking shape, growth accelerated, and France was becoming industrialized and “adapted to its time.” Similarly, the intellectual and cultural climate changed quite quickly: the nouvelle vague in cinema and the nouveau roman in literature disrupted the unity of the narrative. Lévi-Strauss, who had already published two major works,4 was elected in 1959 at the Collège de France, where he delivered the inaugural lecture on January 5, 1960: structuralism made its entry on the intellectual scene. The following year witnessed the sudden death—on May 3rd—of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose last works revealed a sustained interest in Heidegger5 (and who was working on having the Collège de France officially invite Heidegger).6 That same year, May 1961, Michel Foucault published his thesis, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, which caused a sensation. There is no reference to Heidegger in this structural study,7 which situated itself mainly under the patronage of two masters of the theory of myths and of the history of scientific concepts, who were unknown to the German thinker: Georges Dumézil and Georges Canguilhem.8
Jean Beaufret gradually realized that he was no longer at the center of the Parisian debates. One unpleasant sign, among others, was Althusser’s nonrenewal of his teaching appointment at the École Normale of the rue d’Ulm at the start of the new academic year of 1962.9 With respect to Heidegger, a certain indifference, which was at first insidious, difficult to identify, and often tainted with hostility,10 was spreading. More precisely, in 1961, the political polemics returned, unexpectedly, regarding a problem of translation that at first seemed minor.
“Should we translate Volkswagen by voiture de la race [“race car”]?” Aimé Patri11 asked, responding to the translation proposed in volume 3 of the journal Médiations by Jean-Pierre Faye. This strange question, asked in jest, challenged Faye’s translation of the adjective völkisch by raciste. The stakes were obvious: was Heidegger guilty of racism because he unfortunately yielded to the dominant terminology of 1933? Apart from this problem of translation, it was the question of Heidegger’s “Nazism” that was posed once again.
Engaged in a long-term study on the genesis of “ideological speech” in the extreme right wing German discourse,12 Faye discovered previously unknown texts in Freiburg in 1958–60: statements in support of Hitler, signed by Heidegger while he was rector. On the basis of conversations with young faculty [Dozenten], of a citation found in the student newspaper, as well as of a brochure published by Guido Schneeberger,13 he decided that these forgotten pages were significant and deserved to be brought to the attention of the French public. This occasion was given to him, when he returned to Paris, by Jean-Louis Ferrier, director of the review Médiations, who was looking for original texts.14
Faye’s commentary15 follows six texts that he translated himself, all dating from 1933, except a “Call to the Labor Service” of January 23, 1934.16 Formulating first the question that everyone would ask: “How were these statements possible?” Faye immediately focused on a reflection on the linguistic affinities between Heidegger’s language and “an all too recognizable ideological language”:17 namely the völkisch ideology of the “national-conservatives” and the Nazis. And these affinities fed his perplexity: how is it that the ontological decisionism and the “revolutionary” pathos suddenly tended to coincide? This convergence cannot be explained without reference to the political and social climate in which Heidegger lived in the 1920s: “It was as a contemporary of the revolution of the spartacists and the social democrats . . . that the Heidegger of 1920 engaged himself on the path of a ‘phenomenological destruction.’”18 Relying on the critical reflections formulated after Liberation by Éric Weil and Karl Löwith in Les Temps Modernes, Faye supplemented and nuanced them by pointing out that “from Vom Wesen der Wahrheit . . . the decisionist pathos . . . is in the process of returning toward a renewed language of ‘essence.’”19 The unusual ambivalence of the Heideggerian discourses of 1933–34 was reflected in the expression völkisch, which, “more vague, less literally biological than the word ‘racist,’ bridges the gap between the ‘national’ and the ‘racist’ properly speaking.”20
In the end, Faye’s judgment appears to us today to be relatively measured (and certainly much more so than Farias’s condemnation): while judging “unbearable” the impression that comes from these calls and speaking of Heidegger’s “misfortune,”21 he in no way reduced his thought to an ordinary Nazism; he clearly emphasized that Heidegger “strongly condemns” biologism, and he even possibly goes too far when asserting that Heidegger’s faithfulness to Husserl proves the absence of any anti-Semitism.22 And he concluded, not without relevance, with a moving allusion to the paradox of Heidegger’s “engagement” with Trakl’s poetical vision: although his desire (already with this poet and with Hölderlin) was to break with the modern decline, he was forced to participate in “the great weakening of a people.”23
At the time, Jean-Pierre Faye did not intend, by translating these historically incontestable documents, and by accompanying them with a commentary more or less respectful of the tragic dignity of an authentic thinker,24 to stir up a controversy. But the fact is that he had just challenged the image, until now relatively spared—at least in France—of a giant of contemporary thought, who had succeeded, for more or less a decade, to reduce, even in his own country, the circle of hostility or suspicion that formed against him after the war.25
In private, Jean Beaufret reacted strongly, but—entertaining good relations with Faye until then—he allowed his colleague Patri to voice publicly the Heideggerian response, but not without telling him what was important to say. In a very blunt tone, Aimé Patri first sarcastically mocked Jean-Pierre Faye for “being too late, and for revealing what was already well-known,”26 then he insisted on the serious error in interpretation that resulted from the translation of völkisch by raciste, and in the process criticized Jean-François Lyotard for also being guilty of a malevolent inexactitude toward Heidegger.27 That being said, he had to recognize that Faye’s position was not so reductive as to transform Heidegger into an unconditional disciple of Hitlerian anti-Semitism,28 and he did not refuse to take both the arguments of the defense and those of the prosecution into account. But this concession was immediately withdrawn, because of Faye’s “confusion.”29 In the end, he was reproached for using Heidegger’s silence since 1934 (on the political question) as a way to fuel hostility against him: had he come out in favor of Stalin—even once—he would have been forgiven for many things!30
One can hardly understand the virulence of these polemics if one does not place it in the political context of the time: the journal Le Contrat Social (in which former communists such as Boris Souvarine and Kostas Papaioannou participated) was virulently anti-Stalinist; the other journal, Médiations, directed by Lucien Goldmann, remained Marxist. Heidegger became, at least in part, a “lure” in the settling of accounts in which his thought itself became almost secondary. And yet, the original intention of Faye, who had been a sincere admirer of Heidegger at the outset, was above all to bring new elements of critical reflection to a case that was triggered at the time of Liberation. Aimé Patri, who was himself mistaken when he reduced Heidegger’s rectorate to three months,31 considered himself above the need to inform people about the rector of the University of Freiburg’s declaration of allegiance to the Führer. The question of the translation of the word völkisch then risks being the tree that conceals the forest. Even if Faye can be criticized on this very point, he was able to show that the adjective völkisch has a history and a connotation (different from the substantive Volk) that were so influenced by the extreme right wing that its usage was banned after the war and had to be abandoned (which was not the case with the word Volk).32
The most important episode, however, was yet to come. In addition to the immediate polemical effects, the debate concerning Heidegger’s political involvement resurged dramatically, from elements that were not entirely new (because Löwith and Weil had alluded to them and even had quoted a few excerpts), but whose publication was impressive as a whole as well as because of its vehement tone. After reading these texts, one is no longer able to maintain that Heidegger’s affiliation with the party had been merely tentative; one is even obliged to recognize that, as Löwith noted, some keywords of these political statements betray, to a certain extent, a troubling terminological analogy with the ontological vocabulary of Sein und Zeit.
