THE GREATEST STORMS began to subside. Approaching the 1990s, we were sailing on relatively calm waters compared to the turbulence of the “Heidegger affair,” even if the thunder could still be heard in the distance.1
In October 1990, the translation of a much-awaited book by the historian Hugo Ott2 was published, a biography of Heidegger that was on the whole well received, although it contained no sensational revelations. Everyone recognized the seriousness of the historian from Freiburg, at least in terms of the establishment of the facts. Ott is not a philosopher and does not claim to be one (his work remains for the most part in the margins of Heidegger’s philosophical work and barely addresses the later Heidegger). There was, with respect to this book, a general consensus that contrasted with the recent rifts; one recognized its qualities, its serious tone: but this apparent agreement concealed profound disagreements in matters of interpretation. Some found that Farias’s thesis was confirmed3 (and they were not mistaken in certain cases, for example concerning Heidegger’s preparation for election to the rectorship); for others, Farias’s tendentious simplifications were refuted (and this was equally true particularly with respect to the reduction of Heidegger’s thought to the SA ideology or in relation to Rosenberg’s growing hostility against Heidegger—which Farias had minimized or concealed). Thus, unfavorable to Farias, but trying to present a balanced account of the debate, Jean-Michel Palmier wrote in his postface with regard to the rectorate episode: “The horizon in which Hugo Ott inscribes Heidegger’s Rectorate is profoundly different from that of Victor Farias, for whom nothing separates essentially the political positions of the philosopher from the most ordinary Nazism. What is interesting about Hugo Ott’s approach is that he rejects equally this simplification of the ‘Heidegger case’ and the presentation of the facts that Heidegger himself elaborated in 1945 in order to minimize his responsibility.”4 In an effort to be fair, Palmier distanced himself from his earlier analyses, which were clearly more lenient toward Heidegger.
Let us be clear: even if one takes the inevitable gaps in memory and the effects of indifference into account, neither the philosophical world nor that of the media—broader but less homogeneous—was able or willing to ignore what had happened. In fact, nothing would be as it was before. However, what was new was that sides were taken, positions declared, arguments exchanged, camps delineated, this time much more clearly, and, to all appearances, definitively. To whoever poses the question of Heidegger’s political engagement, we would respond with an understandably blasé air: “The case is closed, learn the facts!” With that, the interest in Heidegger’s politics would subside;5 or, if it remained, it would be at a more essential or more radical level than that of the polemics triggered by Farias’s book.6 It was apart from any publicity, in a journal with an unfortunately small distribution,7 that in 1990 the debate received without a doubt its most intellectually honest and rigorous treatment: Jean Quillien, a disciple and former assistant of Éric Weil at Lille, was unwilling to simply pit his “commendable” mentor, rationalist and democrat, against the villain Heidegger, a collaborator with Nazism who was opposed to reason, modernity, and democracy. His point of departure was rather “the state of French philosophy”8 during its very crisis: its persistent silence on “the Heidegger case” and the remarkable article Weil published in 1947, which was reinforced by a multifaceted existentialist and structuralist fascination for a Heideggerian thought treated as oracular and divorced from its social-historical context. Like Weil, Quillien labored to respect, on the one hand, the coherence and dignity proper to Heidegger’s philosophy, and to grasp, on the other, the “logic” of the personal engagement of Heidegger the man, both in relation to his own work and in continuity with an entire German tradition, without ignoring the climate of the ’30s. One should not confuse, as Farias did, Heidegger’s philosophy with Nazism: we should learn to distinguish between Nazi ideology, on the one hand, and a certain philosophy of National Socialism, on the other hand. With respect to Heidegger’s addresses and proclamations in 1933, Weil wrote: “It is Nazi language, Nazi morality, Nazi thought (sit venia verbo). It is not Nazi philosophy.”9 Quillien disagreed with Weil on this point: while conceding that Weil could not go further in 1947, he declared himself in disagreement with Weil’s idea that the connection between Sein und Zeit and Nazism was arbitrary (and thus that it was necessary “to save Heidegger’s philosophy, as philosophy, from Heidegger himself.”)10 How are we to understand the meaning of this connection without reducing it to Farias’s hasty assumptions? By inscribing Heidegger in a certain German tradition (that he brings to its “unsurpassable completion”11) that, from Luther to Jacobi and Schopenhauer, challenged the domination of Reason, just as Hitler, in another way, sought to destroy the political rationality of the enlightenment thinkers. Heidegger was not an existentialist, as Weil still believed, but an essentialist who intended to think the pure violence of being, prior to and beyond onto-theology: a radicalism that accomplishes itself only “by making its own impossibility explicit.”12 Quillien’s assessment of Heidegger’s philosophy was thus quite severe, much more so than Weil’s, but at the end of an argumentation that respected the coherence of a thought whose unsettling grandeur, resituated in its historical context, was recognized nonetheless. If it fascinated French thought, always favorably disposed toward a critical radicality, it was because of its destructive (or deconstructive) power. This would explain the silence in relation to Weil’s work and his promise of construction (or reconstruction) of an ethical and political rationality. Would the end of the century allow us to turn this page? Such was the hope formulated in the conclusion: may French philosophy reconnect with positivist thought!
