THE YEARS THAT led from the events of 1968 to the death of the Master in 1976 cannot be characterized in one way. On the contrary, the French reception of Heidegger split up into different, if not contradictory, camps. The appropriation of his thinking became dogmatic in each camp, each closing in upon itself; marginalizations, and indeed, excommunications, proliferated. In acknowledging this dissemination, we are not forgetting what this allusion to the title of Jacques Derrida’s book (which appeared in 1972) connotes:1 threads become woven with more specialized research and with Heidegger’s most difficult, ambitious, and inapparent themes; one should neither sever them nor forget them. But did this “dissemination” foreshadow a reconstruction of the philosophical landscape?
If we borrow this expression from François Couperin, it is because he liked to give his compositions for harpsichord poetic and fantastic titles, whose secrets we still do not know how to decipher. It is also because, all things being equal, the events of May ’68 in France remain enigmatic (why this unpredictable, sudden, and intense explosion?). Allow me to make a discreet admission of my own perplexity, especially with respect to the years immediately following 1968, faced with a shifting and highly volatile intellectual situation, where certain cases proved to be extremely complicated. This is a troublesome knot for our inquiry, reminding us that the history of thoughts, like history as such, does not follow an unambiguous, calm, and transparent course.
A preliminary question has to be examined: did the year 1968 constitute a break in the reception of Heidegger in France, which was comparable to the break that took place in the political world? Although the series of causes and events were quite different from each other, and although the analogy has to be handled with caution, it remains that the shock of the “events” was such that, in the university as well as in intellectual circles, one must at least raise the question of the pertinence of the relationship—positive or negative—between the rebellious spirit of May and Heideggerian thought. In fact, is there such a thing as a “French Philosophy of the ’60s”?2 And if so, was Heidegger one of its instigators or one of its foils? From one myth to the other, finding one’s bearings is not so easy here.
First myth: May ’68. Taking the time to demystify the myth is not our intention. However, this implies that we ask whether Heidegger’s thinking intervened in any significant sense in the references and the themes of the workers’ and student movements. The answer is obviously negative; but it was only indirectly, due to the sudden onset of the climate of “protest” and of the more or less overt intellectual terrorism, that Heidegger was rejected as a “bourgeois” philosopher, without the question of his “Nazism” intervening in any explicit or specific manner.
Even in this tumultuous climate, Heidegger was not always subjected to accusations or rejections. At the time when a translation of Pöggeler’s important work was published3 and the series of volumes of Questions4 began to appear with Gallimard, a book by a young assistant professor at the University of Nanterre, Jean-Michel Palmier,5 presented a heroic and combative image of Heidegger that was thoroughly Marcusian.6 Without ignoring the gravity of the error of 1933, without attempting to excuse him, without even denying that the language of Sein und Zeit can be discerned in the political proclamations of 1933–347, Palmier intended to resituate these facts and these writings within the properly philosophical horizon of the accomplishment of metaphysics in technology. The question: “was Heidegger a Nazi?” made “no sense” to him.8 Instead, he maintained that Heidegger’s position remained incomprehensible if one did not consider it in the context of Ernst Jünger’s book Der Arbeiter (The Worker), published in 1932, to which Heidegger accorded a great importance, and more generally, in the context of the accomplishment of nihilism proclaimed by Nietzsche. For Palmier, the short sentence from 1953 concerning “the inner truth and greatness of this movement” makes no sense outside of this interpretative horizon. Further, Palmier diligently reconstructed the attacks directed against Heidegger from as early as 1934 by certain Nazi authorities and in particular by Rector Krieck. At the end of the volume, Palmier included the “Rectoral Address” and a few articles. Overall, this book, laudable for its careful documentation and philosophical quality, was generally well received,9 although no one assumed that it had settled the case (which, incidentally, it did not claim to do). François Chatelet praised it as “a courageous enterprise,” while continuing to question the “ideological situation” that allowed such a remarkable German intellectual to be led astray.10
For his part, like almost everyone else, Jean Beaufret found himself out of step with the events. In the midst of May ’68 and apart from the turmoil of the Faculté des Lettres—in a room reserved at the last minute—Beaufret decided to give a talk in Aix-en-Provence on “Heidegger and the Thinking of Decline,”11 far from the preoccupations of the time and leaving his listeners stupefied (as in Nice where the talk was repeated, without disruption, in university facilities). Highly stylized, a partial defense (Heidegger is presented as the sole thinker of our Western destiny), and somewhat polemical (against the “academic establishment”), this text engaged the “entire scope” of metaphysics from the early dawn of Parmenides and Heraclitus to the modern “downfall” in the scientific and technical domination of nature, in order to express in one word—decline—a situation designated by Heidegger first as Verfallen12 and then as Abfall.13 The inauthenticity first attributed to our everyday existence (“distracted” from its more originary condition) was historicized, which is to say placed back into the perspective of its Greek origins: the thinking of being as such. Philosophy pronounced both the opening to the being of beings as well as the withdrawal of the enigma of being. “If metaphysics, then, is declining in its history—let us say, rather, in decline—then we are dealing here with a wonder at which we will first learn to marvel in order to then be able to meditate upon it.”14 Refusing to understand the decline of the West in a purely superficial Spenglerian sense (this refusal also applied to the interpretation of Verfallen as a secularization of the Christian doctrine of original sin), Jean Beaufret (this was his Aubussonian side15!) wove a rich tapestry whose philosophical threads and Heideggerian knots were so dense, so consecrated by the beauty of the writing, that one would almost have to untie every single knot in order to explicate, discuss, and meditate upon it. What a challenge to give such a talk at such a moment! It was the sign of a break. This time, no quarter was given! The man who had devoted twenty years of his talents to the exclusive service of the singular genius of Heidegger no longer made any concessions to current trends. It was as if, having noted that the vast majority of the philosophical public no longer followed him, he told himself: “They no longer want to be either converted or convinced. Let us confuse them!” The discomfort of certain conventional rationalists and Bachelardian colleagues was visible by the end of the lecture. To them, this stylistic exercise seemed mercurial or insane, even though it was so carefully written, so intelligently informed by the loftiest thoughts. One felt that they would have preferred a frankly reactionary presentation in order to have been able to reject it out of hand. Instead they found themselves, like most of the students, utterly flabbergasted. It could not have gone otherwise, since the art of being “untimely” was Beaufret’s style—and not without panache.
As for the Zeitgeist, it was far from clear or unified. An ideological camp cannot be formed in a few days or weeks. Further, although a few leaders or groups shouted Maoist, Trotskyite, or liberal slogans, the immediate benefit of May ’68 was “freedom of speech” in the halls of the Sorbonne, in city squares and many other public places: the buzzing of questions, the ebb and flow of opinions of all types, and indeed, an enjoyable but pointless “anarchy.” “May ’68” was, at first, reduced to a syncretistic mix where militant reactualization of Marx combined with basic demands, anarchist slogans, and the creativity of “imagination in power.” It was only after the party, in the postcoital sadness, that Marcuse was said to have been its leader.