These hostilities were only the prelude to a more massive attack, coming from Switzerland, and to the polemics that followed and intensified. Given the success of his little book in 1960, Guido Schneeberger published in 1962, at his own expense and in house, a beautiful red hardcover volume containing 217 documents referring to Heidegger’s political involvement in 1933–34.33 This book, which has never been completely translated into French (in the meantime some of the more important documents have been translated), nevertheless abundantly fueled the French debates in the 1960s. Jean Beaufret often referred to it at that time, in his numerous conversations on the subject, to claim that nothing damaging to Heidegger could be found there. François Fédier responded to it a few years later in Critique,34 as well as to two other German publications (the most notable of which was Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity).35
Fédier’s article aimed to brush aside all the attacks against Heidegger in one fell swoop. This goal was all the more ambitious since this counterattack claimed to be above the fray by revealing the presuppositions of the hostile arguments against Heidegger. To elevate the level of the discourse was, in principle, laudable; to act as if it were not in the context of a polemics seems, however, less tenable. Fédier found himself in a delicate position: although he wanted to appear impartial, he could neither deny the authenticity of the documents produced by Schneeberger nor genuinely set aside the hostility of his adversaries. However, it was understandable to express one’s opposition on a more philosophical ground rather than in the context of base polemics. As for Schneeberger, Fédier objected that out of the 217 documents that the book contained, 100 of them (almost half) had no direct relation to Heidegger (newspaper articles, proclamations from students and even from Rudolf Hess) and that 38 others related only indirectly to the philosopher; finally, even among the “direct” documents, only 18 were by Heidegger himself and 17 dated from May 1933 to March 1934. Moreover, from the very beginning of the text, in the second document, the volume contained an excerpt of Madame Toni Cassirer’s autobiography, written well after the events and stating that Heidegger had a certain “inclination to anti-Semitism.” Fédier emphasized that having placed this very subjective testimony in the book (and the only one referring to the philosopher’s anti-Semitism) revealed its biased nature, which did not deserve to be considered objective since it included only hostile testimonies and documents against Heidegger (excluding the fact that he had resigned from his functions as a rector). Its design sought “to present a defamatory image of Heidegger.”36 Schneeberger’s book was also silent concerning the attacks on Heidegger as early as 1934–35 from different Nazi groups. Analyzing the presuppositions of the book, Fédier denounced “a socio-political treatment,” along with a psychological caricature, with no consideration for Heidegger’s evolution (nor for the properly philosophical dimension of his thought). These psycho-sociological presuppositions are confirmed by a moral presupposition that considers the engagement of 1933 as an “absolute” without recognizing that it lasted only ten months and that it had been “strictly conditional.”37
One sees that Fédier’s method is exactly that of an attorney who focuses more on discrediting his opponent than on really addressing the contents of the case. To have succeeded in showing that Schneeberger’s book was neither complete nor impartial was for the most part emphasizing the obvious: nobody expected such a book to be published without any ulterior motives. There is still the matter of the texts signed “Heidegger” where he claimed an unconditional allegiance to Hitler: having circumscribed the flaws of Schneeberger’s book, Fédier managed to avoid comment with respect to the content of the most embarrassing texts. The same was at stake in his discussion—albeit less detailed—of Adorno’s book entitled The Jargon of Authenticity. He did not take the opponent’s thesis seriously by renewing the debate over Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit. Adorno’s thesis was reduced to a reflection theory; the jargon was so generally imputed to philosophy that Heidegger himself became one symptom among others of numerous stand-ins for Nazism. Adorno’s book, considered as a product of the Marxist reduction of language to an expression of socioeconomical infrastructures, does not seem to present any interest in and of itself. Since Adorno did not make an effort to understand Heidegger,38 why should he receive any greater consideration?
We will not dwell on the third part of Fédier’s article that attacks a clearly mediocre text by Paul Hühnerfeld.39 However, the last pages are more interesting. Preceding a testimony showing that in his courses from 1935 to 1944, Heidegger had the courage to note how he differed from the regime, Fédier presented, as a return to “reality,” a summary of Heidegger’s defense, always as an advocate: he did, however, recognize “Heidegger’s most serious political failing.”40 But in the same way that the adversaries were reproached for not being sufficiently philosophical, the links between Heidegger’s thought and his involvement were not examined.
Fédier’s vehement article was nonetheless precise and elegant; it remained a minutely detailed defense of Heidegger the man, and remained silent on the most embarrassing texts. He did not discuss, as he initially claimed he would, the “presuppositions” and the crux of the problem of Heidegger’s engagement. If his goal was to control the discourse with a kind of “barrage” responding to the anti-Heideggerian attacks, it was a success. On the contrary, if the aim was to silence Heidegger’s opponents through incontestable argumentation, it was a complete failure: he only managed to relaunch a polemic that was smoldering like an unextinguished fire.
In fact, three months later, the same journal published a new issue, “À propos de Heidegger.”41 In a few scathing pages, Robert Minder, an eminent Germanist and a professor at the Collège de France, put his finger on an essential and sensitive point that was ignored by Fédier: the close connections between the language of Heidegger’s statements in 1933 and Nazi terminology: “Heidegger literally wallowed in that jargon, just as the cohort of the Blut- und Bodendichter themselves wallowed in it, prostrated before Hitler.”42 Minder also recalled that the elegies Heidegger devoted to his fellow citizens of the town of Messkirch, Conradin Kreutzer and above all J.-P. Hebel, put excessive emphasis on the “virtues of the Earth and the dead.”43 Considering Heidegger as a representative of the “malaise of contemporary Germany,” Minder imputed a twofold responsibility to the philosopher: his silence after the war only worsened his error of 1933. However, Minder weakened the scope of his intervention by completely neglecting to examine the philosophical dimension of the work that he intended to condemn and that he reduced to the expression of a rustic, reactionary, Swabian Catholicism.44 Heidegger’s style was summarized as a set of puns or verbal tics; above all, Minder did not seem to be able to finally repress his anger, which compromised the scientific nature of his contribution as a linguist: was it necessary to characterize some of the last communications of the elder Heidegger as “ludicrous” or as “ridiculous”? Even if he was not completely wrong to deplore the fact that Heidegger was “sacralized” in France, Minder gave the obvious impression that instead of the balanced and thorough analysis of a work that he himself recognized “will have marked its time,”45 he succumbed to a kind of allergic reaction.
In the same issue of Critique, Jean-Pierre Faye, for his part, responded directly to Fédier.46 After having referred sarcastically to the “Paris Heideggerians” who protect their Master in the same way that the SPA (Society for the Protection of Animals) protect a special pet, Faye returned in the first part of his response to the problem of the translation of that “very singular word,” völkisch: the history of the uses of that word, from Fichte to Hitler, including “social Darwinism” and the “German National” party of Ludendorff in the 1920s, carried a heavy connotation that Heidegger could not be unaware of: “Could we possibly imagine Sartre, for example, being unaware of the meaning of the word ‘ultra,’ after one year of the Algerian war?”47 The “apologists” portrayed Heidegger either as naive or as ignorant, thus erasing the tragic dimension of a “thinking that was both blind and insightful,”48 and which allowed its language to be contaminated by the gravest peril.
The second part of the response, less directly polemical, intended to reflect on the complexity of a hermeneutical situation characterized as follows: “Heidegger the ontologist was influenced by semantic usage, forcefully operative at that time, against the obvious and hidden backdrop of a certain economic process.”49 Certainly, after he resigned from the rectorate in February 1934, Heidegger freed himself from direct complicity, but—weakened by the attacks of a certain Krieck, who was rector of Heidelberg—he tried to answer the charges by rejecting the accusation of nihilism and by ascribing it to the errancy of Western metaphysics. Faye went as far as to assert: “What has most fascinated the Parisian left in the work of the late Heidegger, i.e., the fall of Western metaphysics as logos and concept, comes directly from the Rector Krieck.” This reductive suggestion was, however, compensated by a conclusion on the complexity of the “transformational levels”50 of the Heideggerian texts: avoiding both censure and blind defense, one must take Heidegger at his word, and respond to the duty to explicate matters, in the light of a rigorous reading, “under the most dangerous light of day.”51
These hostilities ended with a new intervention by François Fédier in July 1967.52 Returning to the translation of the word völkisch, a decidedly ultra-sensitive word, he argued that Faye implicitly recognized a general, and not racist, connotation of the term: if the word involves the struggle between two senses, one has to examine Heidegger’s use of it “with greater appreciation of its nuances.”53 Consequently, in the “German Students” of November 3, 1933, did Heidegger actually intend to speak of the “racist (völkischer) vocation of the state”? But the substantive Faye translates by “vocation” is a masculine plural dative (in den Berufen). Arguing that in this context it could not mean “vocation,” Fédier noted that Faye had to slightly modify the German text to adapt it to his translation (by transposing the masculine plural into a feminine singular). While admitting that Heidegger spoke over the course of ten months using some “contaminated” words, he argued that it was preferable—in the interest of interpretation—not to adopt an external point of view, but to be able to question these texts by constantly relating them to the work of the philosopher.54
After having made that point, although on the basis of a position that was less ambitious than it had been previously (since it conceded Heidegger’s “philosophical failing” more explicitly),55 Fédier proceeded in a much less convincing way by challenging Faye on issues of translation:56 Fédier’s purpose was to cleanse Heidegger’s language of any contamination by Nazi ideology. It was quite a task to claim that Heidegger was not Hitlerian when he wrote: “The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” For Fédier, Heidegger limited himself in 1933 to believing that Hitler was an authentic leader and his mistake was precisely not to have seen, from that moment on, the real Hitler. That being said, Heidegger’s oath of allegiance in 1933 shows that he had been—however briefly—Hitlerian, even if one agrees that this does not imply an adherence to the Nazi ideology in its entirety (and, in particular, to the doctrinal racism—a point on which Faye agreed). Reproaching Faye for always choosing the lectio pessima, Fédier always chose the lectio optima. The fact that it should be necessary to “interpret” the unconditional allegiance to the Führer on the basis of Heidegger’s other texts and in the light of his thought does not mean that we should minimize, as much as Fédier did, the extreme and unconditional character of this allegiance. The texts themselves provide extremely embarrassing testimony to this allegiance.
