Heidegger passed away in his sleep, the morning of May 26, 1976. He was buried in his birthplace, Messkirch, in a special ceremony that he had carefully organized with his friend Bernhard Welte, the Catholic priest who delivered the homily in the cemetery’s chapel. Before the open grave, Hermann Heidegger read the prayer, Our Father, followed by excerpts from Hölderlin’s poetry.1 The tombstone is adorned with a small star, however, and not a cross.
Without making any reference to these ritual nuances, Beaufret, who was present at the ceremony with Fédier and Vezin, would remember Heidegger in the following terms, in the sober obituary notice published in La Quinzaine littéraire: “Such was, apart from all honors, the private ceremony, which gathered around him those who accompanied him that spring to his last abode where he rests in his country close to his kin.”2
The event did not make it into the newspaper headlines nor the television news, but was nonetheless the subject of an important dispatch from the Agence France-Presse,3 which was released in the media and received a “headline” on the front page of Le Monde on May 28, 1976.4 It thus did not go unnoticed, in contrast to the silence that had surrounded Husserl’s death forty years earlier. In the meantime, the cultural and social status of philosophy had changed: the public had heard of existentialism, most of all because of the political debates that it had incited. Of course Heidegger’s name was constantly implicated in these debates, as well as in their existential and political stakes.
Yet, at the end of the spring of 1976, the climate was less volatile.5 There was an attempt to take a step back and to pay homage to the thinker (“the greatest philosopher of our times,” according to Jean Lacroix),6 although it was more difficult to do justice to the man whose complex personality was still a mystery. The allusion to the involvement of 1933 in Le Monde was discreet and measured.7 Clearly, it was a reflective moment, and this was no doubt the reason why Le Monde published an article by the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton, entitled “A Peace That Emanates from a Long Rest of Being,” in which he used his picturesque8 memories of his visit to Freiburg to salute Heidegger as a spiritual master. In the same issue of Le Monde, the longest article was by Jean-Michel Palmier,9 which was an undeniable effort to do justice to the thinker, and to the richness of his oeuvre, without becoming a mere defense. Certainly at the time it was unimaginable that the political polemic would return with the same intensity, as there had already been so many developments. It was thought that everything about the involvement of 1933–34, its effects and implications, had been well-known. There was greater interest in the news of the monumental Gesamtausgabe, prepared by the Master during the last years of his life. This interest accentuated the profound significance of the passing of a philosophical giant. It was also in these terms that he was saluted in Les Nouvelles littéraires in a dossier entitled “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Thinker,” in which the moving testimony of the young philosopher Henri Mongis10 stood out. There was also a vibrant tribute on France-Culture radio.11
One must nonetheless nuance this quasi-universal expression of appreciation. On the one hand, an event willed by Heidegger himself followed his death, namely, the publication, on May 31, 1976, in the weekly Der Spiegel, of a conversation held ten years earlier between the philosopher and the magazine’s director. Although the highly awaited clarification of his political involvement was not immediately translated into French, it was said to be ambiguous. Produced fairly rapidly, the French translation appeared in March 1977.12 It was received with interest but without much excitement: a general relief was felt as Heidegger finally emerged from his silence—albeit postmortem—and refuted some accusations,13 but also there was also a disappointment as his personal self-justification seemed to blind him to the intrinsic perversity of the National Socialist movement (the specificity of which he continued to dilute in the global movement of planetary technological nihilism).
However, while the disappearance of a great figure deserves respect and circumspection as well as an analysis of an entire oeuvre, it would be naïve to think that Heidegger would experience a transfiguration—all things being equal—comparable to the apotheoses of Roman emperors! One must know how to differentiate silence and reticence.
Thus, if one takes the trouble to compare the way in which the main French philosophical journals reported Heidegger’s death, one notices a surprising contrast between restraint or discretion on the part of some (the majority)14 and cautious homage on the part of others.15 Among the latter, only one text stands out, the truly affectionate “In Memoriam,” in which Pierre Aubenque skillfully wove personal memories and substantive appreciation. Confessing his “painful and deep conviction that one of History’s few great thinkers in history had passed,”16 Aubenque recalled Hannah Arendt’s observation: the initial shock of Heidegger’s teaching was due to an unprecedented combination of a return to the “things themselves” with a renewed attention to the fundamental texts of the metaphysical tradition. Emphasizing the extraordinary exegetical contribution made by Heidegger’s interpretations, Aubenque criticized the caricatures often given of the Master: “The grotesque image of a pompous and presumptuous thinker—a sublimated hypostasis of an oppressive society—is the view of Heidegger promulgated by the Frankfurt school.”17 Nonetheless, he also distanced himself from the French Heideggerians, from a few translators18 as well as from—without naming him—Jean Beaufret (concerning the connection between Heidegger and neo-Platonism19). Sensitive to the complexity of the famous “turn,” which seemed to produce a shift from fundamental ontology to the “overcoming” of metaphysics (he saw it more as a slight shift than as a complete reversal), Aubenque concluded this careful and measured essay in an unexpected fashion, that is to say, in an apologetic mode concerning the political question. Vigorously opposing Bourdieu,20 he defended Heidegger by recalling the circumstances and reasons for his acceptance of the rectorship, namely, his assumption of the responsibility for a university aware of its mission: “He wanted to reaffirm its necessary autonomy by opening it onto the outside world. Who, today, would reproach him for this?”21 Falsely naïve, this question stands out at the conclusion of this talented and captivating essay by the great Aristotle scholar, and it was thus important to note its significance.
A few months after his death, the Magazine littéraire published a special issue dedicated to the philosopher. The editors’ desire for balance was obvious. In the introductory note, one reads the following question: “Was Heidegger’s philosophy intrinsically a Nazi philosophy?,” but this was immediately counterbalanced by the recognition of his “incomparable language” and by the fact that he opened new perspectives for “thinking outside the domain of economic production.”22
Whereas Jean-Paul Dollé hailed Heidegger as a “messenger” [passeur] who came to poetry through metaphysics, Jean-Marie Benoist was more critical. Recalling the more compromising declarations of 1933, he drew a comparison to the bloodstains on Lady Macbeth’s hands, probably unaware of the extent to which this assertion would be proven right: “Periodically, the French intelligentsia was occupied with washing Heidegger’s brown shirt.”23 He wanted to give this polemical statement a philosophical scope: referring to the critical works by Faye, Bourdieu, Bollack, and Derrida, he gave the last word to the latter in order to challenge the return in Heidegger’s work of “the great shadow of Unity and of a totalizing and totalitarian discourse.”24 In a less obvious way, he praised Beaufret sarcastically: “Heidegger’s ontology carries out definitively—Beaufret was not mistaken in this—a triumph of Parmenidean ontology over the decorative ruins of a Platonism that had been shaken in order to be better invested with being.”25 Opening genuinely new pathways: Heidegger thus failed in this difficult task, which he barely glimpsed, a task that must now be undertaken by interweaving texts and discourses, apart from any tyranny of unity.
Whereas other articles gave a precise account of the relations between Heidegger and the philosophies of Nietzsche, Marx, and Sartre,26 the most notable contribution was a brief conversation with the expert of German literature Robert Minder.27 While confirming his earlier severe criticisms (above all concerning the “interpretation” of Johann Peter Hebel), he situated Heidegger politically in the wake of the nationalist conservative agrarian Friedrich Naumann, and linguistically (due to the “taste for assonance”) in the heritage of Wagner. In sum, he did not deny Heidegger’s originality, but deemed it to be less significant than what was thought in France. Particularly, he found Heidegger’s approach to the poets rather limited (yet he did not consider the reinterpretation of Rilke).