A second “mythologizing” operation can be seen in the severe diagnosis offered by Ferry and Renaut, who—many years later16—produced questionable amalgams of quite different thinkers. For some of them, their relation to May ’68 was negligible or even nonexistent (Derrida’s case is the most obvious one: his complex and patient work of deconstruction started much earlier, was carried on much later, and had, strictly speaking, nothing to do with May ’68. And what can be said of Lacan in this respect?) Nonetheless, it is necessary to examine how the challenge to Heidegger, rightly or wrongly, intervened on this occasion or under this pretext. It was the question of antihumanism (already emphasized by Dufrenne17 in ’68) that provided the polemical guiding thread of Ferry and Renaut’s polemical text, even though it was tied up with many other themes: the end of philosophy, the paradigm of genealogy, the dissolution of the idea of truth, and the historicization of categories.18 We shall return to these different points at the right moment in order to measure “Heidegger’s influence”—which, in our opinion, the text in question largely overestimates.19 Let us for the moment mention the fact that this work dedicated only a single chapter to “French Heideggerianism”20 and was concerned only with Derrida: a double reduction, from the said “Heideggerianism” to the work of Derrida, and from the latter to May ’68. In fact, this late reconstruction of the intellectual landscape of the end of the sixties risked misunderstanding a much more decisive trait of the ideological realities of those years: the diminishing influence of Heidegger in favor of structuralism, of linguistics, and of a renewed Marxism. At the same time, other philosophers displayed their originality and their work: thus Gabriel Marcel reiterated his critiques of Heidegger in 1968, but also his points of agreement in his Entretiens with Paul Ricoeur,21 who would publish the following year, in spite of his own troubles at the university, a first collection of “hermeneutical essays,” one of which stood out as a dense and solidly constructed text on “Heidegger and the Question of the Subject.”22
In this text, Paul Ricoeur advanced and connected two theses: the Heideggerian critique of the cogito does not eliminate all subjectivity; it is “the reverse side of a hermeneutics of the ‘I am.’” This hermeneutic persists throughout his work: the later Heidegger remained faithful, like the early Heidegger, “to the same pattern of a ‘backward relatedness’ from being to man.”23 This hermeneutic unification of Heidegger’s path is highly clarifying, but also has a limitation. It is based on a precise and pertinent analysis of the relationship between Dasein and being in Being and Time: the “destruction” of the cogito, far from implying the renunciation to all self-relation, makes possible the de-substantification of the self and its authentic unfolding.24 Its limitation is perhaps to be found in its very formal skillfulness: by maintaining that “one and the same formulation” organizes the entire Heideggerian path, and by reducing the thought of the later Heidegger to a “philosophy of language” that only displaces the terms of a hermeneutics of the I am, in place from the very beginning, Paul Ricoeur risked being schematic. For if it is true that Heidegger maintained a hermeneutical circularity, it is not enough to say that poetic authenticity now occupies the space previously reserved for freedom-toward-death. The entire questioning of the essence of metaphysics (and the metaphysical status of subjectivity) is thus ignored. Formalizing an analysis that had a certain initial pertinence, Ricoeur reconstituted the unity of the Heideggerian path abstractly, causing it to lose the fragility of its course. The “hermeneutical” operation provided an understanding of Heidegger in terms of a philosophy of reflection. Did this not miss the most critical aspects? One may wonder whether, due to his unwillingness to confront a thinking that he so strongly disliked, Ricoeur did not prefer to recuperate the offending “object” by sterilizing it. This is a question that will have to be posed in the light of other texts, in which, thanks to hermeneutics, the project of restoring metaphysics and morality is explicitly avowed.
More generally, what is in any case incontestable is that the style of the 1960s—in literary as well as in philosophical matters—(in the case of Barthes, for example, but also Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, and Foucault) is absolutely not Heideggerian. As far as the “content” was concerned, to the extent that it could be separated from the style, the issue would have to be discussed on a case by case basis. We have begun, and will continue, this examination. In fact, if Heidegger’s thought is reintroduced into the ideological horizon of the time, it is rather through Marcusian protest—also relayed by Kostas Axelos—against the one-dimensionality of technology and the increasing tyranny of a society of production and consumption on the road to globalization, suffocating the message of thinkers and word of the poets.
A clear sign of Heidegger’s withdrawal—willing or forced—was the extremely discreet and private character of the seminars that Heidegger gave in Provence starting in 1966. One must understand the logic of dissociation (and of a correlative “sectarian” fragmentation) to which these events corresponded. To propose only one reading of them would be reductive.
Why hold seminars in Le Thor, in Provence, during the month of September, on three occasions (1966, 1968, 1969), and under such private conditions? The simplest question to answer is the choice of place, which was closely tied to the occasion: René Char invited Heidegger for a visit and lodged him in Le Thor, at the Hotel du Chasselas, a few kilometers from Char’s small property, Les Busclats, situated in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. The poet and the thinker would meet in the afternoon for conversation and for walks. René Char never involved himself in philosophy;25 he remained an outsider to the seminars (even though the discussion of September 9, 1966, took place in his house, at Les Busclats26).
Before addressing the seminars, we must pause to emphasize the extent to which Heidegger’s repeated visits to the “precious soil of Provence” took on a meaning laden with affective attachments: Char’s friendship, the appreciation of Cézanne, and the admiration for the landscape that was evocative of Greece blended together in the same crucible and formed a precious and rare alloy. Jean Beaufret, who did so much to ensure that there would be an invaluable collegial climate of collaboration and complicity, spoke of the sojourn as follows: “He loved above all the site of the Rebanqué, where a Delphic cliff towered over an olive grove.” He recalled an unforgettable evening at the Grand Camphoux: “Christian and Yvonne Zervos came to join us, led by René Char, while Madame Mathieu, discreetly attentive, reigned over a domain where the gods of Greece were present, as in Heraclitus’ saying.”27
Who had the idea of holding a seminar during Heidegger’s stay? Not René Char, it would seem, but Jean Beaufret. Beaufret obtained Heidegger’s agreement since he himself “managed,” together with the two François (Fédier and Vezin28), “the details,” including the transportation (Fédier had a car and was the Master’s chauffeur, thus sparing him any inconvenience, if not fatigue29).
Heidegger never conceived of a seminar except as organized formally around a theme: there was no question of “having a discussion” around a vague or general theme; rather, the goal was to gather in a most rigorous and academic fashion around the professor to study a text prepared in advance; for each session, a student had the task of writing a “protocol,” which was then reviewed at the beginning of the following session. The professor constantly held the initiative. What distinguished the seminar from a classical lecture is that the Master often paused in order to question his interlocutors, whom he considered not as “partners” but as students whom he even bullied on occasion! This very Germanic method—to which Heidegger added his personal touch—could have become more flexible; after the last war and especially since the end of the 1960s, this was the case in Germany in different ways, but not for Heidegger, who held on to this classical model, which was for him the only serious one. One might have thought a “private” seminar would be an occasion for more equal exchanges and that it would take place in a more “informal” atmosphere, especially in the case where the participants would not all be young students. Kostas Axelos reported30 that he suggested this to the Master, but to no avail. At the beginning of the 1960s, the editorial committee of the journal Arguments would have gladly organized a discreet and friendly round table around Heidegger; the text of the encounter would then have been published in the journal. But the Master did not even take such an exchange into consideration—he would consider only the formal lecture format, which obviously was of no interest to Axelos and his friends.