It is time to draw some conclusions about the argument,57 certain nuances of which may have seemed Byzantine. The discussion seems endless and vain when it loses sight of something essential that Éric Weil had discerned in a magisterial way, in a few pages, as early as 1947. Since the facts were established, the texts known and indisputable, what was the point of the disagreement? With respect to the preferred interpretative method: the apologist favored an internal critique, and the accuser an “inter-semantic” approach. Are the two methods incompatible? One must understand what Heidegger felt he had to accept based on the presuppositions of his thinking (which does not diminish his responsibility) and resituate his personal comments in their historical, semantic, ideological, and even psychological context (although some “allegiances” or “contaminations” appeared then, they seemed less ideological than psychological). The difficulty of finding a balanced view in such a delicate task explains that the debate was destined to return and to intensify.58
Nineteen sixty-one was a decidedly eventful year for Heideggerian matters. Emmanuel Levinas came on the scene with two texts of uneven importance that appeared almost simultaneously: an article about “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” and his thesis, which would become famous: Totality and Infinity.
The article could obviously not be placed at the same level as Levinas’s magnum opus. Aimed at a readership consisting of nonphilosophers, that of Information juive,60 it was nonetheless very significant. On the occasion of the first successful space flight by Yuri Gagarin on board the vessel Vostok I, on April 12, 1961, Levinas proposed a few reflections on technology. They are very polemical and essentially directed against Heidegger, whose critique of contemporary technology was briefly presented as a “declamation”61 containing, nonetheless, some truths: technology threatens human identity and even the survival of our planet. Was it really necessary to oppose it in order to seek the secret beauty of the world? In this approach (that he presented in a schematic form, while recognizing paradoxically that it was “subtle and new”), Levinas unmasked “the eternal seductiveness of paganism,” by clarifying that “Judaism is perhaps no more than but the negation of all that.”62 Consequently, Gagarin’s exploit was praised as admirable, for he opened new possibilities for a humanity henceforth capable of liberating itself from belonging to a Place. In diametrical opposition to Heideggerian rootedness (already figured in various forms, before the letter, by Catholicism), Judaism demands the destruction of idols and the demystification of place. In the same way as technology. Hence, Levinas aligned himself with both.
What should we think of this short article? It is absolutely not what one would expect from Levinas. Overly schematizing Heidegger’s thinking with respect to technology, Levinas embraced an unconditional “technicism,” without recognizing (at least at the end of the text where the initial concessions seemed forgotten) that technology could, in turn, produce idolatry, and moreover without even considering that the concern for the secret of the world does not necessarily entail a contradiction with the respect for the human being in “the nakedness of its face.” But this polemical episode should not cause us to forget the main work: Totality and Infinity.63 To believe, however, that this work had a major impact at the time would be a serious mistake. Published by Nijhoff in the Netherlands (thus at a relatively high price, with negligible distribution in France), plagued by quite a large number of typographical mistakes in its first edition, the book was read at first only in limited circles.
However, the henceforth uncompromising opposition to Heideggerian ontology did not escape the specialists, who were all the more aware of this reversal since Levinas had been one of the most enthusiastic early readers of Heidegger’s thought in France. Furthermore, if anyone approached Totality and Infinity without knowing a thing about Heidegger, many allusions would be lost on him or her. One could even wonder if the main thrust of the text would not be missed in these conditions. Indeed, it is from the outset, in the preface, that Heidegger is targeted: “We do not need obscure fragments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself as war.”64 Ontology is conceived of as the primordial grasp of totality, the affirmation of mastery of beings, the abstract expression of violence and valorization of war. Being itself neutralizes any relation to the Other through an impersonal knowing. By affirming the priority of being over beings, Heideggerian ontology subordinates “the relation with someone” to the relation with impersonal being, allowing the domination of beings: it “subordinates justice to freedom.”65 Certainly, Heideggerian ontology is granted a certain “primacy,”66 a certain radicality as first philosophy, but by that very fact it is rejected, because it reduces the Other to the Same: “Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power.”67 On the contrary, it is metaphysical transcendence, subjectivity, and ethics that are not only revalued, but absolutely affirmed in a radical exteriority prior to any recuperation of identity. Levinas goes beyond any “clearings,” any disclosure in the Heideggerian mode68 in favor of events or “conjunctures” that are indescribable and even go beyond the face.
I will not insist here on the fundamental themes of a philosophy that has become well-known, since we should not let go of the guiding thread of an extremely conflictual relationship with Heidegger. Even limiting ourselves to the analysis of the Heideggerian corpus, which is always present as a foil, it would be possible to identify the details of a rewriting of the existential themes of Being and Time in a strictly opposite or in a radically different sense; joy and love of life replace anguish and being-toward-death, sensitivity, enjoyment, and the face-to-face rupture the affective neutrality of beings: “It is interesting to observe that Heidegger does not take the relation of enjoyment into consideration. The implement has entirely masked the usage and the coming to term of satisfaction. Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry. Food can be interpreted as an implement only in a world of exploitation.”69 And at the end of the book, it is the infinite nature of fecundity that overflows the possible, and it is the positivity and the novelty of the temporal beginnings that are contrasted with the radical finitude of time and mortality: “It is not the finitude of being that constitutes the essence of time, as Heidegger thought but its infinity.”70
One has to recognize that Levinas has taken (no doubt half-heartedly at first) a completely radical turn with all of its consequences: Heidegger, whom he had so admired, became the emblematic thinker of totality, as well as of war and violence, in an intolerable complicity with Nazism. A careful study by a historian of contemporary philosophy should be able to show whether this turn led Levinas to exaggerate matters, sometimes by doing violence to the texts, in particular concerning the use of the concepts of “totality” and “violence,” which cannot be imposed on the analytic of Dasein without betraying it—especially since Levinas failed to address the theme of the call of conscience [Gewissen] and solicitude (Fürsorge).
But my perspective is not that of a historian of philosophy. It is neither that of a judge deciding whether Levinas—in spite of his concern for justice—has ultimately been unfair to Heidegger. In fact, he never ceased oscillating until the end of his life between nuanced homage and devastating critique. There are two inescapable facts. On the one hand, Levinas himself accepted the consequences of an “anti-Heideggerian” (hence, excessively reactive) reading of Totality and Infinity. On the other hand, he had certainly “found his voice” and the relative reserve, which was still apparent in his writings just after Liberation, had disappeared. One saw evidence of ethical concern, of the welcome of the stranger, of the widow, and of the orphan, but without the radical incompatibility with the Heideggerian ontology being emphasized. In this clarification, the decisive turn against Heidegger played an absolutely pivotal role. There is no possible doubt about that, even if the text of Totality and Infinity offers other perspectives, and, in particular biblical eschatology, as well as the metaphysical and ethical rereading of Plato or Descartes.
Why has such an important, personal, authentic book taken so much time to become known? No doubt its uncompromising style, its publication in The Hague, and its relatively “confidential” mode of distribution were all factors. But the cryptic nature of the conflictual relation with Heidegger must have also played a role. The resistance from the “Heideggerian circles” was insufficient to discourage the average reader. In fact, it was necessary to have been very well versed in the debate on the “end of ontology” to grasp the profound stakes of the book. And it required the exceptional lucidity of some particularly attentive minds such as Wahl, Ricoeur, Blanchot, or Derrida71 to recognize that these stakes—apart from any narrowly partisan position—were on par with the most far-reaching intuitions of the Master of Freiburg.