Manifesting their concern for relevance, the editors followed these highly critical considerations with an excerpt from a televised interview from 1969, followed by notes illustrated with photographs taken by Frédéric de Towarnicki. A brief comment concerning Heidegger’s Spiegel interview (published posthumously) noted correctly that Heidegger attempted to justify himself while skillfully evading the most embarrassing questions, and that the interview failed to add anything new.28
However, what are all these comments, pertinent and interesting as they might be, compared to the few lines written by the poet and friend René Char, the very day of Heidegger’s death?
Martin Heidegger died this morning. The sun has laid him to rest along with the tools. Only the work remains. This threshold is constant. The night opens itself with love.29
Two days later, Char wrote a letter to two young friends from which the following lines deserve to be recalled:
We will go to Rebanqué with Heidegger’s friends from Provence this afternoon. There, at least, our sadness, perhaps, shall be attenuated when we draw water from the deep well into which Heidegger gazed and meditated on the spark twinkling between darkness and day, making them communicate.30
It was thus up to the last moment and even beyond it that the poet and the thinker pursued their friendly dialogue. A few months after Heidegger’s death, the translation of one of the most important of his later works appeared, On the Way to Language.31 The French translation32 carried a particularly warm dedication to René Char.33 Heidegger himself chose three of Char’s sayings, which “attest to the proximity of poetry and thought,” while adding: “Is dear Provence the secret invisible arch that connects the inceptual thought of Parmenides to the poem of Hölderlin?” This attention given to the “nearness” of the poetic word corresponds intimately to the spirit of this volume in which a study on Trakl was juxtaposed with meditations on poems by Stefan George, Gottfried Benn, and once again Trakl, not to mention the “conversation with a Japanese.” This latter text would quickly become emblematic of the Heideggerian encounter with Eastern thought and of his respect for the singularity of linguistic alterity.
As an unexpected epilogue, let us note the posthumous homage, quite indirect, which was paid to Heidegger a year after his death. In 1977, André Glucksmann published The Master Thinkers.34 This book attracted a good deal of attention and inserted itself into the offensive of the “nouveaux philosophes” against totalitarianism, Stalinism, and the ideologies of state power. Four criminals of thought were thoroughly dismantled, thinkers of the State and of the Will to Power: Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Not only did Heidegger escape the pillory, but his thinking was clearly used to give thought to this power and to the “will of the will”35 that subtended the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Glucksmann saluted Heidegger as the “greatest of contemporary German thinkers”36 in the chapter “Why We Are So Metaphysical” (a telling title) and even absolved him of any Nazi tendencies, since the Master confirmed after 1940 that the French were “not sufficiently ‘up to the level’” of the demands of modern technology.37 No doubt, Glucksmann did not engage in “Heideggerian jargon” in a manner that was overly ostentatious, but it is clear that he sought recourse to a true thinker who had the “honesty” to publish his thoughts on Nietzsche and not remain “settled” there.38
In the course of 1978, a number of texts, which were very different in both spirit and form, would be published. At the outset, one must pay particular attention to a polemical response that Jean Beaufret addressed to the detractors of the translation of Questions IV,39 and specifically to Alain Renaut,40 who had become the spokesperson of these critiques. Without alluding to the letter addressed to Heidegger a year earlier, without mentioning the details of its argumentation (which he only summarized by insisting on two points: we do not know who really authored the texts of the seminar protocols; the general allure of the translations revealed “a preference for a style that was quite affected,” “a deliberate search for the unusual and the archaic”41), Renaut went further: he made the debate public and did so in severe terms, for he openly suspected that the translators of Questions IV wanted to “render the text unreadable and thus beyond critique.” Renaut thus unmasked their “insidious hagiography.”42
One thus understands that Beaufret himself felt obligated to exercise his right to respond in the same journal. The response obviously had no bearing on Renaut’s philosophical choices (“to read Hegel in order to finally work at the heart of that which is”43), but it does have a bearing on the justification of the incriminated translations and, more generally, on the type of work he carried out with his students and disciples in relation to reading, understanding, and translating Heidegger. Much more than a simple “response,” this was an important and significant text of self-justification. Beaufret, once again, revealed his talent as a polemicist in an embarrassing and paradoxical situation, since in this case he condescended to quarrel in public with a young man who had until only recently been his disciple.
Denouncing from the outset “the atmosphere of suspicion” that Renaut set out to create around Questions IV, Beaufret recalled that the seminar “protocols” had indeed been verified, reread, and authorized by Heidegger; he admitted, at most, a “lack of coordination, since each person had worked on his own.”44 This concession was all the more noteworthy since it was the only one made in the text: it amounted to admitting that someone should have been designated as “responsible for the editing.” Further, the most rigid position was taken with respect to the translations that were called into question, especially with respect to “the Open without withdrawal” [“l’Ouvert sans retrait”] as a rendering of Unverborgenheit. In a Parmenidean context, the essence of truth is not thought in its most intimate essence, but rather as “clearing of presence.”45 In his counterattack, Beaufret himself alluded to the famous “protest letter” to express his indignation with respect to Renaut’s tactics and pointed out that Renaut proceeded by hiding his sources. The other signatories were not named, but ridiculed as “clandestine letter-writers” or as the “collective.”46
Yet this was not the most interesting element of this text. Having been personally attacked, Jean Beaufret intended to address the accusation of hagiography. It was thus the very spirit of his lifelong work, in Heidegger’s footsteps, that he intended to defend and to illustrate. This was the heart of the debate: was there a guardian angel protecting Heidegger from all criticism and choosing intentionally abstruse or affected translations in order to rebuff the critics? Beaufret was not content with denying it, preferring, as was his habit, to recount (rather than to demonstrate) how his patient pedagogical and hermeneutical labors had gained him the loyalty of excellent students (certain of whom, including Renaut, were beginning to make a name for themselves). He accused his former disciple, who had become his adversary, of being involved in a “partial recuperation” of Heidegger, based on a distinction between an “acceptable” and an “unacceptable” Heidegger.47 This precisely consisted in implicitly recognizing that the reception of Heidegger was no longer carried out in terms of an “all or nothing,” but also explicitly in refusing to enter into a heated philosophical discussion with Renaut,48 who found himself rejected as one of those who understood nothing, such as . . . Gabriel Marcel!49 In his inimitable style—more an amusing conversation than a philosophical discussion—Beaufret clearly managed to win over the audience. Was this, however, not accomplished at the price of a few distortions? More precisely, was it true that the “official university curriculum” categorically refused to address Heidegger? And was it true that Beaufret had encountered a “climate of prohibition or intimidation, albeit muffled?”50 Did these allegations stem from what could be called a persecution complex? The question must be posed with frankness and clarity. If one were to respond honestly, one would have to take into account the evolution of the question itself over the course of the French reception of Heidegger’s thought. To take sides in this emotional quarrel would be tantamount to dismissing, all too quickly, the entire achievement of the present study. Let us go back to the facts. It is clear that Jean Beaufret was never prevented from teaching either in khâgne or at the École Normale Supérieure, nor was he subjected to any pressure; on the contrary, it is difficult to imagine a greater pedagogical freedom than the one from which he benefited. One can also present Birault’s case as another counterexample: he followed a classical university career, concluding at the Sorbonne, even though he wrote a dissertation on Heidegger, without either abandoning his admiration or joining the accusers. There never was any implacable ban at the pedagogical level; however, it is true that Beaufret’s university career had been blocked, once by Jean Wahl (in 1953 or 1954) and a committee (having determined that he had not made sufficient progress on his dissertation); then, much later, in 1969–70, when his application was turned down at Aix-en-Provence. Even taking these facts into account, the expression “implacable ban” seems exaggerated. On the other hand, was Beaufret right to speak of a “muffled” climate of intimidation? By definition, such an atmosphere is infinitely less clear than an explicit ban. What is true, we have observed, is that this climate (at once intellectual, academic, and cultural) evolved considerably between Liberation and 1978. This change was not an unambiguous one (in the sense of being favorable or unfavorable to Heidegger): the reception became more complex, the critiques (external and internal) became more sophisticated, and the popularity of other philosophies (structuralism, Wittgenstein—to mention just two) competed with the exceptionally favorable reaction Heidegger initially received. That Beaufret did not take well to these evolutions and reversals and remained proud of the work accomplished, sheltered from publicity, is undeniable. But it is equally clear that certain misunderstandings that separated him from Renaut (whose good faith cannot be put into question) were due to his approach to personal relationships, where arguments were often less important than allegiances. The all-too-easy accusation of sectarianism was not Renaut’s fabrication; it had been formulated for some time from many sides, since Beaufret’s attitude had very quickly become one of an unconditional and polemical defense of Heidegger, the man and his oeuvre. Renaut perhaps went too far when he spoke of “hagiography”; it is nonetheless obvious that for his part Beaufret—as respectable as his true motives might have been—refused to take seriously criticisms of a thinking whose resources he had wanted to illustrate in purely philosophical terms and had thus always treated as conducive to reflection and meditation. Thus put in perspective, the quarrel with Renaut can be situated in a series of different disputes that had crystallized around Heidegger’s name since Liberation and that Beaufret had wanted to handle personally. As the years passed, the dossier thickened for the person who had made himself the defender of the Master, who had become his friend (choices became a destiny, although not an inevitable fate: Merleau-Ponty’s case shows clearly that a very different attitude, which was open and nonconflictual, was also possible—certainly easier for a chair at the College de France . . .). Let us recall that Renaut belonged to a completely different generation (forty years younger than Beaufret!): for him, Heidegger was a classic whom he at first idealized and then almost “abhorred”: personal allegiance to a classic was not possible!