At Le Thor, the 1966 sessions were not as “structured” as those of 1968 and 1969.31 The German edition indicates that the seminar of 1966 had not been planned as such,32 but was decided upon following conversations that took place during joint excursions. This also explains why Heraclitus would be at the center of these discussions: at the time, Heidegger was preparing the Heraclitus seminar that he would give together with Fink during the winter of 1966–67.33 The “protocol” (which had been composed only after the fact and by only one person, namely Jean Beaufret) was presented as incomplete (having been written on the basis of the participants’ notes) and reported on only three “conversations” bearing primarily on Heraclitus, out of the seven that actually took place. Furthermore, there was no particular text that formed the basis of the study; the first two conversations were said to have dealt with Parmenides and the following five with Heraclitus. Beaufret himself furnished these details at the beginning of his protocol, published ten years later in Questions IV.34
“Upon its poetic cliffs, Le Thor rose up. Mont Ventoux, the mirror of the eagles, towered into view” (FS, 1). This is how Jean Beaufret “set the scene” for the session that took place September 5, 1966, using a citation from René Char, as he would for the other two sessions. It was at once an elegant and clever way to pay homage to Char, who was the “welcoming power,” and to insist on the “proximity” between the poet and the thinker, while easing the strangeness—and unprecedented nature—of this distance. René Char succeeded in maintaining this sovereign autonomy, in perfect accord on this point with Heidegger, who applied the verse from Hölderlin’s Patmos to the relationship between poets and thinkers: “close on mountains most distant.” In fact, the way Heidegger approached Heraclitus was so precise and “technical” that it did not lend itself easily to dialogue with a “non-philosopher,” as intelligent and inspired as Char might have been. In the first session, a commentary on the beginning of fragment I in the Diels-Kranz edition proposed a more “paratactical than syntactical reading.”35 Singling out the genitive eontos, Heidegger saw therein the being of beings, thus bringing Heraclitus into maximal proximity with Parmenides instead of focusing on the singular specificity of his logos or of seeing in it the prefiguration of a quasi-sophistical linguistic game.
The session in Rebanqué, on September 8, 1966, revealed once again the proximity between Parmenides and Heraclitus, but this time on the basis of a reading of fragment II, where the xunon must not be understood as general or generic but rather as a co-belonging, like that of day and night. In contrast to the everyday view (as in Hesiod), which sees nothing but the succession of light and darkness, Heraclitus’s thinking is that of an “unfolding of contraries and grounded in the inapparent character [Unscheinbaren] of logos.”36 This welcoming logos announces, but does not yet engage directly, the dialectical method; nor does it transform being into an object, but attunes thought to it.37
The conversation of September 9, 1966, at Les Busclats, Char’s house “at the edge of lavender fields,”38 almost exclusively concerned the Heraclitean kosmos, with Heidegger attempting to stress its polysemy (at once an ordering, a shining and an ornamentation).39 This protocol was the most elegant, which was characteristic of Jean Beaufret’s style. It was also the most surprising since “the poet” (Char) appeared on the scene to note that “Heraclitus stands among the poets”—a remark that was not of a transcendent originality but that allowed Heidegger to oppose the modern will to domination to the richness of the Greek language in its opening to nature, an openness that is today preserved by poetry. Philosophical thought, for its part, was left to assume the heavy fate of a world that has lost “the site.”40
Were we to venture a critical appraisal of these conversations from 1966, as they were recorded in the French edition,41 two points would have to be established. With respect to Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, the “seminar” teaches the contemporary reader nothing more, indeed even less, than the one held a bit later with Fink, and which was subsequently published. Thus the “scholarly” interest of this seminar is quite limited. The second point is more significant: it concerns the tone and style that reveal the original style of Jean Beaufret, not just in the staging (or the decor) that we have already alluded to (“at the edge of the olive trees” at Rebanqué, “at the edge of the lavender fields” at Les Busclats), but more decisively in the superimpositions (between Heraclitus and Char—or Heidegger himself,42 between Provence and Delphos) that tend to endow, in an almost religious way, the Heraclitean logos with a real presence: “Behind us rests a Delphic mountain range. This is the landscape of Rebanqué. Whoever finds the way there is a guest of the gods. . . . Heraclitus remains near to us.”43
Did the seminar of 1968 have the same characteristics? Held from August 30 to September 8, 1968, this time only in Le Thor,44 it was prepared more carefully, and Heidegger insisted that it had to be a “model seminar.”45 The participants, noticeably more numerous than in 1966,46 did not number more than fifteen: they were selected on the basis of “non-academic”47 criteria (actually, according to the personal preferences of Beaufret and his two “co-organizers”). The text that served as the basis for the work was The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, a work dating from the end of Hegel’s youth (1801), an important but austere and difficult text for a nonspecialist. Heidegger knew, of course, that Beaufret and his friends were not well-versed in German idealism and would not have been able to read the text with ease—it is after all not one of Hegel’s most famous works, not even in Germany. Furthermore, and above all, this choice was unexpected because the Master, who did not search for his most intimate inspirations in Hegelian sources, even thought of himself as Hegel’s “adversary” (Gegner): in the texts dedicated to Hegel, there was always a radical distancing that prevailed in the end, specifically concerning the idealist accomplishment of metaphysics. The last Thor seminar concluded by asserting “the most pointed contradiction to Hegel.”48 How can such a decision be explained? Aiming at a “model seminar,” Heidegger himself evoked his teaching at Marburg, which “aroused criticism”49 because of its slow and deliberate quality, but above all because of its method of reading—which was extraordinarily careful and detailed about a few passages of a major text. It can hardly be doubted that he was somewhat nostalgic for those Marburg years and had sincerely wanted to have his young French friends benefit from this exceptionally authoritative approach (which he himself compared to a “kindergarten”50). All things considered, there was a “doctrinal” reason also at play: Heidegger conceived of the “overcoming” of metaphysics only as the result of an entry into its essential domain: the appropriation of the very heart of metaphysics must uncover the possibility of “another thinking.” Nonetheless, a less apparent motif can be added to these two reasons: the choice of such a difficult and poorly known text—especially when one considers the language barrier—was a sure means of maintaining absolute control of the seminar and of avoiding any “slippages,” in the sense either of digressions or of troubling questions (too contemporary, too politicized).