It was precisely this particularly delicate work that Jacques Derrida undertook in 1964 in one of his major texts, “Violence and Metaphysics.” It would be a complete mistake to present this essay as a Heideggerian refutation of Levinas. On the contrary, Derrida went to great lengths to take the specifically Levinasian questions into account: the objection to the “violence of light” that phenomenology still relied on following the Western tradition, the opening to the radical difference of the Other conjuring the logic of the Same, the quest for the radical exteriority of transcendence, even beyond the face itself. Nevertheless, Derrida contrasted the revival of metaphysical and ethical transcendence with the essence of metaphysics and Western Logos. He undertook this patient operation by following Levinas’s itinerary: “The respectful, moderate reproach directed against Husserl in a Heideggerian style will soon become the main charge of an indictment this time directed against Heidegger, and made with a violence that will not cease to grow.”72 Resituating Levinas’s choices in the “powerful architecture” of Totality and Infinity, Derrida exposed them to their linguistic and ontological presuppositions: those of a nonviolence that has to assert itself in the very words of an economy that it sought to exceed: the “non-Greek” must speak Greek: “In addition, metaphysics, unable to escape its ancestry in light, always supposes a phenomenology in its very critique of phenomenology, and especially if, like Levinas’s metaphysics, it seeks to be discourse and instruction.”73 The metaphysical revival of ethics was less disputed than related to its transcendental preconditions: Derrida undertook a return to the destinal character of the Heideggerian listening to Western metaphysics. “Levinas’ metaphysics in a sense presupposes—at least we have attempted to show this—the transcendental phenomenology that it seeks to put into question.”74 The result is that the debate with Heidegger should not be reduced to a frontal contradiction but would require a much deeper dialogue. To have this dialogue, one should first not try to schematize Heidegger’s thought under the influence of polemics: to reduce being to a neutral principle, separated from beings, is to misunderstand the ontological difference; to reduce the question of being to an ontology, or to a “philosophy of power,” when Heidegger meant to begin again from the very possibility of naming, amounts to being closed to the question of being: “It is thus paradoxical to see the Heideggerian city governed by a neutral power, by an anonymous discourse, that is, by the ‘one’ (man) whose inauthenticity Heidegger was the first to describe.”75 The “letting-be” in the sense Heidegger understood it does not mean that beings should first be reduced to objects of understanding in order to then speak to the interlocutor: it immediately refers to the possibility of the approach of the other. Further, Levinas, who had been able to recognize the nontheoretical nature of the Heideggerian understanding of being, thereafter identified it as a conceptual knowledge, just as he (wrongly) identified the Same in Heidegger as a generic unity. In fact, through all these polemical operations, Levinas presupposed the very concept of being that he meant to overcome: by so doing, “Levinas confirms Heidegger in his discourse,”76 that is to say, by virtue of the fact that the very gesture of metaphysics is the forgetting of the ontological difference (metaphysics refuses to pose the question: “What Is Metaphysics?”). From the Heideggerian point of view, it was Levinas who regressed toward a humanism and a metaphysics. The question of being, returning to the ground of the great metaphysical distinctions, “is simply forever out of reach”77 for the operation of the reversal (of ontology) proposed by Levinas. But in the end, if there is a certain legitimacy in Levinas’s approach, it is that he returned to the priority of beings within the natural attitude, while imprisoning himself in the contradiction of the affirmation of a pure nonviolence, through which he revealed, by relying on a trans-historicity, his theological intention.78
At the end of this extremely dense and subtle confrontation, Derrida identified a relative complicity between Levinas’s metaphysics and a certain empiricism, but not without recognizing the dignity of the play between philosophy and nonphilosophy, between the Greek Logos and its other (that never ceases reappearing within the same), and between the Greek and the Jew. He concluded, by quoting the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, that the extremes (the Jew and the Greek) meet in an undecidability that requires that the indissociable marks of the two heritages be recognized simultaneously in our Western world.
One would also be tempted to characterize Blanchot’s writing in terms of undecidability, in its complex relation to Heidegger’s influence, an influence that was increasingly questioned due to Levinas. Long before his reflections on the Neutral and quite early on (before 1930), at Strasbourg, Blanchot had been exposed to phenomenological, and then more specifically Heideggerian, themes.79 These themes can be perceived in Thomas the Obscure, although never in the form of a thematic review or of explicit references: “Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare.”80 If there is, then, an undecidability, it is that of the relation of language to truth and to death. Consciousness is certainly no longer a sovereign self-presence. One can perceive the mute proximity of the existential anguish of the early Heidegger; however, nothing allows us to impute Blanchot’s continuous development of a work on the secret and “central point” of literature, namely, the “concentration of ambiguity” and paradoxical opening of désœuvrement81 in Mallarmé, Rilke, Kafka, Hölderlin, and Char, to Heidegger’s influence alone. Though these last two names evoke a different Heideggerian “legacy,” Blanchot’s interest in them developed in an autonomous way, and to such an extent that, as early as 1956, Levinas was able to discern in art, such as Blanchot conceived of it, a very penetrating questioning of Heidegger: “Does Blanchot not attribute to art the function of uprooting the Heideggerian universe?”82 Blanchot’s “turn” away from a thought that undeniably was relevant to his aesthetics83 thus seemed clearly anterior to Totality and Infinity;84 it would become even more pronounced thereafter. The attention to the most refined nuances of Heideggerian translations85 did not prevent Blanchot from distancing himself from, among other things, the political involvement of the philosopher (and above all, in this respect, from the very complicities of the philosophical language):86 anonymous, without reason, without face, without definitive value, the Neutral escapes any grounding, any reappropriation, even that of an originary event. Is the part of night and silence that Blanchot shelters from any ontology, from any “clearing” of being, not evocative of “language in archipelago,” which, in Char himself, remains apart from the Heideggerian approach?87 Even in 1959, Blanchot paid tribute to Heidegger in a few pages for the philosopher’s seventieth birthday. This text, entitled “L’attente” (Awaiting),88 could seem Heideggerian to an overly hasty reader who would only retain, from the title, the connection to the patient endurance of the preparation for Ereignis. In fact, this tribute was anything but a show of support. The awaiting according to Blanchot is an impossible, paradoxical waiting, without content, mysterious and ineffable, “without anything being hidden.”89 The question raised by the awaiting even escapes meditative questioning: “It was neither a question that he could find and make his, nor a proper manner of questioning.”90 This is a disconcerting expropriation of the words that were most dear to the thinker, and on his own ground . . .
The debate having been opened by Levinas, and carried on by Blanchot and Derrida, plowed a new furrow into the reading of a work about which it was no longer a question of introducing or even interpreting, but rather of rethinking at its true height, and in its deepest stakes (essentially, the status of metaphysics, the uncovering of its un-thought, the resources of language and writing, and, the possibility of an ethics). These works—closely followed by young students who, like Jean-Luc Nancy and François Warin, did not hesitate to translate Heidegger’s difficult pages91—sowed new interrogations.
Were the first writings of Jacques Derrida Heideggerian? That question exceeds the scope of the present work. It has to be formulated in more strictly limited terms: although it is true that the young Derrida, who began his philosophical career with a work on Husserl92 and who was neither a translator of Heidegger nor a member of Beaufret’s circle of close friends, was interested in the Master of Freiburg, can it be said that this interest really marked a stage in the reception of Heideggerian thought in France? An entire part of this interest was expressed in Derrida’s teaching at the Sorbonne, where, as an assistant from 1960 to 1964, he gave “entire courses” on Heidegger.93 Can the signs of this interest be considered as interpretations or as already original reconsiderations? We will address two texts in which the reference to Heidegger is the most explicit: “Ousia and Grammē,” in homage to Jean Beaufret, which I will treat of after the lecture “Différance,” given January 27, 1968 before the Société française de philosophie.
This lecture was disconcerting for more than one reason. I will not undertake an inventory of the discordances that were deliberately and strategically introduced in the usual philosophical discourse. We have a sufficient number of systems of classifications concerning the connections and caesurae with respect to Heideggerian thought. The title, before one notices its strange orthographic feature, is consonant with the theme of the “ontological difference.” The author’s skill (should we add his boldness or mischievousness?) is precisely not to have written a lecture on this basic question, but to literally have reinscribed it into a text where this question is newly rearticulated against the Heideggerian alliance of the word and of speech. This perspective, which ultimately focused on the Heideggerian Proper (in order to contradict it) confirms, if it was necessary, that it was above all Heidegger with whom Derrida was debating (although Freud and Nietzsche figure importantly as well in this questioning of difference). However, one should obviously add that this lecture cannot be included in the economy of a classically academic “reception.” It is unlikely that the great majority of the listeners, or readers, were really able to follow Derrida in this excessively subtle operation of a deconstructive reappropriation of Heideggerian thought, which was focused on one of his most difficult texts, “Anaximander’s Saying.”
How does the substitution (apparently a misspelling) of a single letter in a single term—even if it is an important word—constitute an event of thought? Could we not see, then, the particularly bizarre Heideggerian use of etymologies and translations taken up again in ways that were as ingenious as baroque by an (almost) too clever doctor? In order to understand this gesture without condemning it too quickly, one should be willing to listen to and to read the “accused.”
Although inaudible, différance can be marked and remarked upon only through reading: such is the first stratagem, playing on a difference between meaning and trace, between logos and its written form. Let us call this first difference grammatological, insofar as it allusively points, in an orthographic hapax, to the critique of logocentrism already undertaken by the young Derrida. With this first difference at the level of the signifier, there is also a second difference that plays within the signified: between différance as temporization and différance as spacing.