What kind of critique is desirable? Is the distinction between an “external” and “internal” critique pertinent? This problem of a hermeneutic-critical deepening of Heideggerian thought arose again in 1978, although in a less contentious manner and in radically different texts, which were barely comparable. On the one hand, there was a severe article by two young, still unknown, writers who proposed an “internal critique” of Heidegger,51 and on the other hand, there was a long-awaited, voluminous book by a distinguished Heideggerian that offered, in elegant language, an equally “internal” commentary that was hardly critical of Heidegger.52 This disparity went unnoticed at the time. It was instructive nonetheless, both as regards the interpretative sophistication that was carried out in the 1970s and in relation to the widening gap that would increasingly separate the adversaries of the Master from his staunch supporters.
While it would be inappropriate to establish a parallel between (or even equate) Ferry-Renaut’s article and Birault’s volume, their contemporaneous appearance nonetheless deserves some attention. Let us note—without making any judgment as to their respective value—the symbolic opposition that separates them, despite their simultaneity.
Indifferent to current affairs, Birault finally gathered together the fruit of many years of work; his brilliant commentary came at the end of the first wave of Heidegger’s reception—the one that welcomed a great thinker with admiration and paid attention to a philosopher taken to be one of the greatest. Ferry and Renaut, on the contrary, presented a new style, which was rather irreverent toward the Master, closely tied to ideological and political contexts, and aiming to put into practice a project of “internal critique” (they would not be the only ones to make this claim).
Each attempt must be given its due, but Ferry and Renaut’s “attempt at an internal critique” cannot occupy us for too long (it is after all just an article; furthermore, and more importantly, more elaborate forms of that same approach in the later works of the same authors will be subsequently considered). This article—where Renaut’s complete turnaround with respect to Heidegger53 became visible for the first time—revealed a strange disparity between its stated goal (to replace the “external” critiques of Ladmiral, Cotten, and Bourdieu54 with a truly “internal” critique) and its actual outcome: a virulent denunciation of an “impasse,” even of a “deception,” indeed of a “failure” bordering on mystification (one gets the impression that in fact a new form of “external” criticism prevailed). What happened between these two extremes—against the “external” critiques and against Heidegger himself? There was the identification of a “remainder” that would have been missed by the “external” critiques and that, once identified, would be subjected to critique, a critique so acute it would silence Heidegger’s thought. The transition from the “external” to the “internal” was conceived not as a hermeneutical deepening but rather as a radicalization that turned into a rationalist and critical position. Although they showed clearly that the challenge from “external” readings to the autonomy of Heidegger’s work folded these readings back onto the sociological or ideological “interests” that they claimed to represent (while failing to address the core of Heidegger’s thought), Ferry and Renaut’s reading itself sought to be efficacious.55 However, the aim of the reflection (which was opposed to the Heideggerian “dignity” of said thought) was never made explicit. Although they claimed to follow the Hegelian model of internal refutation, the method used was less a dialectical and comprehensive overcoming than an ostracizing, which, in the end, was as polemical as the “external” critiques. The accusation of “deception”56 also carried a moralizing connotation that was in no way justified by the authors themselves. Their final judgment, however, attempted to balance the failure imputed to Heidegger with the acknowledgment of two essential achievements of his thinking: the grasp of the onto-theological structure of metaphysics, and the identification of an irreducible (ontological) difference.57 This was a somewhat peremptory conclusion to ingenious analyses of the relation between being and language, which—while succeeding in unmasking the Heideggerian “double game” between the mirage of a new instauration and the conservation of the status quo—remained completely foreign to the question of the meaning of history under the effects of a henceforth planetary technology.
What a contrast with Henri Birault’s work, where one has the impression of being on a completely different planet! It is not just that the latter limited himself to thinking with Heidegger without attempting to criticize him, but that he took care to carry this out with style, in a personal manner, and with a probing method. In this case we are dealing with an attempt similar to that of Jean Beaufret: a similar studious admiration for an oeuvre, which is taken to be profoundly innovative and already a classic, a similar recounting of a pedagogical experience, and a similar interest in style (in both cases sustained by the art of rapprochements and the talent for introducing new perspectives).58 This connection must of course be nuanced: Birault’s style is more eloquent, and also more academic; his tone is also less insolent or polemical; he does not offer Beaufret’s inimitable mix of depth and anecdote.
Indeed, Birault’s intention was to rise above the fray. He achieved this by conducting his dialogues only with the greatest figures associated with Heidegger: Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. His strategy of in-depth readings (following the great themes: knowing, desiring, willing, questioning truth, being, and time) was complemented by the constant play of a “double reading”: Heidegger on the basis of Kant, and then the reverse; similarly for Heidegger’s other great “partners.” This confrontation was not limited to a repetition of the teachings of the Master of Freiburg, but enriched them by multiplying the angles of attack—a method that nonetheless was faithful to the fundamental project of unearthing the “unthought” of the great metaphysical worldviews: “In its very path, Heideggerian thought is inseparable from a renewed reading of the entire metaphysical tradition.”59 The accuracy of this remark is especially attested in his work in the field of modern philosophy. Although Hegel is not neglected (he appears in the chapter “The Adventures of the Concept”60), we should note that this rereading is principally inscribed within the Kant-Nietzsche-Heidegger “triangle.” This triad is thought to circumscribe our modernity: Kant as the critical refoundation of a “metaphysics of metaphysics” on the basis of transcendental subjectivity; Nietzsche as the destabilization of such subjectivity in terms of a will whose nihilism becomes apparent; Heidegger as the questioning of all the assumptions of this tradition and as the preparation of a completely different thought.