The philosophical substance of the commentary on the Hegelian text was not negligible, although it was not one of Heidegger’s most unforgettable achievements. A phrase of Hegel’s was at the center of the commentary: “When the power of conjoining vanished from the life of man, and the oppositions lose their living connections and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises.”51 This sentence accounts for the “need of philosophy” that arises from the division [Entzweiung] that causes the loss of the primary and living unity: this Vereinigung cannot be thought as a progressive “unification,” but as the originary unity that is already “an indication of the Absolute.”52 In the following sessions, Heidegger explored in a patient and precise fashion this “need of philosophy” (which must be read as both a subjective and an objective genitive), in order to emphasize what separates the absolute position of self-consciousness (in the sense of Hegelian or Fichtean idealism) from the Greek experience of the One-All. However, starting with the session of September 4th, and especially that of September 5th, the accomplishment of metaphysics (or its “acceptance”) was interpreted from the ontological difference, itself reinterpreted “as difference”:53 Hegel’s text passed into the background and was replaced by a formal lecture, in which the Heideggerian reading of the history of metaphysics was unfolded; Hegel’s text returned to the center stage on September 6 with the remarkable explication of the fundamental statement in which Hegel characterized his dialectical method as “infinite world-intuition” (unendliche Weltanschauung).54 The seminar ended on September 8 in a more heterogeneous fashion, always in a tension between the projects of explicating Hegel’s thought (namely: what is a “speculative proposition”?) and of practicing phenomenology in a radical sense (namely: what does it mean to posit?), and not without a note of dissatisfaction expressed by the Master: “Heidegger makes the observation that the seminar did not go as far as he had wished to take it. This, however, is neither a regret nor a reproach to anyone.”55
In sum, it cannot be denied that Heidegger made a considerable effort (especially considering his age) in these eight sessions, in which he had wanted to apply his method of reading and interpretation in the most rigorous manner and without any concession to fashionable trends (let us emphasize that we were in 1968!) or to any group.56 In this respect, a piece of his advice is worth being mentioned: “What remains essential is to continue along the same path without concern for any of the publicness around us.”57
Did the six sessions in 1969 follow the same model? Yes, as far as the discreet nature of the gathering and the limited number of participants were concerned.58 No, with respect to the methodology: although a classical text was again chosen, it was never discussed! At issue was a precritical text of Kant’s, from 1763, The Sole Possible Basis for a Proof of the Existence of God, and more specifically the first chapter: “Of existence in general.” Heidegger’s choice59 of a text in which the status of Dasein was addressed is perfectly understandable (even if he did not necessarily want to uncover the sense he had given this term in Being and Time, he tried to show the status of existence within classical philosophy, and then in critical philosophy). The reasons for abandoning the method of literal explication that he had vigorously defended the previous year is less obvious. The text of the protocol of September 2, 1969, did specify that “This seminar aims to elucidate Kant’s text indirectly”;60 however, the text was so indirectly clarified that it was completely forgotten! A plausible explanation for this state of affairs was the recognition that leading a “model seminar” in the Marburg method would be difficult with French participants, regardless of their good will. In fact, even when previous questions by Roger Munier concerning the essence of modern technology were inserted, there was still no other theme treated than Heidegger’s own thinking with respect to the destiny of metaphysics since the Greeks. This made things no less interesting. The style became somewhat improvisational, essentially connected to key words from the tradition: hypokeimenon (traditionally translated by “subject”), eidos (“idea”), form, beings, and phenomenon. This terminological summary did nonetheless follow a guiding thread: the Greek meaning of appearance was objectified by modern subjectivity, making possible the reduction of the world to a manipulable and technicized ensemble. Thus, Kant was relevant in the sense that he contributed, starting with his text of 1763, to an understanding of being that determines modern science and its technological unfolding: being as “position”61 (with the added provision that the Critique of Pure Reason subjected this position to the capacities and limits of our understanding). The world would be reduced to what it became for Wittgenstein: “that which falls under a determination, lets itself be established, the determinable” (was der Fall ist),62 “actually an eerie statement,”63 added Heidegger, who thus prepared the group for a meditation on technology understood as Gestell, which, for its part, prefigured the appropriation of Ereignis. Refusing to present the planetary domination of technology as a “negative occurrence,” Heidegger nevertheless concluded with a one-sided account based solely on the fact that “the human is challenged forth to comport himself in correspondence with exploitation and consumption.” This seminar was the only text to present the possible passage to Ereignis as direct and almost mechanical: “The photographical negative of Ereignis is Gestell.” One can wonder whether this metaphorical formulation was genuinely Heideggerian or whether it had not been accepted, after the fact, by an elderly man who lacked the time and the energy to weigh every formulation with the same care as he had earlier. Neither the German nor the French edition mentioned the name of the person responsible for each protocol in 1969. However, the private version of the seminar of 1968 did mention the names of the responsible parties64—useful information that was eliminated in the final edition. Another unusual aspect of these seminars is that they constituted the only texts by Heidegger (at least among those published under his name) that had first been written in French and then translated into German.65 I am not suggesting that their “authenticity” should be questioned. But when it pertains to philosophical thought, and at this level, the slightest nuance matters: it is legitimate to raise the same kinds of questions about pages that do not stem from Heidegger’s own hand—taking appropriate differences into account—about Hegel’s courses and their additions, which were not texts written by the Master himself.
If we take an even more critical perspective with respect to the seminars of Le Thor as a whole, two remarks can be made: one concerns the timeliness, the other the spiritual impact of the seminars. Their confidential, almost clandestine, character cannot be solely explained by the Master’s preferences (he had not always refused to appear before a large public). There were mitigating circumstances behind this “low profile”: we have seen that the climate of the 1960s was no longer as favorable to Heidegger’s thought as it had been; not to mention the years 1968–69, when the very style of a “formal lecture” was called into question. Furthermore, Jean Beaufret’s successful “coups” (Cerisy in 1955, and Aix-en-Provence in 1958) inspired countercoups as well as direct or indirect reactions. Heidegger himself, having weathered many unpleasant episodes, had to have realized that the conditions had changed, that the prior visits to France could not be repeated in the same form. However, to settle for these explanations would be shortsighted: at his age, and given his international reputation, nothing obliged the Master to accept the work and make the effort. He could have easily used the private nature of Char’s invitation to limit himself to walks and conversations or simply to taking it easy. One might consider the Thor seminars repetitive, insufficiently open to real discussion of Heidegger’s presuppositions, and one could certainly find other failings. Can one deny, however, their rigor, their erudite quality, impartiality, and absence of narcissistic complacency (for Heidegger never spoke of himself)? It was clear that he intended this work to be a testament for posterity: he worked less for the participants and less for the short term than for the image of the work of thought he wanted to communicate (he was undoubtedly happy as well to show his compatriots that he was amicably received on the other side of the Rhine). This is also what explains why he allowed his name to be used on texts that he did not himself write.66
It was no small paradox that the Thor seminars—in any case, those of 1968 and 1969—were exclusively dedicated to meditations on the thinking of the Master, at the time when the critique of traditional hierarchies was unleashed in the universities and in the intellectual world. It was no small feat for an older Heidegger to have been able to discreetly “stay the course” and to have done so in France. One had wanted to avoid embarrassing questions and to achieve absolute discretion: the instructions were respected: no “leaks” and no incidents disrupted the sessions. Yet, while these sessions were quietly taking place (as intended and as it should have been), intellectuals were mostly occupied with the many and various repercussions of the events of ’68. Most surprising, however, was the belated appearance, with Deleuze and Guattari67 and with Lyotard,68 of a liberating and “libidinal” philosophy that continued the defiant ardor of the mad days gone by, aiming to give them a theoretical coherence: now that was the “pensée ’68!” Heidegger was absent from the discourse, for the question posed was that not of being, but rather of power—and in terms of desire, affects, or intensities. It was a creative reading of the Nietzschean “Will to Power” that came to fuse the apparatus of displacement of the Marxist and Freudian texts, all the while contesting, in passing, the conception of desire and repression professed by another Master (Heidegger’s “friend”), Jacques Lacan.69
It would be too facile, however, to focus only on those who made the most noise in order to gather a crowd, whatever their talents. I recalled only this in order to underline the great diversity and even the dissemination that characterized the philosophical landscape of these years,70 as soon as one takes the trouble to broaden the horizon, within which the “Heideggerians” remain present although not in dominant way (this is the case, as well, of Michel Serres, an independent spirit, who always remained unaffected by Heidegger’s thought). Another pioneer, Jacques Derrida, whose work developed at the beginning of the 1970s, deserves a more refined consideration than the “all or nothing” practiced by many. A representative of “French Heideggerianism” (according to the authors of La pensée 68, but also to many Americans), he was completely exiled to the wilderness by the “orthodox” Heideggerians (there would never even have been a question, it appears, of inviting him to the Thor seminars).71