Derrida admits straightaway that this set of distinctions is both “strategic and adventurous.”94 The strategic aim is the introduction of an operation exceeding any ontological and/or theological reappropriation. The adventurous part comes from the absence of any “finality” in this operation (a boldness that will return at the end of the text, with Nietzsche, “in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance”).95
How is Heidegger then put into question? He is put into question in two respects, through a gesture that is accomplished with him and that turns against him. With him: to think what differs from any being (even in the form of the being of beings) is to radically criticize the presence of the present and to deconstruct onto-theology (which is constituted as an economy and hierarchy of presence). Against him: the project consists in reinscribing in the play of an endless text the aim of a linguistic reappropriation of a single word (being or Ereignis) such that différance would no longer appear as an ultimate word, and on the contrary, appearing as a “metaphysical name,”96 all the while subverting, however, that same metaphysics (of language, within language, and through language).
Such an intense discussion with Heidegger had to be undertaken, according to the very logic of a textual deconstruction, including finding the trace (Spur) of the forgetting of being in the 1946 text, “Anaximander’s Saying.”97 Without being able to address this reading in detail here, I will note that Derrida’s originality does not limit itself to repeating that the forgetting of being reveals itself in its very essence, but rather finds in the Heideggerian deciphering of one of the most enigmatic documents concerning the Greek “origin” of philosophy the play of a trace that is both early and already (barely) erased, a trace of the difference between the present and the withdrawal of its presence. Avoiding “criticizing” Heidegger, but seeking to imbue his text with its “power to provoke,”98 Derrida went as far as possible in the decryption of the play of a difference, and questioned whether it pertains to being. And this is why he concluded the essay with a radical and elliptical interrogation of one of Heidegger’s key sentences: “Being speaks always and everywhere throughout language.” Does being speak? For Derrida, it traces itself, writes itself, and disseminates itself. But should one still refer to it as to a subject? The very unity of being is undermined and under erasure. The “Heideggerian hope” (of a proper, unique word) is put into question. By so doing, Derrida uses and turns the play of the crossing out of being [la rature de l’être]99 against the master, but he does so on the basis of an affirmation (suspending questioning) that we have just seen introduced elliptically with Nietzsche in laughter and dance, without further explanation. Nietzsche against Heidegger, but which Nietzsche? This relation to Heidegger is certainly not easy to “narrate,” since it is such a close reading of the Master’s text. It does not so much undertake to enrich its “margins” as to displace its literality.
Do we find the same situation in “Ousia and Grammē”? This “note on a note from Being and Time” presents itself overtly as a commentary in a classical sense. Before addressing it, it is necessary to recognize how it was included in a book that was a homage to Jean Beaufret. A casual reader could think it is a pure and simple act of allegiance to the inner circle of the French Heideggerian school. This is not at all the case, for the publication of L’Endurance de la pensée100 was not an easy matter. It is necessary to briefly recount its entangled circumstances.
It seemed that it was François Fédier who initiated the project of a volume in homage to Jean Beaufret and was indeed the editor of the project. It is not impossible that the idea was suggested by Heidegger himself, who was fond of the academic practice of the Festschrift, which was bestowed on him on his sixtieth birthday. Might not the master have wanted to honor his disciple and friend in this way, even though he never really understood the idiosyncratic, uniquely French, and apparently modest status of a “khâgne professor”? Whatever the case may have been, beyond the quite laudable intention to “please” the person concerned and to render him a fitting tribute, this strange initiative (normally appropriate to the retirement of a “distinguished university professor,” it did not correspond, in this case, to the retirement of Jean Beaufret, which would take place five years later) seemed to involve the will to express, in relation to Heidegger himself, an exceptional recognition of the intellectual pedagogical and philosophical stature of an authentic master (and in this way to “put to shame” the French academics for not granting him the first rank that he deserved). Well intentioned in principle, this project, controlled by François Fédier, who himself had strangely hidden his role as the “editor” of the volume,101 would encounter unforeseen obstacles that were quite unpleasant for the “recipient” of an undertaking that had, however, been (almost too) carefully prepared. The project was perhaps too ambitious, and its (relative) failure needs to be carefully considered, even if (and precisely because) a bitter irony emerged. Of course, the volume seems successful if one approaches it without knowing anything about the context. Opening with a page by René Char, who saluted Beaufret as “philosopher of origins” with “eminent presence,” it then included Heidegger’s important lecture “On Time and Being,” followed by a very respectable collection of contributions bringing together authors of diverse renown from France and Germany.102 But besides the fact that no prominent figures of the French university (or of the German university)103 of that time were present, one detail should not escape the attention of the careful reader. Maurice Blanchot’s text is dedicated to Emmanuel Levinas with this mention, both explicit and disturbing: “For Emmanuel Levinas, with whom, for forty years, I have been linked by a friendship that is closer to me than I am to myself: in a relation of invisibility with Judaism.” Thus is not the “gift” singularly “poisoned”? Is that the fate of any gift? Or does this gift, in particular, not indicate, in spite of itself, its “lacks” or un-said, if only through the typographical error that had surreptitiously slid into Parmenides’s epigraph?104 How could good intentions have resulted in this strange situation that could only engender malaise or, at least, confusion? What one absolutely wanted to avoid took place, as the return of the repressed (Heidegger’s “Nazism” in the form of an anti-Semitism that he would have “bequeathed”—or passed on—to his disciple and friend). I will not arbitrate what had become the first affaire Beaufret105 and the fall of the noble quest for truth in a succession of accusations and of exonerations where L’Endurance de la pensée seemed to be symbolically put through the mill. Briefly put: Roger Laporte, thinking he heard Jean Beaufret making an anti-Semitic remark, reported it to Jacques Derrida, who became upset and wrote to Fédier. The latter protested and asserted Beaufret’s innocence. Maurice Blanchot, also informed, considered pulling his text from the collection. Beaufret, accusing Laporte of slander, justified himself to Derrida and Deguy. Blanchot’s and Derrida’s texts barely made it into the collection, but Blanchot added the dedication to Levinas along with a justification.106
Much ado about (almost) nothing? It is impossible not to mention this succession of incidents that one should neither exaggerate nor underplay. Even if public rumor did not benefit from adjudication of this “matter,” the textual trace deliberately left by Blanchot would deserve some clarification. And this information is necessary to understand how and why Jacques Derrida kept his text in the volume, thus recognizing (in spite of everything) his debt toward his former professor at the École Normale Supérieure. To overemphasize the incident would be, additionally, to erase this recognition of debt, and to risk, as well, causing Derrida’s very important text to be forgotten, despite its ironically modest subtitle.
This “Note on a Note from Being and Time”107 is in fact far from unimportant. We can give only an incomplete account of it here. What is striking at the outset is the accuracy of Derrida’s “insight,” which located a crucial passage from paragraph 82 of Heidegger’s master work.108 Although it appears to be concerned only with Hegel’s debt toward Aristotle in the determination of the now, of the limit, of the point, and of the “this,” this note raises anew the meaning of being as presence of the present throughout the history of metaphysics. On the basis of a very careful commentary on its literality, on its references and allusions, Derrida succeeded in widening the horizon to the very limits of the enclosure that metaphysics circumscribed by privileging the now, as a result both of the “self-evident” character of the ordinary concept of time and of the “exorbitant privilege”109 afforded to the “now” by Western thought, from Parmenides and Aristotle to Hegel and Bergson. Could this privilege of the present be “destroyed”? Although it seems obvious and steadfast, nevertheless, this privilege can be deconstructed, insofar as, by thinking what could not have been thought, one will produce “a certain difference, a certain trembling, a certain decentering that is not the position of an other center.”110 Applying a meticulous double reading that was not immediately apparent, Derrida first proposed a new “paraphrase” of Heidegger’s text and of its harmonics, showing the extent to which the analyses in Book IV of Aristotle’s Physics are determinative for the establishment of the traditional concept of time as “number of movement” (and in this way Derrida followed in Heidegger’s footsteps), but he also initiated in these very analyses the discernment of premises of an “instability” that the author of Being and Time would have controlled.111 Thus, he gradually inserted into the scrupulous commentary on the Heideggerian note a text that overflows or exceeds it, a text that, while claiming to work within the Heideggerian question, displaced it. It is indeed the theme of the oblivion of being that was being transposed into the theme of (the trace) of the erasure of the trace in the metaphysical text, so that the elliptic conclusion points at a difference that is even more unthought than the difference between being and beings: the unsettling différance that would be “the first or the last trace.”112
This is an important text, but a very strange homage to Jean Beaufret! We first encountered it in its context; we can understand it better now on the basis of a reading that reveals the extent to which Derrida undertook a work of critique from within, with virtuosity, a work that until then had not been accomplished by the French Heideggerians. Further, a note denounced both “the camp of Heideggerian devotion and the camp of anti-Heideggerianism,” allied “in the same refusal to read.”113 We will have to return to it to clarify how Derrida inscribed, more and more vigorously, the singularity of his themes in an intellectual concert that often became cacophonous.