A significant hesitation, however, appeared in this scholarly interpretative ballet, and one should not think that it was settled once and for all in Heidegger’s favor. It was Nietzsche who introduced and imposed this hesitation, to the extent that the chaotic character of his thought resists Heidegger’s reading, as penetrating as it might have been. Thus, one must resist “subscribing too quickly to the Heideggerian interpretation according to which Nietzsche’s philosophy is purely and simply a metaphysics of the will to power.”61 Not rejecting, for all that, Heidegger’s interpretation (and above all not its genealogical character, following the guiding thread of the accomplishment of metaphysics), Birault did not intend to reduce this tension the way that one solves a problem: he preferred to open the horizon to a “double reading” of Nietzsche (either chaotic or “despotic”).
However clever (albeit sincere) such a model might have been, it becomes clear—above all at the end of the book—that Birault remained split between Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is not just the interpretation of the former by the latter that gave rise to his perplexity: the stakes of thinking lay in that interpretation, as thinking was determined by Nietzsche’s quest for the “eternal now” and Heidegger’s disposition for “another beginning.” Birault did not really decide: he left two irons in the fire for the future.62
The hostility or admiration toward Heidegger was not always directly linked to clearly defined political orientations. The two cases just mentioned are good examples of this—especially that of Henri Birault, who was quite unlikely to take a political position. Another memorable example of a study of Heidegger that is difficult to classify politically is George Steiner’s book, which appeared in a French translation in 198163 and was hardly noticed at first. It was an introduction to Heidegger intended for an English-speaking audience, and its more original aspects were largely ignored (an acute sensitivity to Heidegger’s language and a passionate effort at making a distinction between the greatness of his thinking and the intolerable character of his silence about the Holocaust).64
Furthermore, the very idea of a “Heideggerian left” could be disputed since there had never been—to my knowledge—an explicit claim to such a title, by either a single person or a group. Would it thus not be odd to be satisfied with such a label to describe Jacques Derrida? In 1980 he published a large work of more than 500 hundred pages entitled The Post Card, which was difficult to categorize according to conventional genres and whose “subject” was in no way Heidegger.65 In fact, was there even a subject in this text (or collection of texts)? Starting with a “sendings” of a correspondence, (with) a postcard that strangely depicts Plato standing behind his teacher, and reversing their roles by having Plato seem to dictate something to Socrates, who functions as a scribe, Derrida inserted many allusions to Heidegger into a lover’s correspondence, caught up in the pleasure of his own text. Under what pretext did this take place? Under a critical reflection on destinal “sending” in Heidegger, a Geschick more proper and more decisive than being itself. When Derrida opposed Heidegger with “the Postal Principle as differantial relay,”66 the unprepared reader risked getting lost and giving up. Nonetheless, one must understand—as strange as this may appear—that Derrida is much more serious here than he lets on. What he is putting into question is the Heideggerian return to an original gathering or gift. If nothing is destined at the heart of being itself, there is, in some sense, no privileged sender: there are only networks, intermediaries, multiple sendings; there would be only “the postal” without destination, neither originary nor final.67 Hence the erasure or disintegration of the notion of a destiny of being and even of the idea of a unity of metaphysics68 in favor of an ever-reiterated, albeit elusive, différance through the textuality of the proposed fragments. This ironic and coded critique of the Master’s assumptions seemed clearly unacceptable or unnecessarily insolent to “strictly obedient” Heideggerians; it was, however, accompanied by a gesture of homage (“we will not get around Freiburg”69) and other signs, where a decisive debt to Heidegger is unquestionably confirmed. This is particularly the case with a questioning of Lacan’s logocentrism and the meditative retrieval of the question of truth within and without the psychoanalytic field.70
Regardless of the limits or the relative legitimacy of the label “Heideggerian left” (which was obviously insufficiently clarifying in the case of Derrida), it is undeniable that it at least allows a provisional orientation within a complex intellectual and ideological landscape. It is in this respect that one can consider Kostas Axelos as the most noteworthy representative of an early “Heideggerian left,” which was certainly small in number and more of a minority among Heideggerians than the left Gaullists were in the large family of the supporters of the General! To seek a convergence between the goals of emancipation in Marx and the preparation of “another thinking” in Heidegger is certainly neither a reactionary nor a conservative approach. It is also a more radical project than an enlightened liberalism or a socio-democratic progressivism, not to mention its clear rejection of an allegiance to the Stalinist or even “revisionist” systems. As contextualized as every political “classification” must be, it does not seem unjustified to consider two publications from 1982 as belonging to the left, if not the extreme left: first, a remarkable accomplishment by Gérard Granel, and second, an unexpected theoretical advance by Reiner Schürmann.
The accomplishment consisted in the publication of a bilingual edition of the famous “Rectoral Address”71 and of an explanatory text: “Why have we published this?”72 Oft cited and added to the accusatory dossier against Heidegger, this address had, until then, hardly been read closely in France. Publishing it while proclaiming its value as a great text was perceived as a provocation, especially since it was accompanied by virulent contestations of the “capitalist-fascist” order instituted by developed capitalism in Europe. Far from limiting himself to a defense of Heidegger the man, and by wisely inscribing his contribution within the limits of the ongoing debate around Heidegger’s political error, Granel shook up the landscape of this controversy by almost turning the “Rectoral Address” into a contemporary text. Thus, managing to catch Heidegger’s enemies off balance, he attempted more audaciously (but also more decisively) to explain the urgency of a meditation on the joint effects of technicized science and of neo-capitalism.
We cannot dwell on the French context—largely forgotten today—surrounding this operation: the student demonstrations and the protests surrounding the “Higher Education Laws” imposed by Madame Saunié-Séïté, then state secretary of higher education. This context, although significant, was the technocratic conception of the university that was rejected by a large number of students and faculty. This allows us to understand the surprising comparison of the French situation of 1976–77 with the German one from 1933. Granel turned the “Rectoral Address” into a crucial reference, in the sense that Heidegger proclaimed therein “the self-affirmation of the German university” in order to thwart the politicization of the university disciplines that was advocated by the Nazis. He also attempted to initiate a more radical questioning concerning the essence of science. Of course, Granel had to concede the legitimacy of the question: “How could Heidegger have made such a mistake?” He responded that it was a question of “false expectations”:73 Heidegger had thought (clearly in error) that he could make a compromise with a movement whose positive possibilities he had overestimated. This was an enormous mistake, but one that was shared at the time by the German bourgeoisie and by many others as well—including in France.74 This “logic of compromise” (found, mutatis mutandis, among the “comrades,” as Granel cruelly recalled) does not negate the call of the address to rethink the “existential” founding of the sciences, to free them from their functionalist closure, and to tirelessly question their meaning.75 Read in this light, the “Rectoral Address” was, according to Granel, a text of great importance whose lesson must be heard. Considering the “constitutive ambiguity”76 of this text (which was rooted in its historical inscription and in the fragility of a personal choice), we must relate its finding to those of Marx in order to interpret technocratic modernity (in its neo-liberalism as well as in its fascist dementia) as “the total mobilization of the individual in service of infinite production.”77 Despite the homage paid to Jean Beaufret,78 this latter point clearly differentiates them.
At the same time, this gap also explains how Granel, in his very excess, and even if he did not convince everyone, managed to influence the “vanguard.” Instead of limiting himself to defending Heidegger the man, a task where many failed, he set forth a skillful assessment and attempted to open up a philosophical discussion. The assessment concerned the importance of the “Rectoral Address” that was to be read as the great text that it was (which did not mean that one had to accept all its assertions79); to reduce the address to its Nazi elements was to misunderstand what was crucial to it. However, the open perspective toward philosophical discussion concerned the convergence of irrationality (indeed of dementia) and efficiency in the contemporary forms of domination at the heart of which science and technology play a decisive role. Granel discerned that as early as 1933, Heidegger paved the way for giving thought to the “monstrous nature” of modern technology: did Heidegger not have a premonition of the incommensurable complicity that would unite—in hitherto unknown forms—technological neutralization and mass extermination when he denounced hyper-specialization and called for questioning? However, what was lacking in this unfinished text80 was a more precise determination of Heidegger’s “error” and of the specificity of political tasks, to the extent that these provide scant resources for exorcising the excess produced by the convergence between the capitalization of the means of production and the technicization of scientific knowledge.