I have already indicated that I would not be satisfied with the simple question: was Derrida Heideggerian? Let us recall that he denounced the “complicity” that united the anti-Heideggerians and the repetitive rephrasing of the Heideggerians in the same “refusal to read.”72 He thus seemed to situate himself above the fray, while in fact he was at the center of the liveliest philosophical research, when he published successively three volumes: Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, and Positions.73
Although the title of this chapter alludes to it, Dissemination is, of these three works, the one that deserves the least attention here. The complex topic of that work is to relate the question of “paleonymy” to that of polysemy, to allow the old names to circulate74—including that of the book—in order to displace them toward an “outside-the-book” and an “outside-the-text,” beyond explicit meaning, toward the randomness of numbered information, toward the blank and the outside of the canonic Western text that was woven from Plato to Hegel and that Mallarmé disrupted. Not only is it the case that none of the three texts gathered there75 refers to Heidegger, but the question of the text replaces the question of being, and a writing of dispersion and of the trace disjoins the gathering meditation of Language. The deconstructive work seemed to particularly upset, among other Heideggerian presuppositions, the reappropriation of the truth of being. And yet, various allusions or references to the closure of metaphysics,76 the contestation of truth as presence,77 the discernable fold between adequation and disclosure,78 and the crossing of being,79 all signaled discreetly the grafting of Heideggerian themes. In order to go further and determine more clearly the stakes of the “double game” that Derrida thus put into operation with respect to Heidegger, one should turn above all to Positions, where he accepted the ambiguity of his reading of Heidegger, a reading whose finesse I have already analyzed with respect to the two principal texts collected in Margins.80
The clarifications one finds in Positions do not add anything new, strictly speaking, in comparison to the two concluding pages, of an almost solemn tone, of the famous lecture “Différance”: a recognition of an absolutely essential debt with respect to Heidegger (“What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions”81), as well as a critical reversal and “demarcation” from this decisive advance (a demarcation that concerns the concepts of origin, of fall, but above all of the proper, properness and appropriation82). The terrain of this twofold reading was strategically extended to all textuality but was delimited with and against Heidegger in relation to a “metaphysics” whose “closure” was affirmed while being thought as incessantly mobile and displaceable. With and against Heidegger: Derrida was thus on the razor’s edge; he knew that the equilibrium between the “for and against” was infinitely difficult to maintain, and he understood better than anyone else that the only way to resolve this aporetic situation was to advance, that is to say, to balance the “for and against,” not under the pressure of circumstances, but rather through the patient deconstruction of the key concepts of metaphysics, and of the Heideggerian text. No serious philosopher can doubt that the word “deconstruction” is undisputedly Heideggerian, since it translates the Abbau of metaphysics, even if the stakes of this translation are still debated and remain debatable. As we have just seen, in pursuing the project of deconstruction, Derrida remained to a large extent bound up in the network of Heideggerian presuppositions, and he admitted this himself.83 What is less clear, however, is the extent to which he distanced himself from the letter of the Heideggerian texts. Although this uncertainty is not surprising (since, as we have seen, the nature of the criticism is modified by the questioning), it is increased by Derrida’s style, which is not content to oppose “thesis to thesis,” but prefers to put deconstructive practice into play through a writing that multiplies “audacities” and modes of intervention (one sees in particular this textual proliferation at work in the opening text of Margins, “Tympan”). Far from attempting to stabilize these shifting frontiers, Derrida already gives the impression of doing his utmost to blur the fragile boundaries even further. Not placing any principled limit on a general interrogation (which is as wide-ranging in its references as in its modes of inscription), his enterprise, on the one hand, can appear more Heideggerian than Heidegger’s own work (since the issue is one of contesting, even more radically, the economy and hierarchy of onto-theology), and on the other hand, can seem a radical challenge, whose laughter and dance recall Zarathustra, in order to derail any path to the Proper.84 The very formulation of this reversal against Heidegger is not conclusive: “I sometimes have the feeling that the Heideggerian problematic is the most ‘profound’ and ‘powerful’ defense of what I attempt to put into question under the rubric of the thought of presence.”85
A feeling can change; it can be reversed. In any case, deconstruction is an infinite task, increasingly exposed to the undecidable. With respect to the magisterial element in Heidegger’s discourse, we thus witness displacements that are tantamount, of their own admission, to borrowings, deviations, or appropriations, thus contesting any doctrinal understanding of Heidegger in terms of “revelation.” It was thus also the Lacanian reading that finds itself challenged: Derrida literally purloined the “purloined letter.”86
Mines had thus been laid throughout the terrain of deconstruction. Some would not detonate until much later. For the moment, in the middle of the 1970s, the confrontations concerning Heidegger would be more clear-cut. With the sufficient hindsight that we have today, the examination of the chronology leaves no room for doubt: the publication in 1973–74 of Jean Beaufret’s three volumes of his Dialogue avec Heidegger was followed in 1975 by an aggressive anti-Heideggerian offensive by Pierre Bourdieu, which seemed to be a strategic reply to Beaufret’s advocacy. Of course, Bourdieu’s enterprise did not present itself as such: it would be, let us be plain, difficult to “refute” Beaufret on his terrain (the history of philosophy). In ideological matters, as elsewhere, modern warfare demands mobility.
How did Jean Beaufret, who never ceased his patient work despite the difficulties,87 regain the initiative?88 His friend Kostas Axelos had pressured him for a long time to publish a collection of texts in Axelos’s series Arguments at Éditions de Minuit, supplemented perhaps by new material. This detail about the publisher is not without import: the publisher in question was also Bourdieu’s publisher. With a “leftist” reputation, this publisher offered Beaufret an almost ideal support to “clear” Heidegger of all remaining suspicion. However, this was obviously not the main purpose of Dialogue avec Heidegger, and it would be regrettable if one reduced the purpose of this work to these circumstantial facts. Let us say that without being hasty (for that would be out of character for him), Beaufret managed to seize this opportunity so as to bear witness to the philosophical work accomplished over almost thirty years with Heidegger and his school.
This accomplishment turned out to be a considerable one. The three volumes89 cover all of philosophy: the first, dedicated to Greek thought, contains two previously unpublished texts, a “Note on Plato and Aristotle” and a detailed analysis of the Latin translation of the key Aristotelian word energeia; the second covers the path from Christian philosophy (principally medieval) to Nietzsche, with patient and knowledgeable sections on Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. It was only in the third volume that Beaufret addressed Heidegger himself, insisting on the fact that his thought is not a new “thesis” about being, but an unprecedented and irreplaceable listening to the unsaid of the entire Western metaphysical tradition: the question of being in its forgotten truth.
His former students and auditors found in these volumes—alas, without the gentle and slow rhythm of his voice—the inimitable conjunction of two great pedagogical qualities: a reliable and precise knowledge of the fundamental texts, and a disconcerting talent for distinguishing and confronting the texts casually and at times carelessly (though always with a very firm command of the French language). One will not be surprised to find out that the weft of this meticulous weave was the Heideggerian reading of metaphysics (which was above all legible in the interpretations of Descartes and of Nietzsche). But what is most surprising for the unprepared reader is that the most specifically Heideggerian themes were not obvious until the third volume, and even then only by way of a rereading of the monumental history of philosophy. This was not an accident. Beaufret’s motivation was not merely a defense and illustration of Heidegger’s oeuvre; this first task was inseparable according to Beaufret from the reappropriation of the philosophical tradition. Beaufret, the philosophy teacher, rediscovered the essence of philosophy thanks to the ideal professor: Heidegger. This is why he minimized or even objected to the theme of an “overcoming of metaphysics,”90 in favor of the inverse: the wonder before the presence and the exaltation of a thinking resituated in its abode, thanks to the openness to the secret of being and the listening to the legacy of the tradition.91
Nothing in this paragon of philosophical sobriety and didactic care would seem to incite fierce and hostile reactions. Alain Renaut, still a Heideggerian at the time, noted both his admiration and his reservations, particularly concerning Beaufret’s “pessimist lyricism” and his way of settling “certain accounts.”92 Indeed, as always with Beaufret, the seriousness of “the thing itself” is not without irony. The best example thereof is the conclusion of his preface: his letter to Heidegger, which takes up the theme of the thoughtful dialogue between Germany and France since Leibniz, and ends on La Fontaine’s little known fable, The Serpent and the File. The last verses were directed at the superficial minds who dared criticize Heidegger too quickly:
Your teeth will leave their marks
Upon the deathless works you criticise?