Among all the contributions that added, in the most intense moments of the sixties, to the complexity of the debates owing to an intellectual inventiveness that was labeled “structuralist” too hastily, one led Michel Foucault to present a brilliantly erudite history of the life sciences, of political economy, and of language as a genealogy of the “death of man.” It is essentially in the tradition of Nietzsche that the author of the successful although austere book called Les Mots et les Choses situated himself when he reflected on the “uprooting of Anthropology”114 to which contemporary thought seemed (to him) to be devoted. As was the case in the thesis on madness, Heidegger is never cited. Should we, nonetheless, suspect his hidden presence in the critical distance from humanism, but above all in the genealogical undertaking that redefines the caesura of modern rationality? Emphasized and systematized, this hypothesis becomes an interpretative frame that is no doubt too ambitious, recomposing Foucault’s itinerary and even indicating a somewhat Heideggerian “turn.”115 The risk is then to transform a useful reference into a cliché. Foucault himself confessed, a short time before he died: “My whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger”; he nevertheless added the following, which considerably attenuates the scope of these words: “I nevertheless recognize that Nietzsche outweighed him. I do not know Heidegger well enough: I hardly know Being and Time nor what has been published recently.”116 This ambivalent confession does not permit one to distinguish between those who want to “Heideggerianize” Foucault and those who refuse to do so. As he asserted in the interview we just cited, there is no question that Foucault read Heidegger as early as 1951 or 1952. That Nietzsche “prevailed” is an obvious fact confirmed constantly by the reading of the work in its totality. There remains, as far as the relation to Heidegger’s thought is concerned, an immense margin of uncertainty that it is important to be able to recognize rather than question. In this respect, Hubert Dreyfus seemed to have gone too far in the connection he established between Heideggerian being and Foucaldian power. To read Heideggerian ontology as “the unthought of Foucault’s œuvre” requires hermeneutical and scrupulously critical deciphering work.117 A “happy positivist,” who occasionally cited René Char (which was not that frequent in the neo-positivist circles), Foucault was too intelligent and too lucid to have “censured” Heidegger’s name and direct references to his themes, without consideration or cause. The work, such as it is, is silent on this point, although its constant concern to draw the limits of rationality and to establish its genealogy could be interpreted as the most subtle of “positive” translations of an essentially Heideggerian questioning.
Things are different with Lacan. In spite of his taste for the secret, or even for mystification, he offered, in the matter, some traces and testimonies that can be identified more easily despite their constantly cryptic opacity. First of all, commentators have not been inattentive to the facts and events attesting to Lacan’s interest in Heidegger’s work beyond the first “existentialist” approaches. Did the fact that he became Jean Beaufret’s psychoanalyst in April 1951118 provide an initial access to a formidably hieroglyphic thought? Yet, the “cure,” soon interrupted, gave way to a very Parisian friendship rather than to a genuine philosophical exchange, despite some efforts.119 Did a visit to Freiburg in 1955, as well as the hospitality offered that same year to the authoritative Master, on the occasion of the famous conference of Cerisy (which Lacan did not attend), indicate more than a fascination toward an oracle from which one grasps fragments? It is necessary, no doubt, to return to the texts, which, as it turns out, provide less information than one would have hoped.
In the intellectual fireworks of the sixties in Paris, the highpoint was probably the publication of Jacques Lacan’s Écrits. Produced thanks to the efforts of François Wahl and Jacques-Alain Miller, this huge book contained a collection of articles and interventions of the mysterious doctor whose seminar had been attracting intellectuals in Paris for years already. It contained thirty-four titles, with some unpublished texts.120 If we keep to the letter of the text, the relation to Heidegger’s thought comes up only incidentally. However, Lacan is not someone who would allow just anything to appear in his texts, so that the least allusion requires a decoding, which, in turn, indicates a path of research that until now had not been considered.121
In “The Seminar on ‘the Purloined Letter,’” we read: “Thus, when we are open to hearing the way which Martin Heidegger uncovers for us in the word aletheia the play of truth, we narrowly rediscover a secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.”122
This valuable (since it is rare) allusion to Heidegger deserves to be savored as such and demands to be examined according to its scholarly intentions. One should note that, far from clarifying the paradox of the “Purloined Letter” (invisible because it is so obvious) on the basis of the Heideggerian understanding of aletheia, it submits the discovery of the word “truth” to the always valid logical paradox of a hide-and-seek game in which what seems to be “the most true” is known only to its “lovers.” Nothing was more foreign to Heidegger than such eroticized mind games in social circles that would be more germane to the eighteenth century than to any so-called original Greek thought.
Thus, more than the parsimony of allusions, it is the very nature of this wink that should caution us from “acceding” to the Heideggerian hermeneutic field. It is extremely difficult (and it would most probably be in vain) to want to decide whether this allusion is a kind of coquetterie (precisely since this kind of step is never so simple), or if it is not rather, in the guise of a tribute, the mischievous reduction of the Heideggerian discovery of a key word to a kind of eternal truth for a few privileged minds, or if—third possibility—it manifests a profound fascination masked by the veil of ellipsis, for fear of misunderstanding.
Nothing would be more superficial and vain than to begin a quest for traces of Heideggerianism in Lacan. This is, incidentally, what a knowledgeable interpreter, Gérard Granel, avoided. While devoting a text to “Lacan and Heidegger,”123 he avoided any comparisons124 and on the contrary emphasized the distance [Entfernung] between both thinkers. He showed that it is the same refusal to treat humans as objects that is at stake in both cases, an extreme attention paid to the “gestures of language in language.”125 And the unexpected “fraternity” that Granel discerned between Lacan and Heidegger, despite everything, concerned the very idea of science with regard to its “subject” as well as its “model”: “The subject of science is the narcissistic constitution of the Western World.”126 To exorcize this historical fixation in a new way, Granel proposed and outlined a new epistemo-logical task beyond the currently authorized disciplines.
In any case, Lacan himself, as if he were extraordinarily sensitive to the precious singularity of the Heideggerian thought, showed a discretion and a prudence that was unusual for him.127 His only audacity—which was quite significant—was to publish a very personal translation of the essay “Logos.” In May 1957, at the end of “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” discerning in Freud the “symptom of and prelude to a reexamination of man’s situation in the midst of beings [dans l’étant],” he forestalled, with a conspicuous verve,128 any “neo-Heideggerian” labeling of the perspective thus advanced, concluding nonetheless this clarification with a strong tribute: “When I speak of Heidegger, or rather when I translate him, I strive to preserve the sovereign signifyingness of the speech he proffers.”129
A master of sovereign utterance allows us to appreciate that more sovereign still is the word whose oracle is in Freiburg. This also clarifies that the effort of translation is to be taken seriously as well as taken as a homage that is superior to any ordinary reference or allegiance. The translation of “Logos” was thus not unimportant, although the Heideggerians made no comment on it.130 Strange and very “Lacanian” through its apparently unusual choices and further encryption of the original text, this attempt could only have discouraged the reader further, given that Heidegger’s text was not an easy one to begin with. More poetical than pedagogical, but especially thoughtful, this translation merits our full attention.
Without attempting to “summarize” Heidegger’s words in this text, let us indicate the main orientation: what is at stake is to rethink the very meaning of logos from what is probably Heraclitus’s most celebrated fragment.131 To recognize the ordinary and prevailing sense of the verb legein (to speak, to say, to tell) does not prevent one from mentioning a sense that is at least as archaic (and understood as more originary by Heidegger): to gather (in the sense of the Latin legere: “to lay in order to gather”). Two German verbs are then used to restore the rich semantic range of legein: lesen (to gather, to read) and legen (to lay, to lay out), which, it is noted, is homonymic with the Greek word. How is it possible to conceive of the unity of this meaning? Does the saying allow itself to be thought as the Laying that gathers [La Pose recueillante]?132 If this was the original meaning, how did it come to signify speech? Returning to Heraclitus’s sentence, Heidegger suggested that the listening to the One-All to which we are invited is that of the truth of being, which was unthought by the Greeks and even by Heraclitus: the Laying that gathers of logos is the sheltering of aletheia. As in a lightning bolt, one thus catches a glimpse of “the storm of being”; our task is now to think what first imposed itself as destiny.