The intentionally provocative character of Granel’s contribution, his audacity and his panache (within the limits we just mentioned) gained him, if not respect, then at least its equivalent in our intellectual jousts: no one challenged him directly. Just as unexpected, but in a completely different style and on a completely different register, was the publication, in 1982, of an original work by a German philosopher teaching in the United States: Reiner Schürmann.81
In an impeccable French and with abiding elegance, Schürmann turned away from any sort of historiographical or biographical consideration in order to envisage the legacy of Heideggerian thought on its own terms. His question was precisely that of archē, the grounding principle understood as the economy of presence. Schürmann begins at Heidegger’s ending point: the presumption of an end or a closure of metaphysics. The task of thinking should be one not of repeating or saving that which is inscribed in this closure of the figure of presence, but rather of completing the decay of the epochal principles, a decay that, by disrupting the dyad of theory and praxis, impels thinking beyond their difference. “Action itself, and not only its theory, loses its foundation or archē.”82 Such a conception of the deconstruction of metaphysics seems to lead to a paradox, indeed to a contradiction: how can there be a principle of that which withdraws from any principle?83 Schürmann acknowledges this possible misunderstanding, the reality of this paradox or even contradiction, from the outset: he turns it into the “dazzling”84 theme of his reflection. “Anarchy,” in the sense in which he meant it, in following Heidegger (a name that points to a “discursive regularity”85), designates an enterprise that is conscious of its own impossibility: the search for the Principle is dislocated. Deconstruction is not a purely theoretical gesture; it is on the contrary the expression of a dispossession of all principled mastery of action. It opens the “releasement” (Gelassenheit) and the explosion of a pluralization of action, announced in poetical mode by Char:
That part never fixed, asleep in us, from which will spring TOMORROW THE MANIFOLD.86
To remain at this preliminary level might give the impression that Schürmann’s work advances provocative propositions without argumentation. As a matter of fact, nourished as it was by meticulous Heideggerian interpretations of the history of metaphysics, the book is solidly constructed around a core that undertakes a historic deduction of the categories of presence by distinguishing three decisive moments: the “prospective” categories of the pre-Socratic beginning,87 the “retrospective” categories (essentially Nietzschean) of the technological accomplishment of metaphysics,88 and finally the transitional categories resulting from Heidegger’s own “turn.”89 Schürmann is most original when he shows precisely how Heidegger reworks his own conceptuality (that initially corresponded to his fundamental ontology) in order to be able to indicate, or at least begin to indicate, what is left in reserve beyond the closure of metaphysics and the economy of presence. It is also this elaboration of the transitional categories that lends support to the paradoxical principle of anarchy itself: the mutation that announces a completely different thought is first translated into the language that it destabilizes. The closure of metaphysics is not to be confused with the end of history: it creates rather a tension internal to our actions, and the conditions of a transition whose stakes we are only beginning to glimpse.
Although we cannot here enter into more “technical” considerations, we can nonetheless mention the attention Schürmann paid to the objections made against him.90 He reconstitutes them systematically and responds to them in detail at the end of his book. Indeed, he establishes his position without hesitation by almost teaching a lesson to his elders: against Derrida he shows that the Heideggerian concept of “presence” utterly destroys the “complete possession of self by self,”91 and in sharp opposition to Birault, he maintains that the latter ignored the “hypothesis of closure” and that he does not understand that with the lecture “On Time and Being” a new turn sets in, allowing us to think that epochality itself is overcome.92
Such a masterful book, having marked a turning point in the Heideggerian literature, could not provoke, as one might have guessed, immediate reactions. Nonetheless, not only did it not go by unnoticed,93 but it contributed to a resurgence of interest94 in Heidegger, which was seen at the beginning of the eighties, from an innovative and progressive perspective.
The most notable text in this respect is nonetheless difficult to characterize in these terms. In a long reflection, the principal concern of which is the “Rectoral Address,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe posed anew the question concerning Heidegger’s political involvements by trying to maintain two positions at the same time: refusing any complacency toward the “unforgivable” while still recognizing the “greatness” of the thinker in question.95 The issue then was to avoid slipping back into the rut of the polemics around Heidegger’s personal guilt, in order to identify that which in this thinking “made possible—or more exactly, did not forbid—the political engagement of 1933.”96 The axis followed was the one that led to a gesture of foundation (or refoundation) of Germany’s spiritual mission: this gesture was both philosophical (hence radically metaphysical) and political (in an equally fundamental sense).97 This “overvaluing” of the philosophical and this overestimating of the political intersected in the exaltation of the Nietzschean model and crystallized in a twofold way: in the interpretation of events based on the will to power and the ideal of refoundation in terms of Spirit (Derrida, a few years later, would return to this crucial point). What did the failure of this attempt lead to? It led undoubtedly to “the pure and simple collapse of fundamental ontology.”98 But this negative result (whose counterpart would be the famous “turn”) could not cover up a “formidable assumption” or, if one prefers, a Heideggerian unthought: “Heidegger’s constant refusal, as it seems to me, to take seriously the concept of mimesis.”99
Lacoue-Labarthe thus gave the impression (for those looking for a conclusion that could easily be exploited in a politico-ideological sense) of finding a way out that may seem too academic or subtle: Heidegger’s political error would be due to the mimetical mythification (investing history) of the German possibilities seen in relation to the Greek model (inimitable). The impossible “repetition” of this model would find its confirmation in the failure of the political involvement, but would nonetheless not be radically placed into question by Heidegger. “It seems to me more and more difficult not to see a fundamental mimetology at work in Heidegger’s thought.”100 What was thus proposed was less a definitive response than a working hypothesis, a path for further research that Lacoue-Labarthe intended to explore and deepen.
A delayed effect of the Master’s death? The discovery of new aspects of a thinking approaching monumental status thanks to the gradual publication of the Gesamtausgabe? These explanations are not mutually exclusive when it comes to explaining the flourishing of studies101 and tributes (the most interesting of which—especially, Heidegger et la question de Dieu102—were not exempt from critiques or questions). These years were also marked by the passing of Jean Beaufret,103 who, until his last days, never ceased working along “Heidegger’s path.”104 Beaufret’s final texts, collected in the fourth volume of Dialogue avec Heidegger, testify to his careful work, which was always attentive to the quality of the writing, and aimed to show that “with Heidegger, everything is reversed.”105 He was no longer interested in “converting” anyone to this thinking (if he had ever tried). From then on, with no more illusions about support or success, he concentrated on coming to terms with what he liked to call Heidegger’s “enormity,” and on formulating scrupulous clarifications on the oblivion of being, Aristotle’s metaphysics, his interpretation of tragedy, the question of “Christian philosophy,” and that of the “humanities.” If one of the texts in this collection was openly polemical (the reply to Renaut, “A propos de Questions IV de Heidegger”), the book is permeated from one end to the other by a scathing irony that in no way impeded highly scholarly explanations, whether on “the enigma of Z3” (a subtle questioning of the formulations of the multiple senses of being in Aristotle) or—in following a digression on technology—on the discussion of “Marx’s exact point of confusion.” Marx posited a priority of the practical over the theoretical even though the two always correspond to each other: “To juggle, in regards to modern technology, the twin concepts of theory and praxis, amounts quite simply to repeatedly raising the insoluble question of the chicken and the egg—which comes first?”106
Even though the order would have to be reversed from a strictly pedagogical point of view, a reading of these studies should be completed by reading the interviews107 Beaufret gave in his last years. In those interviews, once again, his inimitable style of joining what was important with the anecdotal by explaining them together shone forth. Beaufret managed once more to amaze, not only by his pedagogical talent in the domain of the history of philosophy, but also by his ability to make the past palpable: for example, in his Entretiens avec Frédéric de Towarnicki, by discussing the specifically Greek wonder before what is, but also, more subtly, in discussing the Hellenistic sense of oblivion, that “great withdrawal from everything” that, according to Thucydides, had beset the Athenians on the occasion of the famous plague.108 Suddenly, with the passage of time, one understands why the Cartesian search for certainty could have only given rise to sarcasm on the part of Pythagoras109 and in which sense the Greeks “had no concept of consciousness.”110 One then understands Archimedes’s protest against the Roman soldier about to kill him: “Do not disturb my circles!”111 And then, there is this privilege afforded to Beaufret, rare enough among philosophers: a pure and sober language that is no less for having been spoken, like a table set impeccably (and yet spontaneously), clear and ironic, like Valery, but suddenly delicate and poetical like Nerval. Thus, a childhood memory arises and carries us to this “almost sacred” moment when, at twilight, the ceremony of the lighting of gas lamps took place.112 Thanks to these traits of originality, the faithfulness to Heidegger’s inspiration takes on its own unforgettable life in the French language.