Fie! fie! fie! men!
To you they’re brass—they’re steel—they’re diamond!
The ending is admirable. But one can guess that it was not to everybody’s taste among intellectuals in Paris and within the university. What must have been irritating was precisely that this manner of lecturing, always at the highest level, with great flair and without jargon, expressed open contempt toward anything ideological or coming from the university, and with no consideration whatsoever for the champions of the “social sciences.” In a certain sense, Beaufret reached his goal effectively: stinging his adversaries, with a very Nietzschean bite. But was it necessary to put Heidegger so high on a pedestal? A more measured defense would certainly have been better received. But those who knew Beaufret well could not doubt his sincerity for an instant: it was at once his strength and his Achilles’ heel. He never sacrificed this sincerity for the sake of efficacy. Furthermore, he would have been hard pressed to introduce criticisms against Heidegger that he did not agree with merely in order to “provide a balanced view.” One can apply Heidegger’s “confession” to Beaufret: “When you are able to see my limits, you will have understood me. I cannot see them.”93
These were the limits that Gérard Granel sketched out, for his part, with his singular writing talent.94 Going back to the heart of Sein und Zeit, he emphasized the difficulties with great finesse, but did not offer the reader simple and straight “access”: the absolute singularity of Heidegger’s thought is its “unapparent” relation to metaphysics (freed from it and entirely turned toward it95); his rediscovery of the world is a (non-)description that forms a circle with the description of Dasein. One must enter into the withdrawal of this radical transcendence while grasping its differentiated unity, which constitutes the fecundity of finitude.96 Neither empirical, nor psychological, nor transcendental, this Heideggerian phenomenology is ontological in a completely new sense, which is no longer metaphysical, and which constitutes—in its “earth shaking quality”97 and its untimeliness—a “scandal for our time.”98
Is this “introduction” to Heidegger in the form of a learned manifesto really to be taken as pedagogical in nature? One can have one’s doubts, since it did not hesitate to play on and exacerbate the semantical and methodological aporias of the Master. While in no way imitating Beaufret, Granel shared with him an immense admiration for Heidegger and the taste for challenging, under his banner, the vain group of pedantic academics. Is it then surprising that the academics censured, in turn, a singularity that had wanted to be so provocative?
Heidegger’s destiny was to provoke hostility as well as adulation. Things could have certainly been different if he had not made the “great blunder” of 1933. However, even his political involvement, its assumptions and implications, were subjected to successive waves of critiques, which were only repeated in part, and in fact reinforced each other.99 Even before Bourdieu’s scathing critique, Jean-Pierre Cotten published a short book in 1974, called Heidegger, in the excellent series Écrivains de toujours.100 Well-written and beautifully illustrated, this book attempted to do justice to the internal coherence of the work and to subject it to a vigilant critique. This critique was guided by a Freudian and above all a Marxist perspective. The issue was to show that Heidegger, without being a Nazi or even “a reactionary,” shielded himself from the sociohistorical reality by way of denial: “Heidegger is sequestered in a certain library.”101 This was an eminently peremptory expression that illustrated the ambiguity of this little book: not clearly distinguishing introduction from critique, it carried out—under the appearance of an introduction to an oeuvre—a veritable project of demolition! Reducing the existential analytic in Sein und Zeit to a preanalytical anthropology,102 he acknowledged that Heidegger, “in his own way,” conceived of the development of power-knowledge in terms of technicism and positivism, but without extricating himself from the “final phase of imperialism” and from “its denial.”103 This essay, which certainly meant to avoid being reductive in a mechanistic sense, left one perplexed.104 Although the author’s attempt at a critical explication is undeniable, his readings of Heidegger turned out to be superficial, and his own assumptions were not made explicit. In such a limited space, he proposed to do either too much or too little.
Levinas pursued his questioning of Heidegger’s thinking from what was obviously a completely different perspective when he published Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence the same year.105 This book was neither explicitly nor principally devoted to the Master of Freiburg, who is hardly ever mentioned106 (he was certainly less in question in this text than in Totality and Infinity). Nonetheless, an informed reader would not have missed the extent to which a quite personal and intense debate with Heidegger’s thinking was being pursued. The very title indicates that thought, which is responsible in the face of the infinity of the other, goes beyond ontology and even beyond the ontological difference. To the latter, Levinas opposed the more originary alterity of infinite subjectivity. This “exception” disrupts all ontological conjunction,107 transgresses the obsession of the anonymous il y a [there is] (a Heideggerian theme)108 so as to rediscover the sense of justice and the absolute transcendence of God as “not contaminated”109 by being. Levinas turned Heidegger’s weapons against himself, even more radically than in Totality and Infinity: the search for an origin inscribed at the heart of existence, the non-ontical character of transcendence, the concern for Difference assumed in the verbality of the “saying” at the limits of the unsayable.
The attack launched by Pierre Bourdieu in 1975, entitled “Heidegger: un professeur ordinaire” [Heidegger: an ordinary professor],110 entailed a new and interesting dimension. It did not concentrate on the facts that testified to Heidegger’s political involvement with the Nazis, but introduced the interpretative perspective on the inscription of his professorial discourse in the sociopolitical conditions of his milieu, of his country, and of his epoch. The irony of reducing the great Master to an “ordinary professor” played on the German term Ordinarius, a term generally reserved—contrary to what one might expect—not for teachers of a modest rank, but on the contrary for university professors occupying a chair. Bourdieu’s essay presented its goal at the outset: to reveal—beneath the mask of a great philosopher, by way of a critical analysis of his “professorial” discourse—a skillful operator, representing a certain class and dated interests. This “act” of social research was also a militant text: after being ground in the mill of its pitiless denunciation, not much remained of the “greatness” or even of the originality of Heidegger’s thinking. One might use the explicitly polemical and even reductive character of this essay as an excuse to ignore it. This would be to misunderstand the work that it represents, and the skillful passion that it involves (an involuntary homage to his ideological adversary?), not to mention the influence that it would exercise on the subsequent reception of Heidegger’s work in France.
We have noted the minute and detailed quality of this long essay, which attempted to combine, as one might expect, an “external” and overtly reductionist reading (sociohistorical as well as ideological) with an “internal” reading that claimed to be familiar with the latest refinements of the “self-interpretation” of the Master (in particular, the distinction between “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II,” which became canonical after Richardson’s book111) as well as with the most subtle virtuosities of the clarifications and puns of the thinker. The issue was one of demystifying, by way of “effects” and of “discursive strategies” (terms dear to Bourdieu) the distinguished status granted to Heidegger for many decades112 in the French ideological field, and of unmasking in the work itself “the corrections, rectifications, clarifications, and refutations through which the author defends his public image against criticism—in particular politically based criticism—or, worse, against all forms of reduction to a common identity.”113
The goal of this corrosive text was twofold: to give an exemplary illustration of the critique of literary work, broadly conceived (as developed in that issue of the Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales) and to liquidate the “Heidegger myth” in the French philosophico-ideological field (in this respect, the irony was scathing and willingly feigned familiarity to attack the Heideggerian hagiography and even—in less acceptable fashion—attack the friendship between Beaufret and Heidegger).114
To what extent did Bourdieu achieve, exceed, or miss his goal of attempting to unmask the Heideggerian “double-game” between ontology and politics, the occultation of the latter to the benefit of the former (always wrapped up in a “linguistic alchemy”)? We will refrain, here as elsewhere, from attempting to offer a sort of Last Judgment on the issue. We shall simply limit ourselves to giving the reader a few elements of a critical appreciation of the debate that ensued.