Aware of the risks and after having warned the reader,133 Lacan undertook a bold initial move: translating the German verb legen by legs [legacy]. This was apparently an arbitrary suggestion, though ingenious, for in the French, it is a play on the homonymy (or homophony) evoked by Heidegger with respect the Greek legein and the German legen. Lacan defended himself by translating legen more adequately by “putting to rest” and emphasizing that “he uses a spontaneous equivocation of our language” (between legacy [legs], lay [lais], letting [laisser]).134
Obviously, Lacan enjoyed taking Heidegger at his word and adding to his disconcerting language games, causing them to proliferate in French, almost ad infinitum, without one being able to know exactly when the quest for the originary stops and when the puns begin. One should be able to follow, in all of its details, this high-stakes game in which Jean Bollack discerned a salutary and liberating subversion of the Heideggerian account of the Greek origin that privileged the authenticity of the German language: “Lacan’s translating method is very free and high-handed. He wrenches the text in the direction of science, art, and language and accords more importance to hearing than to speech. He adds a touch of Mallarmé.”135
Indeed, when Lacan retranslated the Heideggerian translation of the Heraclitean logos [die lesende Lege] by the “lay in which what is being elected becomes legible” [le lais où se lit ce qui s’élit],136 he almost succeeded in using the French language in a completely unexpected, albeit baroque way, and at the cost of a radical departure from the ontological gathering of the “Laying that gathers,” as André Préau would translate it more literally. The stakes, as Bollack pointed out, was the interpretation of Heraclitus and—on that basis—the philosophical decision to be taken: was it necessary to follow Heidegger in his ontological conception of language?137 One would look in vain for an explicit response from Lacan, who took great care to respect Heidegger from a distance and to maintain toward him the dignity of a power addressing another power.
The fact is that until now there have been very few readers, even among the most experienced philosophers and psychoanalysts, of this outstanding translation by Lacan. One can regret this while appreciating that such a cultivated singularity could discourage readers. From a more general perspective, one should certainly be able to recognize the unexpected complicity between Lacan and Heidegger with respect to the originary ground of a revelatory truth that, far from being reduced to enunciation, conceals as much as it shows, such that the theory of repression as the truth of desire becomes intelligible in terms of the Heideggerian aletheia. In this sense, some have gone as far as to assert that “Heidegger dominates Lacan’s entire strategy.”138 However, as one has judiciously noted elsewhere, “Lacan’s truth, no matter how unfathomable and repressed, remains none the less the truth of a desire—that is, of a subject.”139 Between this theory of the speaking subject (an auto-enunciation that has to elucidate its desire) and Heidegger’s nonsubjective approach to language, there is a greater distance between them, finally, than the signs of proximity and compatibility have indicated.
Such is the esoteric other side of a reception that has been, on the contrary, often trivialized. Throughout this chapter we have established its anguished character140 (which we would still need to analyze further), which is strangely punctuated by discreet inflexions,141 unexpected142 latencies and caesurae, which will undergo new developments after 1968.
I have said that my first encounter with Heidegger, in early June 1962, was almost imposed on me. I would never have dared to disturb the great thinker unless exceptional circumstances had constrained me to do so. The sudden death of my father had put an end to my language instruction near Lake Constance. Sensing my disarray, Jean Beaufret strongly advised me to go back to Germany by way of Freiburg. A letter was to precede my arrival and prepare the way for my meeting with the Master.
With respect to this meeting, which was approached apprehensively by a shy young man, I will only focus on what pertains to the relation of the Master to French thought. Not daring to ask fundamental questions, and assuming that Heidegger did not intend to hold a work session with me, I answered his amiable questions about Jean Beaufret, my life as a Parisian student, and the philosophical situation in France. What were Wahl, Hyppolite, and the Parisian professors doing? He most appreciated my report on Sartre since it was of greatest interest to him, namely the lecture Sartre had given the previous year at the École Normale mentioned in Epilogue I.
The Master was very glad to hear this story. He asked about the news from Paris as would the people of the countryside who enjoy a calm and regular life, far from the capital of which they had formed a mythic idea. Anxious to ensure that his Nietzsche volumes were well translated, he asked me about Pierre Klossowski, the translator who had been proposed by Gallimard, and seemed very interested to learn that he was a maverick, well-read, and an author of somewhat mystical and inventive libertine stories. Evoking Kostas Axelos’s name warmly, he seemed amused by a sentence of his about “the erotic life of Heraclitus.” More seriously, the conversation also included Kant and interpretations that I was able to recall: he seemed surprised by Jules Vuillemin’s reduction of the Kantbuch to an exclusive treatment of the transcendental Aesthetics: “No, really?” he asked with an air of incredulity. He showed me the books he loved (Kommerell, Jünger, Stifter). He opened his copy of Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter, to which he had devoted a seminar: the important passages were underlined in red, blue, and yellow, as if the text had been submitted to a thorough X-ray revealing its various layers of meaning!
Seeing me out after more than an hour of conversation, Heidegger found Jean Beaufret’s letter that was supposed to announce and introduce me in the mail box. Jean was indeed always late! This contretemps made the Master smile one last time and filled me retrospectively with confusion: I had dared to knock at his door and to disturb him without having been announced! I only had one wish: to continue my trip and to discover a stream or a swimming pool, to swim in fresh water to gather my spirits . . .
When I saw Heidegger again, almost one month later in his hometown of Messkirch, I had gained some confidence and I was able to ask questions about Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Plato, and Kant. The conversation was less concerned with France and the French philosophers. But I remember that Heidegger seemed surprised to learn that Jean Guitton had wanted to join the Académie française (clearly, this institution did not mean anything to him); more significantly, he asked me questions about structuralism: he wanted to know exactly what that label meant. I did my best, although not being knowledgeable enough to satisfy him completely!
What lessons shall we draw from these encounters for our inquiry? I have never overestimated their philosophical importance, neither at that time, nor since. They did not change my admiration, nor my subsequent concerns about the thinker. They simply—and this is not trivial—played an important role in modifying the image I had of the man as a great German authoritarian and magisterial professor. The man I encountered was not at all like that (I am not the only one to have noted it). He was short, active, mischievous, with an unforgettably penetrating gaze, very attentive to his interlocutor, giving the impression of being friendly, and able to be humble enough to learn from another person, the very opposite of a pontificating Master. Undoubtedly, he could play several characters; but I felt a fragility, even a shyness, a reserve, which was quite surprising when one thinks of the demonized image his opponents have spread.
His interest in what was taking place in France appeared to be genuine. Having become well-known early on in our country, having made friends there (not only with Jean Beaufret and his close associates), he showed a real admiration toward the French intelligentsia that was tempered by a critical distance. We have seen how, after the war, he found a kind of antidote in and consolation from his exchanges with “die Franzosen.” Of course, the cynics would say it was in his own interest; and it is probable that he hardly read French works (and nor even his German contemporaries . . .). But sometimes heart and reason are in unison. Heidegger would not have known such a sustained and multifaceted glory in France if his interlocutors, on this side of the Rhine, had felt only reserve and hostility from him. Those who exploited his praise of the German language to suggest that he despised all kinds of non-Germanic thought were mistaken. And first, the thinker who was so attached to great texts could not ignore the heritage of Descartes and Pascal (cited in French in Sein und Zeit); the admirer of Nietzsche could not completely ignore or disapprove of the tributes that the author of Zarathustra addressed to the moralists of the Enlightenment: to Bayle, to Fontenelle, to Voltaire, and to Stendhal. If there was a German philosopher permeated by historicity, it was Heidegger; that is why the dialogue he had with French thought was essential for him, for it was the very opening of the space of listening in which the fate of modernity unfolded between rationality (in which France excelled, at least in principle . . .) and the Germanic concern for the fundamental and the originary. But this “polarity” is recalled only for the sake of context. Why, in this matter, should we yield to clichés that bar access to the most essential thoughts? Heidegger also read the French poets, including, among others, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, and René Char, who was to become his friend.
As for me, more modestly, my encounters with the Master could only have been an incentive to improve my German so as not to be dependent on translations. I then immersed myself in the Nietzsche volumes (whose translation appeared only in 1971), especially the second volume, more decisively turned toward the future (the determination of nihilism and the question of the overcoming of metaphysics). My readings of Heidegger—in particular, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Der Satz vom Grund—constantly accompanied the more “academic” work that I undertook for my thesis on “Hegel and the Destiny of Greece.” I have never worked more closely with Jean Beaufret than at the end of my time at rue d’Ulm, in 1961–62, during the extra year Althusser granted me after my agrégation: I began making constant connections between the great texts (first those of Aristotle) and Heidegger. Noticing, however, for the first time, a reserve or hostility among some of the students and normaliens toward Beaufret, I wrote in my notebook: “If a Frenchman had spoken in an intelligent manner and faithfully of Hegel in Paris in 1820, would he have received any better welcome?” Returning to this today, my judgment would be more nuanced: the hesitancies of most of the normaliens did not only concern Heidegger, but also Beaufret’s style, which was considered to be inappropriate for agrégation. Half the time he improvised. Too many of his allusions escaped most people: he was a fireworks display with rockets bursting out in Greek, German, and everything was being done to discourage the uninitiated. Sensitive to this brio, always happy to catch an essential thought in the making, I was not shocked by his casual approach; on the contrary, it seemed to me to be one of the qualities of somebody I deeply admired and who was, incidentally (in his unconventional manner), an admirable pedagogue. Moreover, I did not perceive any hostility coming from Althusser, but rather a distant sympathy: very kindly, he had established a convivial atmosphere that pleasantly surprised me: “We are in the same situation: Marx and Heidegger are both excluded from the University,” he confided to me.