Jean Beaufret’s death in August 1982, six years after the death of the Master, justly conveyed the impression that an era was drawing to an end. The hero and his principal confidant had withdrawn from the scene of history. Hence, one turned to an immense field for research, for decades to come: the German publication of the Gesamtausgabe and its French translations.113 Would there be anything more than interpreters, commentaries, or obtuse adversaries from that point on?
The most notable tribute, in Cahier de l’Herne, which appeared in the fall of 1983 (preceded, incidentally, by an equally remarkable edition of Exercices de la patience114), seemed to exclude such a pessimistic reading of the evolution of Heidegger’s French reception. The challenge was successfully met: the horizon was opened up to as many as possible, to persons and orientations, breaking with all strict “orthodoxy.” The inclusion of voices from other countries was also notable: German and American contributors were almost as numerous as the French. The purely “French” divisions were skillfully displaced or effaced. An undeniable care for quality presided over the endeavor. Even the photograph adorning the cover attempted to break with the academic or imperious images of the Master: there he was, pictured intimately, at work, lost in thought, on the verge of writing, perhaps signing his name.
Michel Haar’s preface had the virtue of explaining the spirit and the goals of the project with great clarity. As a recognition of an “immense debt” that nonetheless avoided uncritical allegiance, the endeavor aimed to distinguish itself from any school: “We are students of Heidegger, but there is no Heideggerian school.” This statement seemed somewhat defensive: on the matter of the difficulty and the “hermeticism” of Heidegger (“obscurity is the index of the finitude of presence”), and on the debatable or unfortunate nature of certain translations (“some have circulated a heavy and precious jargon for the initiates”). A “freer and more lucid” reading—which, however, must always be accompanied by a “critical view”115—would have to hasten the overcoming of “the old dilemmas wherein we tread,” authorizing what Derrida had called “Heideggerian hope.” This preface was accompanied by a liminal text, “The banished biography,”116 in which Michel Haar emphasized that Heidegger always discouraged biographical questions: if it is true that deep reserve in this matter is compensated by a careful “self-interpretation” of the path of thinking, can nothing more than the “natal” be retained as an autobiographical element? This summary was skillful for it avoided allusion to the political involvement of 1933. Further, the latter is present in the chronology that opens the volume. It is admitted that a series of calls and discourses from 1933 revealed “the allegiance to certain Nazi ideological themes,”117 but it is also noted that the “Rectoral Address” defended a conception of the independence of the university “which in no way corresponds to the views of the party.” Above all, it was clarified that after stepping down from the rectorate in 1934, Heidegger “was completely skeptical with respect to Nazism.”118 These details barely maintain a fragile equilibrium between a few cruel truths and their comprehensive reevaluation—Jean-Michel Palmier’s text “Heidegger and National-Socialism”119 developed this line of thought.
Palmier’s text aimed to assess, as impartially as possible, a “dossier” that at that point was already quite large.120 It was as if he was having premonitions of an unavoidable rebound; he resigned himself to affirming that texts dedicated to Heidegger’s political involvement were without any doubt more numerous than those dedicated to his ontology. In attempting to avoid the excesses of an accusation as well as those of an unconditional defense, he recalled first of all—as an illustration of the former—a certain number of inexactitudes bordering on calumny and then examined more sophisticated critical analyses (particularly those from Lukacs, Adorno, and Steiner). Along the way, he tipped his hat, so to speak, to Jean-Pierre Faye’s Langages totalitaires, which he called “a special contribution to the sociology of language,” without necessarily finding the parallel between Heidegger’s metaphysics and the Rector Krieck’s discourses convincing.121 In denouncing the retrospective illusions and the absence of questions concerning what Heidegger during that period “understood precisely by National-Socialism,”122 he attempted to reconstitute the facts. His presentation of the involvement from 1933 (which could not be exactly the same today) carried two sections: one relatively favorable to Heidegger, the other hostile. His acceptance of the rectorate at the insistence of the dismissed Social-Democrat Rector Möllendorf was described as an attempt to defend the university from the threat of a brutal “reorganization”: the “Rectoral Address” was a truly philosophical text that was distinguished from Nazi ideology in many essential respects (the autonomy of the university, the conception of science, and the absence of anti-Semitic biologism). Yet, the text and the proclamations from 1933 (support for Hitler, tribute to Schlageter, and support for the withdrawal from the League of Nations) were “absolutely indefensible” and testified to Heidegger’s political blindness.123 Balancing this criticism, Palmier credited Heidegger with a certain courage for carrying out of his functions as rector (his refusal to allow anti-Semitic posters and his refusal to allow the burning of “banned books” in the university), as well during the period after his resignation when he was attacked and isolated by the regime. Moving on to the political implications of Heidegger’s ontology, Palmier was in no way dismissive of Bourdieu’s critical analyses, recognizing what was pertinent and even notable in his approach to the complexity of Heidegger’s discourse read in the highly variegated context of the German intellectual life of the period. But he could approve of neither the unproven accusation of anti-Semitism nor the arbitrariness of the examples, nor the ambiguity of the irony regarding the rural tastes of the “professor.” Recalling the apolitical nature of the German university and the prevailing disdain for politics at the time, Palmier maintained that one could not understand Heidegger’s case outside of its context, but that the sociological explanations in and of themselves could not account for the complexity of the situation in which the strictly philosophical stakes were so high. It was toward these philosophical stakes that it was necessary to turn, in order to understand how Heidegger could have paid tribute to the “inner greatness” of the National Socialist movement in 1935. Was this a naiveté? Perhaps not only, for it was a grave error to have projected a spiritual possibility upon reality. Finally, the most “embarrassing” question was that of the silence after the war. Perhaps due to the thinker’s pride, this “ambiguous silence” loomed large, but should not become the object of a trial.124
In the conditions of the moment, and whatever the unavoidable corrections might be made in the event of a reprinting, Palmier’s text seems to have represented a worthy effort at a sincere assessment, which was intellectually honest in a domain that was particularly sensitive and delicate. This is also what Roger-Pol Droit acknowledged in a review125 where he praised the qualities and the importance of the Cahier de l’Herne as a whole.126
We cannot examine the other essays in the Cahier in detail, among which the text by a young Jean-Louis Chrétien127 stands out due to its distinctive quality of writing. It is useful nonetheless to characterize more precisely the principal orientation of the volume in order to complete our remarks concerning the spirit of the endeavor. If we put aside the personal testimonies and the documentary elements, what were the major themes that were explored? The main chapter headings128 were predictable. Yet, a critical distance allows us to discern that the guiding thread was the completion of metaphysics in the age of technology—a central question that was not the only question subtending the section entitled “The Age of Technology.” If it had been published two decades earlier, this Cahier would have given more importance to the question of existence and to the early Heidegger. Assembled more recently, it would have no doubt given more space to Heideggerian interpretations of the entirety of the history of philosophy and to the numerous volumes of the collected works that remain untranslated. It is not surprising that the balance (due also in great part to the fact—well understood and exploited by Michel Haar—that Heidegger’s death required that one be imaginative in order to ensure that the awaited tribute would not be conventional) was marked by the historical moment when the critique of the society of production and consumption was no longer carried out in the overly passionate terms of 1968, but benefited rather from reflexive and critical distance, specifically due to a more developed meditation on Nietzsche. Of course, many of the questions posed in the Cahier transcended the circumstances, particularly the perplexities concerning the question of God, concentrated in this remark by Jean Greisch: “Everything takes place as if the sacred as divine milieu absorbed the figure of God.”129 Heidegger’s tomb carried no cross but rather a small, eight-pointed star. The “god to come” is not identified.130 Always enigmatic, the thinker preferred instead a more sober and more exacting legacy: awaiting.