In relation to a brutal “sociologism,” and even a first-rate Marxist reading, this essay was interesting in that it combined the contributions of Freudianism (censorship, denial, sublimation) with a linguistic analysis of the “euphemistic” and “formal” style of professorial discourse. It extended and broadened Löwith’s criticisms and Faye’s research beyond the relatively limited question of Heidegger’s political involvement in 1933–34. One can ask, however, if it really went farther than the aforementioned authors in the denunciation of the ambiguities of Heidegger’s language and of its contaminations by (or with) the “conservative-revolutionary” discourse. In fact, Bourdieu’s essay was more heterogeneous and itself more ambiguous than it may appear at first glance: heterogeneous (between an appropriation of the sociolinguistic critique of the völkisch ideology of the 1930s115 and a theoretical inquiry—peremptory if not pretentious—concerning the symbolic strategies of literary work, related to the social conditions of its production116); and ambiguous, for it masked—to a large extent but not entirely—its ambivalence between a critical discourse of pure scientific research (praising, with some affectation, scientific reason,117 and claiming to be in possession of the sociological “truth” of the processes that it analyzed118—a truth that can be found only in “the academic fraction of that class”119) and the militant passion that led to Jdanovian denunciations, and almost to insults, aimed at the all-too famous “professor ordinarius.”120
Hence, if it is undeniable that Bourdieu’s work calls for a reflection on Heidegger’s language and on its relation to the historico-social conditions of its production, it also sheds some light, despite itself, on Bourdieu himself, on his militancy, his style of “righting wrongs,” and his resolutely reductionist approach. To what understanding of Heideggerian philosophy does Bourdieu’s critique of the critique of reductionism lead? It leads to a degree zero that is in fact assumed as such. I can easily concede that the “haughty philosophical tone” invites questioning and critique, especially in the context of the sociohistorical conditions of Hitlerian and post-Hitlerian Germany. But Bourdieu goes much farther and even too far when—transforming his critical analysis into an inquisition, and bordering on intellectual terrorism (every “distinction” becoming suspect, even Rilke is not spared121)—he disputes the autonomy and pertinence of the questions that Heidegger poses concerning the forgetting of being, the essence of truth, temporality, and so on. What remains of this thought? “Verbal incantations!”122 Is Heidegger really a guru calling his disciples to repeat his formulations without understanding them? He instead asks his disciples to put his formulations into question and to think them through. These invitations are merely rhetoric for Bourdieu, a smokescreen that served to maintain a dominant academic, and even sacred, position. Finally, for Bourdieu Heidegger was just a sordid trickster. One almost expects the revelation of a connection to some sort of mafia. In belittling his ideological adversary to this extent, does not the attacker belittle himself? At the risk of reintroducing a “distinction” that would incur Bourdieu’s ire: should we not here distinguish the point of view of the servant from that of his master?
Just a few months after this virulent attack, discord would be prevalent in a Heidegger “camp” that was already quite divided. In fact, a personal break had already taken place earlier, between Roger Munier and Jean Beaufret, albeit discreetly. After the last “private” seminar held in early September 1973 at Freiburg,123 Munier addressed a letter to the Master drawing his attention “to the fact that the closed circle where Beaufret and his friends had enclosed him risked depriving him of contact with other French Heideggerians who resented this monopoly, notably Birault.”124 Beaufret, who was informed of this by Heidegger himself, did not forgive Munier, who would take the initiative again in 1976.
The publication of Questions IV125 instigated a heated polemic, of a somewhat private nature, in any case not carried out in public. Taking the unprecedented form of a letter addressed to Heidegger himself in March 1976 (two months before his death) from “numerous French readers and translators,”126 the polemic concerned a certain number of key translations of essays, lectures, and speeches gathered in this volume—decisive texts of the later Heidegger.127 “Surprised and indignant,” the signatories to the letter claimed a “mass of mistakes and sloppiness,” and then concentrated their critiques on “key terms.”
Given the technical nature of the debate, we shall limit ourselves here to three significant expressions, Die Unverborgenheit, Zur Sache des Denkens, and the Schritt zurück, translated respectively as l’Ouvert sans retrait [The Open without withdrawal],128 Droit à la question [Straight to the question],129 and le pas qui rétrocède [The step back].130 All these translations resulted from Beaufret’s “inventions,” and one must admit that they worked better orally than in writing. In the first case, the literal translation would be décèlement [unconcealment] or désabritement [uncoveredness]; for the second, contribution à l’affaire de la pensée [contribution to the task of thinking]; for the third, le pas de recul [the step back]. The uninformed would be completely fooled.
In fact, what accounted for the strong reaction of the signatories was less the intention (nonetheless proclaimed and indeed legitimate in principle) to correct errors or mistakes than a complete rejection of the “spirit” of the translations in question: a somewhat baroque quality and a certain linguistic license (thus la traque [the hunt] for Nachstellen, and saisonnement du temps [seasons of time] for Die Zeitigung der Zeit). At the same time, the end of the letter formulated an opposition, now personal, against those “who are currently in charge of the complete translation of Sein und Zeit and the first volume of the Gesamtausgabe.” One could not have more clearly accused Jean Beaufret, François Fédier, and François Vezin of taking the heritage hostage, by referring to the essential stakes of the protest: the translation—still unfinished—of the magnum opus of 1927 and, in the long term, of the announced Collected Works.
Did the signatories really expect the Master to give a formal response? Even if his impending death could not have been anticipated, the fact of his age and of his close relationship with Beaufret made such a response highly improbable.131 However, this letter took on the meaning of a declaration of war against the enemy “camp” and wanted to make a point to the supreme authority, Heidegger himself (but also, and above all, to his French publisher Gallimard, to whom the letter had also been sent).
It is not hard to imagine to what extent the “accused” could have been outraged. At the time, there was no direct response,132 and even less when the Master’s sudden death came, the 26th of May 1976. A schism was thus consummated between the “faithful” around Beaufret and the “critical Heideggerians.”133 But the truce brought about by the period of mourning suspended the polemic, which would only return and turn bitter in the course of the following years.
The attentive reader will have no doubt noticed that my name is mentioned among the participants present “for a day or two” at the second seminar of Le Thor, in 1968. In fact, things happened as follows: I found out about this seminar only at the last minute, two or three days beforehand, at a time when I had expected to be leaving for Corsica with friends. I confess not having appreciated this late notice, given that the text chosen was none other than Hegel’s Differenzschrift. Hegel was the author I was working on in my main thesis. Since I was the sole “Hegelian” in Beaufret’s circle of friends and students, should I not have been notified early enough to be able to study the text carefully? Did the quality of the seminar not demand such preparation from the participants? Had they neglected to inform me or had they deliberately delayed notifying me? I never found out. In any case, I must admit that I was unhappy, and I almost stayed away from the seminar. But they had after all notified me, and I knew that this was a “privilege.” I had already missed the 1966 seminar, but that was not my doing: if I remember correctly, I had found out about the seminar only after the fact by way of a postcard, incidentally a very kind one, signed by Jean Beaufret, Heidegger, and the two François.