Althusser was certainly not motivated by a personal hostility when, at the new term of 1962, he did not renew the classes Beaufret had been teaching for more than fifteen years: coinciding with my departure from the École, the disaffection of the normaliens was obvious: most philosophers were turning toward Althusser himself, Canguilhem, or even Lacan, and the Cahiers pour l’Analyse was founded, articulating a Marxist reading of epistemology through a structural interpretation of Marxism. Twenty-three years of age at the time and thinking mostly of the future, I did not feel that I belonged to any “Heideggerian old guard,” an expression I find, in retrospect, quite funny, if it is true that this “old guard,” in the eyes of our slightly younger colleagues, was essentially composed of Michel Haar and of myself!
Peace was declared in Algeria: I had worked with the socialist left (a breakaway group from the SFIO party, the French Section of International Workers) in order to achieve this goal; but—an irony of history—it was obtained thanks to de Gaulle; a page was turned; other tasks, new curiosities, emerged.
I was not overly concerned by this transition; I had prepared myself for it in two ways: with Heidegger’s thought itself and with Jean Beaufret’s “ultra-minority” mentality. Was the age of Technology not the reign of nihilism? It was to be expected that authentic thought would remain unknown. As for the French university, it remained stuck in its habitual patterns: a self-satisfaction and a rhetoric that a nonconformist professor of khâgne used to laugh at. He was brilliant, almost famous because of his exceptional friendship with the greatest philosopher of the century, and—furthermore—he was surrounded by disciples (which was generally not the case with respect to the professors at the Sorbonne). Consequently, I was in no way put off or shocked by Jean Beaufret’s quasi-marginal situation: the joy of listening to him, the force of his knowledge and of his kindness, the youth that surrounded him: was that not equal to all the Sorbonnes of the world?
How did this situation evolve between 1962 and 1968? Without returning to the changes in the Parisian intellectual climate, what was the situation in the more restricted circle that I am considering here? Nothing was too overwhelming or shocking. With respect to Beaufret, the retreat to the khâgne at Condorcet and to the circle of the faithful was perhaps conducive to a routine, interrupted by two or three trips to Freiburg each year; the wings of glory and carefree readings were reined in, to do research and gain some “distance.” However, on April 21, 1964, in the large hall of the UNESCO headquarters, which was completely packed, Jean Beaufret took his place at the head table next to Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel. The occasion was a tribute to Kierkegaard. It was almost like a dress rehearsal of some of the events of May ’68: the crowd of students, who had been excluded from the room reserved for the invited guests, violently clamored at the doors and succeeded in forcing their way in; they settled on the steps and overflowed throughout the room. What accounted for this almost insurrectional insistence? Was it to listen to Sartre, who delivered a remarkable text—“Questions of Method”—in a dry and monotone voice that was too difficult for an otherwise quiet and respectful audience? What about Beaufret? He spoke “on behalf of” Heidegger who had asked him to translate a lecture that had nothing to do with Kierkegaard: “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (subsequently published, along with Sartre’s text, in Kierkegaard vivant by Gallimard). Beaufret read this very “Heideggerian” text slowly, and as it were with devotion. The master made no accommodation to any audience. Heidegger undertook, however, a very interesting self-critique of his interpretation of truth in Parmenides, referring to the Lichtung (the “clearing of unconcealment”). But as for the audience, Beaufret might as well have been from another planet. I was quite aware of it at the moment and was sincerely distressed, noticing the incredible gap between the importance of this text and the catastrophic impression that it made on the audience. A short while after, in October of the same year, 1964, in Royaumont, during a Hegelian symposium, I had the unpleasant occasion to hear Hyppolite tell Gadamer about this session: “It was a caricature of the caricature” (to be clear: a caricature by Beaufret’s translation of Heidegger’s caricature of himself). I completely disagreed with this judgment, whose sincerity or motives I did not question (for if the translation in question, made in collaboration with François Fédier, was accurate, it had no pedagogical virtue; as for the text, it was not adapted to the circumstance at all, and Heidegger had made no effort in that regard). Thus the gap became abysmally more obvious, and although it had nothing to do with the political question, that question would only widen it further. At the same time, it seemed that everything was conspiring to increasingly isolate Jean Beaufret as well as the people close to him: it was an irresistible phenomenon of fragmentation, where fate and the quasi-mechanical effects of a psychosocial logic of “isolation” reinforced each other. The word “sect” had always been used with malevolence by adversaries. There had never been, on Jean Beaufret’s part, the least authoritarian or sacral affectation of a guru, or attitude of “devotion” from the faithful of the “inner circle,” properly speaking. Everything was philosophical, free, and disinterested, in the erudite or critical discussion and the Socratic exchanges punctuated by anecdotes: this was what I always experienced. Why, then, these misunderstandings, these accusations that would only worsen until the intolerable and pathetic affaire Beaufret that began in 1967–68, according to Christophe Bident in his book on Blanchot? Having followed the genesis of the Festschrift to Jean Beaufret from a distance, entitled L’endurance de la pensée [The endurance of thought] (not having been associated in any way with this project), I can provide only a limited testimony. No longer living in Paris, I heard only Jean Beaufret’s version, in which he depicted himself as a victim of slander and persecution. What is certain is that, far from trying to escape his psychological isolation, he was doing everything (without being aware of it?) to sink into it even more.
While respecting his courageous support of Heidegger and his work, I understood less and less its unconditional nature, and—already for several years- I tried unsuccessfully to introduce more flexibility and a critical distance in our conversations (they became more and more sporadic because of my military service, my stay at the Fondation Thiers, but mostly due to my academic appointment in Nice dating from the fall of 1966). Simple common sense, sustained by a sound and critical philosophical tradition, seemed to recommend a disjunction (which was accepted and even thematized by Heidegger himself) between life and work: a great thinker could have personal weaknesses (Jean admitted this only in relation to the several months of the political error in relation to the rectorate). However, the recognition of the “historical” importance of his thought did not imply an allegiance to all of his theses: even the thinker Heidegger remained fallible! Of course, Beaufret did not deny this in principle, and he never went so far as to grant the Master of Freiburg “pontifical infallibility” in any sense. Further, in daily practice and in the very exercise of argumentation, it was always the defense that prevailed over criticism (which at times allowed for minor concessions). Consequently, one was getting tired of exercising a censorship that would unavoidably encounter a series of obstacles (for one had to follow the extremely slow and convoluted rhythm of the conversation). One should not overlook all the knowledge, the intelligence, the presence of mind and the humor that Jean placed at the service of this good cause (which he instead presented as the correction of misunderstandings, of the malevolencies, and of the “rubbish” repeated about Heidegger). Nonetheless, his extreme concern for details, his deep and sincere friendship for Heidegger the man, his approach to personal relations such as one would find in a local village (he was from the department of the Creuse), sometimes made him go astray, a nearby tree occluding the forest. And the result was, over the course of the years, an increasingly inextricable blending of the personal and the philosophical, the anecdotal and the essential.
I felt it was an opportune time to take some distance. But that was not really a “solution.” It was a stopgap measure.
At the same time, if my work at the Fondation Thiers on an almost unknown philosopher, Ravaisson, seemed to distance me from Heidegger, I was very aware of the metaphysical character of this thought and I started to discreetly sow, in a part of the history of philosophy (that had not been explored until then), seeds from a Germanic ground.
It was also necessary to pursue other ways to access or critique Heidegger’s thought: in 1965, informal discussions took place at the Fondation Thiers with Jacques Derrida, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michel Haar. However, we hardly addressed the reinterpretations of the metaphysical tradition (which were Jean Beaufret’s main concern, since he was reluctant to take Heidegger’s more personal questions seriously: even in his reading of Sein und Zeit, the pages on conscience, being-guilty, and Fürsorge did not seem to retain his attention for long). Other questions interested us more: Did Sein und Zeit succeed in overcoming the anthropological point of view? Is “authenticity” possible, and how? As appropriation? Under what conditions? How should one conceive of the famous “turn,” its connection with the political mistake, the essence of technology? Could one overcome nihilism? I list these questions in no particular order, not to give an exhaustive or faithful list of them, but to show the directions our friendly discussions took, discussions that were not arguments, but rather provocations, stimulations, and common research projects: moments of philosophical joy that one could only hope to recreate again at another time, in another place!