We spoke earlier of transfiguration. At a more modest level than that of glory, of immortality, or waiting for God, we must consider the enigma that figuration posed to thought, and to the polylogue that Derrida organized around the Heideggerian interpretation of Van Gogh’s famous painting of the worn-out shoes.131 This was a seemingly marginal and yet decisive debate (for it thematized the status of truth in Heidegger’s discussion of painting—the credibility of the latter having been put into question by Meyer Schapiro, the renowned art historian). It was under the ironic title “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [pointure]”132 that Derrida led a complex discussion, whose starting point was the opposition of the two “truths” concerning the famous painting: were the shoes those of a peasant (as Heidegger suggested) or those of a city-dweller, the artist himself (Schapiro’s thesis)? At first, Derrida had no difficulty in showing the narrowness of the dilemma, as it was brought about by the very specificity of Schapiro’s “expertise”: the issue can only be, instead of the shoes painted by Van Gogh, the canvas referenced as “de la Faille n.225.”133 Heidegger acknowledged having seen the painting to which he was referring in an exhibition in Amsterdam in March 1930. This “admission” caused him to fall into a trap. But where was the trap? Should the restitution of the “truth” of/in the painting be limited to this narrow dispute—city mouse against country mouse? Schapiro never considered that what was at stake in Heidegger’s text went well beyond the question of whether or not the shoes belong to a peasant woman (with restitution to their “owner”). For the issue was much more fundamentally the critique of metaphysical truth and, with it, of the notion of the subject—truth and the subject as well as the truth of the subject, both confronted by the question of the work of art, and with the origin of the work itself, thrusting into a world. Henceforth, “is it a matter of rendering justice to Heidegger, of restituting what is his due, his truth, the possibility of his own gait and progress?”134 No doubt: the explication of the text is scrupulous, even meticulous, showing the subtle progression that allowed the thinker to choose the example of Van Gogh’s painting in order to allow the work—which cannot be reduced either to the insignificance of a thing nor to the elaboration of a finished product—to appear as the opening of an entire world. The truth that was thus evoked no longer had anything to do with a mere attribution. The Van Gogh painting was chosen by Heidegger as “an intuitive accessory”135 in a process of evocation (which was in no way dependent on the “peasant” character of the shoes) that unfolded beyond any narrow relations of correspondence between reality and representation. “Let us not forget that The Origin deals with the essence of truth, the truth of essence and the abyss (Abgrund) which plays itself out there like the ‘veiled’ destiny (fatum) which transfixes being.”136
If Heidegger was incessantly defended, other voices from the polylogue can be heard in order to cast doubt on him for a certain “monoreferential naïveté.”137 Indeed, he could not have overlooked the fact that Van Gogh had often painted such shoes; above all, with the attribution of the shoes to a peasant woman, “Heidegger falls short of his discourse on the truth in painting.”138 Irony wielded as a weapon also made use of sexual and psychoanalytical connotations that were completely absent from Heidegger’s text (“sex of reattachment,”139 the form of the shoes, the role of the laces, etc.). Moreover, despite the credit given to Heidegger for having overcome the conception of a shoe-wearing subject outside of the painting, it was necessary to go so far as to identify an ultimate limit of the horizon of his thought: “in the belonging (corresponding) to the silent discourse of the earth.”140 And, in fact, is it possible to approach Van Gogh’s work in terms of a pre-originary ultimate reconciliation (an alliance or a gift) worn secretly by the Mother-Earth? Finally, the last word—if there is one—belonged not to Heidegger but to a poet paying tribute to the “occult strangeness” in Vincent, his fellow artist in despair. Listening to Artaud in order to learn to look at Van Gogh? This unwritten moral message of The Truth in Painting is a declaration of the failure of all restitution: “but never to be possessed.”141
Was Heidegger more disfigured than transfigured? Jacques Derrida’s surprising polylogue left the question open. Along the way, a voice registered the following furtive tribute: “It was indeed Heidegger’s text that opened this debate.”142
We noted the stark contrast that characterized 1976: it was the year of the Master’s death, and his disciples were divided regarding the translations of his texts. Obviously this was about the sharing of his legacy. Every empire meets such a destiny upon the death of the founding sovereign. But one might have thought that in intellectual and above all philosophical matters, the stakes would not involve ownership or even an editorial authority. Did the “critical Heideggerians” have the right to complain of being excluded in this respect? Would they not have preferred, after all, to privilege philosophical freedom over unconditional allegiance, since a recognition of a philosophical approach cannot be reduced to fealty or to a personal fidelity? For my part, even if I complained of certain of its effects, I was not scandalized that the publisher Gallimard followed the Heidegger family’s instructions to the letter: Jean Beaufret, and then Fédier, would have the last word concerning the choice of translators of the collected works. The problem should instead have been reversed: it is normally the case that the responsibility for choosing translators would be confided to those who had Heidegger’s or his family’s confidence; it was less justifiable that the choices seemed determined more by a degree of faithfulness to “orthodoxy” (or to the inner circle of the faithful) than by competence. Among the “excluded,” only one would experience a dramatic outcome. The reason for this is clear. Emmanuel Martineau was precisely not to be counted among “critical Heideggerians”; his disillusionment (and his “revenge”) would be in proportion to his absolute admiration for Heidegger. We shall return to this.
Disconcerted by the growing divisiveness, at a time when the passing of the great thinker should have imposed a thoughtful critical distance, I attempted to clarify my own contribution to this task. Sketched out in “L’apprentissage de la contiguïté” (an article that appeared in June–July 1976 in the journal Critique), this work was completed by combining three dialogues (“De la domination,” “Heidegger à New York,” “La rationalité comme partage”), which I intended to publish under the title “L’Expérience dite” (the first article is to this day unpublished; the two others would be reedited and published later, one in Heidegger from Metaphysics to Thought, the other in Rationalities, Historicities). During the years immediately following Heidegger’s death, I became very aware that the period of “admiration” (with the pioneers Beaufret and Birault) had run its course and that a new critical effort would be absolutely necessary. Not that the value of this first reception would be annulled; on the contrary, it was precisely its assimilation that made new advances possible and necessary. I will not dwell here on the lack of preparation of the philosophical public for the nuances of such an internal critique. During a lecture given in December 1976 at the Collège de philosophie, I noted the change in Alain Renaut and the even more radical neo-Kantianism of Luc Ferry. Our friendly yet vigorous debate revealed our disagreement: they did not join me in pursuing a linguistic dimension preserving the gains of Heideggerian hermeneutics in relation to the “dominant language” of metaphysics (my interlocutors rejected the Heideggerian contribution out of hand). At a time when I thought of myself as more and more critical (or “diacritical”), engaged in a difficult dialogue with Heidegger’s thought, I was surprised at being perceived as still (too) Heideggerian. This misunderstanding would only grow. I have had to admit that the reception of Heidegger did not escape a highly classical “rule”: the reversals from for to against, exercising an irresistible power of fascination, captured the imagination and held the public’s attention, and even the attention of the supposedly more informed interpreters, who were repelled by the critical interpretative refinements or were insensitive to its nuances. I had to slowly accept this situation, whether I liked it or not.