Returning to the end of August 1968 and to my dilemma: “Should I go or should I not go?” As a good Norman (at least half-Norman, and this fact is the perfect Norman logic), I chose the conciliatory solution; I would spend a few days in Corsica as planned, but would return sooner than planned by plane, to participate on the last day of Heidegger’s seminar. This delay allowed me to read the text thoroughly—a precaution that turned out to be unnecessary (as one will see).
The morning of September 8, 1968, I attended the last seminar session. Under the shadow of a tall tree, around a long rectangular table, a dozen participants were seated and were taking notes. Heidegger sat at the end of the table at my left; he seemed tired and had a blanket on his knees. His interlocutors were Beaufret, Fédier, and Granel (who recorded the protocol). The other participants were silent and seemed intimidated. The Master seemed dissatisfied by the pace and the quality of the exchanges. Nothing of what I heard was extraordinary: every experienced reader of Hegel knows that it is not sufficient to reflect on the Absolute for it is the latter that reflects itself in us. But how? Not in an enclosure, but according to the modern sense of representation. What does it mean to represent? I think: the Louvre is in Paris. For us, at this moment, this is a “representation.” Where is it? . . . Granel’s protocol did not conceal that the Master was irritated by how we were floundering: “Everyone was surprised to be so lost in the discussion. It was a long and beneficial wandering.” I thought to myself that it had been unnecessary to read the Differenzschrift so thoroughly, for the Master stated: “the phenomenological exercise is more important than the reading of Hegel.” As far as Aufhebung was concerned, we dwelled on its negative sense, which is not surprising. The seminar ended with the explication of the speculative proposition: “God is being itself,” where the predicate can also become subject, but not according to a merely mechanical reversal. There were many clarifications, certainly pertinent, but which would only disappoint someone seeking “discoveries.” Granel nonetheless concluded his protocol with panache: “The session ended on the silence created by the winds of speculation, with each person content and exhausted.” I remember above all the silence—and the feeling of Heidegger’s unhappiness (or fatigue). But perhaps I was mistaken.
In the afternoon we were allowed to rejoin the group at Char’s house, where we were quite welcome. Heidegger did not say very much. Char, on the other hand, proclaimed in his strong voice: “Poetry is without walls.” There was a general accord. The surrounding youth took notes or maintained an admiring silence. Shortly after, Heidegger left, driven away faithfully as ever by François Fédier.
Had I made the right decision to attend? Should I have taken part in the whole seminar? It is not clear. Having always thought that the anecdotal should be subordinated to what is essential in matters of thought (a Heideggerian position, incidentally), I did not dwell on this perplexity.
Let us go back a few months earlier, to the famously merry month of May 1968. I alluded to the audience’s lack of understanding on the occasion of Beaufret’s lecture on “Heidegger and the Thinking of Decline.” These memories must be analyzed further: the public can be excused; they could not understand because they were not expected to understand! When I reread this lecture, it became clear to me that Beaufret did everything he could to encrypt his theme; the brilliant style of presentation was not able to mask an esoteric bent, punctuated as it was with polemical allusions. This style was not new, but it was more accentuated. Why? At the time, I did not know the whole story: I knew almost nothing of the “Beaufret affair”; I only heard from afar of the discussions (often turning bitter) that Jean deemed necessary in order to defend Heidegger. A little later, two years away from retirement, he applied to the University of Aix for a position as chargé d’enseignement: he was entitled to do so, having been on the list of those who were qualified, which was then called the liste large. Professor Granger resolutely and successfully opposed his candidacy (which was supported, on the other hand, by Gérard Lebrun), not because of personal hostility but due to philosophical and ideological reasons (he did not realize that it would have been better to be open-minded, and to have offered Jean Beaufret a dignified and entirely reasonable, time-limited, end to his career). Beaufret did not take this failure well (even though it was highly predictable): he had the impression (evidently mistaken) that there was universal malice toward Heidegger and him. He developed what one would have to call a sort of persecution complex that would only intensify in the last years of his life.
Of course, I—1,000 kilometers away—did what I could to combat this isolation: in 1972–73, if I remember correctly, I managed to have Beaufret invited to my university to give a few classes on Merleau-Ponty (the Phenomenology of Perception was on the reading list for the Agrégation). But I could not do more than this, for my new and highly eminent colleague Éric Weil, with whom I had good relations despite our philosophical differences, could not keep himself from making a horrible grimace upon hearing the name Heidegger. In any case, for Beaufret, the merciless age limit for retirement would soon fall like an axe.
In 1974–75, my distance from this situation was only greater since I spent an academic year in the United States, in Pennsylvania. This helped put things in context: I realized that the French polemics must be put into perspective, since serious and friendly students, at a university where the philosophy department was largely “continental” and phenomenological in orientation, were requesting a methodical study of Heidegger’s texts (an author who was considered a classic on par with Husserl or Hegel).
On my return, after a summer of “reacclimating,” I eagerly awaited the publication of Questions IV announced by Jean Beaufret, but—alas!—once again the all-too-French polemic continued, first with the publication of Bourdieu’s essay in the fall, and second, with the unrest surrounding Questions IV barely two months later.
Reading Bourdieu obviously had an effect on me, but I cannot say that I was profoundly impressed: surprised by the effort at documentation and almost taken by a certain insolent tone, I found this essay nonetheless a terribly reductive sociological approach that barely concealed its hostility toward everything that questioned its neo-Marxist and positivist assumptions. Despite the alacrity of style, the goal was to flatten and ideologically “liquidate” Heideggerian discourse. At the time, it did not escape my attention that this operation could succeed and that it could even ravage the young left-wing intellectuals (the terrain that Axelos and Palmier had covered). But—out of laziness or indifference to these power issues?—I did not feel like responding (this was undoubtedly a mistake).
As far as Questions IV were concerned, I was completely perplexed and in a quandary. On the one hand, with Michel Haar, I found that more prudent and more literal translations would have better rendered Heidegger’s thought—certainly better than a mannered style whose strengths and weaknesses had the disadvantage of erecting a barrier to the German instead of facilitating access. On the other hand, I still respected and admired Beaufret’s offhand approach, which could be questioned but which was never mediocre. Further, I found that my personal relation with Jean prevented me from joining the detractors, whose tone, on closer examination, was extremely severe. Was I wrong? Would it not have been preferable—in a complicated field where divisions into “camps” and where personal animosity risked compromising all understanding, all collaboration—to undertake a patient dialogue concerning true difficulties of translation? I thought then and I still think now that jargon could be avoided, as shown by André Préau’s success (which was commended by Heidegger himself in my presence). I myself participated in a patient and faithful collaborative translation with Beaufret, on a brief text, Hegel and the Greeks, published in Questions II, in 1968.
Going back to the affair of Questions IV, I must alas acknowledge my helplessness. I could not prevent a schism that took on an almost fatal character. No longer living in Paris, I could no longer participate in the debate with the accusers. In any case, they were so “vehement” that it would have been very difficult to convince them to be more moderate in their approach. But I knew from experience how outraged Jean would be at this method (the appeal to the Master was the most severe blow that one could have delivered) and how his position would harden. Most certainly, “the business of thinking” was not and is still not free of passion!