In 1977, on the 22nd of May, Jean Beaufret celebrated his seventieth birthday. His close friends organized a celebration dinner at the Bofinger brasserie, near la Bastille. The invitation card bore the following quote from Simone Weil: “A man who has something new to say can only be heard at first by those who like him.” In fact, snubbed by the “powers of the establishment,” Beaufret was always surrounded by friends and young auditors—a privilege that many professors holding prestigious chairs at the Sorbonne or elsewhere did not enjoy.
Yet, it was in that same year 1977 that the feud between Renaut and his former teacher was consummated and made public, through an article by the former and a reply by the latter, the following year. Was it really necessary for Beaufret himself to reply and to turn this response into a matter of self-justification? He could have simply endorsed a summary prepared by the “accused,” the translators of Questions IV. It would even have been possible for him to hide behind a supreme contempt and to allow them to reply without him. For some time, and increasingly in his last years, Beaufret never hesitated to engage in polemics that turned sour. In fact, he did everything in order to involve himself in polemics. Without saying he was entirely wrong, I must admit having perceived a certain uneasiness that I had trouble understanding at the time, but that had less to with the issues than with the modalities and circumstances. Did a respected master have to accept a sort of public duel with one of his close disciples? His pro domo defense put him on the defensive. Whatever the quality of the text, whatever the validity of the arguments and the liveliness of the formulations, there was something inappropriate or unbalanced, as when a family quarrel—all things being equal—is played out in the public sphere. There was, incidentally, a quasi-familial gesture in the way in which his most faithful students were named, the order corresponding apparently to seniority (Fédier, Hervier, Jacerme, Vezin, etc.). I was almost relieved that my name had not been omitted. The fact of finding myself at the end of the list with my friend Jean-Philippe Guinle in no way bothered me. I was neither the most senior nor the most faithful among Jean’s auditors. The only unusual fact was that we were connected “to the Condorcet period.” For (except for one or two times), Jean-Philippe and I had never taken classes at Condorcet. Although mentioned, the lectures from the École Normale did not seem to be really memorable! What counted most for Jean—this text shows it—was the slow work carried out in khâgne, with a small group of the faithful, all profoundly interested in Heidegger and in the renewed study of the great philosophers. One has to do justice to him: if Heidegger was at the center of these studies, it was in a discreet manner and in the background, for the courses never concentrated on him. It was indeed a question of the philosophical tradition, from one end to the other, undertaken in an admirable fashion.
During the winter of 1979–80, an unexpected opportunity, my unanticipated meeting with Constantin Tacou, provided the early impetus of the Cahier de l’Herne devoted to Heidegger. When Tacou proposed that I organize it, I was intrigued by the idea, but I quickly realized that it was something of a minefield. When I submitted the idea of the project to Jean Beaufret, without whom I could hardly see myself getting involved, I was met not by an obvious refusal but by a silence: my question was not understood or a pretext was found to change the subject. Wanting to have a clear idea on the matter, and no longer having the time to insist (it was January 1980 and I had to leave to teach in the United States), I asked François Vezin if he would be so kind as to clarify the situation. Three weeks later, while I was in Washington, I received a note from Vezin, who categorically advised me against undertaking the publication. No reason was given! This left me perplexed. Not wanting to argue with Jean, I decided to abandon the project. Only a few months later, while relating this story to Michel Haar, I suggested that he take over the project.
Why was this Cahier undesirable? Had someone assumed that I would not prepare it in a sufficiently “orthodox” manner? Did one prefer to adopt a “low profile” in order to avoid any return of the polemics surrounding the choice of translators or the political question? Whatever the answer might have been, the fact is that Jean Beaufret finally submitted a text when he noticed that the project was going through. Alas, he did not live to see the Cahier published. Perhaps, he would not have had an overly unfavorable opinion of it, for this Cahier offered a wide selection of excellent Heideggerian research from the time. Would it have been possible to provide a more striking testimony to the vitality of Heideggerian studies? I do not think so even today. Was it also necessary to give a voice to the most radical critiques (Bourdieu, Faye, Ferry, Renaut) as well as to the most resolute partisans (Fédier, Towarnicki, Vezin)? Probably. At that time, the choices, which were made by Michel Haar alone, seemed pertinent to me, even if—as far as I was concerned—I would personally have been tempted to go further in the direction of encouraging debate. As it stands, the Cahier still seems to me today to be a success—of course, it should be consulted in the original edition, and not in the paperback reprint (the cover of the latter carries the fallacious subtitle “complete edition,” although certain texts have been shortened and others added).
One will have noted that the Cahier appeared after Jean Beaufret’s death, which occurred on August 7, 1982. We must go back in time a bit, back to this event and before it. In accordance with his wishes, his resting place was Auzances, his birthplace. The funeral was simple, under the sun of the Creuse, and I remember a few moving scenes. The disciples, the friends (from the “inner circle” to Granel and Marion) were more numerous than the very small family. Notable above all was the presence of Heidegger’s son and grandson, Hermann and Detlev: this young man with long blond hair seemed to symbolize the passing of the torch. In this calm town in the Creuse, Parmenides’s name was heard, thanks to François Guinle, who read an excerpt from the poem before the open grave. Everything seemed to have returned to an originary peace. Yet I must ask myself: why was this life, which was for the most part happy, always inspired by work, transfigured by talent, and bathed in the happiness of teaching, why was it tarnished at its end by bitter polemics, nearly devastated by a barbaric event in which Beaufret himself never played any role? If there had been a “failing” or a compromise with Nazism, this was never the case with Jean. On the contrary, he had been in the Resistance. So? Having gone to extreme lengths in his defense of a prestigious friend, was this not clearly the origin of a problem and a darkening of the horizon? But it was also the greatness of an accepted solitude in the fidelity of friendship. Such was his destiny, sealed forever. Under the August sun and heat, these thoughts mingled with the pain of the farewell.
To follow a path in the field of thinking seemed to me the best way to remain faithful to Beaufret’s teaching. This is why Heidegger: From Metaphysics to Thought, which appeared in 1983, was dedicated to him without intending to strictly follow in his footsteps. As far as the many years of work that culminated in Powers of the Rational, the question posed itself differently. If the origin of the investigation was clearly a critical revisiting of the Heideggerian question concerning technology, it was intentionally unfolded in the techno-scientific “domain,” while varying the strategy of attack. The guiding thread was no longer the question of being, but rather a phenomenology of the effects of the powers of rationality, combined with its critical genealogy. The dialogue with Heidegger nonetheless reappeared when techno-science was thought as “sharing” (here one encounters Heidegger’s Geschick again but without its ontological unification and avoiding all dualism between the “authentic” and the “inauthentic”). The issue was, and still is, one of appreciating the destinal element that governed the “mastery and possession of nature,” without however failing to grasp the (ethical, political, poetical) threshold that the technicization of life, of time, and of language can and must encounter.
In that year 1985, when this book was published and the dialogue with Heideggerian thinking seemed to unfold calmly with respect to the main concepts, a major event would shake the philosophical intelligentsia to its core: after sixty years of waiting, Being and Time was finally published in French! But this was in the form of a daring pirate publication, by Emmanuel Martineau. Once again, controversy would rage around Heidegger . . .