More generally, beyond such an account, we saw emerge, in a climate in which there was little interest in Heidegger, a number of camps that were not so much hostile as disinterested (or feigned disinterest):13 on the one hand, there were the specialists, who worked among themselves and whose only ambition was to be recognized as such by a limited audience, that is, by other specialists, their disciples, their students, and so on; on the other hand, there were innumerable people who took Heidegger both as an established author and as “cursed” (to what degree? that is another matter), people who would be the source of interrogations, accusations, and questions that were more or less relevant, but whose central axis seemed to be what they took to be Heidegger’s hostility toward the contemporary world, its science and its technology. In this way, one would observe the curious spectacle of scientists, or “neophytes,” none of whom had read even one line of Heidegger, but who found it “fashionable” to mention his name (or to mention a thought that one could attribute to him), at times to legitimize their own positions, but more often as a foil. Could Heidegger not be allowed to be a philosopher “like any other”? One should not forget this question, after having taken note of the stabilization or “normalization” at the university and in scholarship, as well as a more serene climate.14
Within such a favorable climate, we can identify, in 1996–97, two very different accounts. The first was directed to a wide audience: the biography by Rüdiger Safranski. The French translation of his book appeared in 1996, just two years after its publication in German.15 Neither a militant like Farias nor a historian like Ott, Safranski—who was already well-known due to a successful biography about Schopenhauer16—addressed himself to a wide audience. Well-informed, lively, and clear, his book did not offer anything new to specialists, neither with respect to documentation nor with respect to philosophical analysis. In this respect, nevertheless, he made a greater effort than Hugo Ott, and often with a real pedagogical talent, to clarify for his reader the thinking of the philosopher (even managing to evoke the “Zen” aspect of the elder Heidegger).17 He was able, without being overly sympathetic, to focus on what definitively mattered in Heidegger’s work: the passion of questioning and of “showing.”18 However “journalistic” this biography seemed to the specialists, it did fill a void: for the first time, the French reader had a sufficiently complete and impartial idea of the destiny of a thinker, who, despite his professional role and worldwide celebrity, perhaps retained the uncanniness of a “savage from the South Seas,” with mysterious inscriptions on his body (or corpus, in the present case).19
Another testimony related to the “Heidegger case” was the unusual publication of two short essays by Marcel Conche,20 which were situated at a more fundamental level and necessarily addressed to a limited group of specialists, colleagues, and friends. However, the limited nature of the distribution of these essays did not detract from their importance: the author, a distinguished and original philosopher whose work is becoming more recognized, was in no way a “Heideggerian,” whether by his formation, doctrinal orientation, or style. His position, which attested to his intellectual independence, was all the more remarkable. It is necessary to consider the two essays together. Although one could believe that the second text corrected the first, it in fact completed it, not in order to condemn or approve Heidegger’s political error but to understand it.21 Heidegger resistant: did this title not cede too much to the belated defense of the philosopher, arguing that he had undertaken a “spiritual resistance” to National Socialism? Conche conceded that he himself should have put the epithet “resistant” in quotation marks. However, his purpose was “to exonerate Heidegger’s allegiance to National Socialism for the simple reason that he was innocent of what was essential to National Socialism: racism and anti-Semitism.”22 On this point, Conche went as far as to separate himself from Éric Weil, for whom he worked as an assistant at Lille. While recognizing that Heidegger was not a “biological materialist,” Weil nevertheless characterized Heidegger’s “short speeches” in 1933–34 as “Nazi pieces.” Conche did not agree: he argued precisely to show that, although incontestably nationalist and placing his faith in Hitler, Heidegger in no way gave in to what constituted the heart of the Nazi ideology, namely, racist ideology: “The notion of ‘race’ plays no role in Heidegger’s thought.”23 More importantly, in his “Rectoral Address” and other writings from the “dark period”—as objectionable as they were—Heidegger clearly distinguished the tasks of philosophical thinking from the Nazi ideological claims: he separated Dasein from any racial or other determination. He rejected the notion of a “politicized science,” refused to reduce philosophy to a “worldview,” and his relation to language was not “technical,” dogmatic, or based on will as was Hitler’s, but rather one of questioning. Even his justification of the departure from the League of Nations conveyed no imperialist sentiment.24 When one examines the texts carefully and without prejudice, including those concerning Nietzsche and Christianity, Heidegger was in no way a Nazi: “He is rather aligned with free thinking.”25 Why, then, his relation to the party? He believed, at least until the summer of 1934, that he could have an influence on the course of events from within and that the “movement” could be transformed: “That was his error.”26 That error is incontestable, but there was nothing criminal in it, especially if one considers the state of Germany at the time, the scope of the illusions widely shared concerning Hitler, and so on. Did certain intellectuals have the tendency to “condemn” Heidegger? One can gladly agree with Marcel Conche, whose intellectual honesty and independence deserve our respect. One is more skeptical when he went as far as to justify Heidegger’s silence or “quasi silence” (including posthumously) with respect to the specific horrors of Nazism. For example, was the Holocaust Hitler’s personal decision alone? Did it not have something to do with National Socialism “as such”?27 There is certainly a discussion to be had, well beyond Heidegger’s personal case, which in any case remains much less interesting than the contribution of his fundamental thinking. Even if the late intervention of Marcel Conche can seem regressive, insofar as it revives the endless discussion of the scope of Heidegger’s personal responsibilities, its quality, its precision, and its high level of analysis gives us a document with which we will have to reckon.
One cannot say the same about the volume published in 1995 by François Fédier, entitled Écrits Politiques, 1933–1966,28 which went almost unnoticed—a surprising fact after so many polemics. In addition to the fact that most of the texts in question were already known, the text corresponded neither to a volume in the Collected Works nor strictly speaking to a little book published separately in Germany by Herman Heidegger in 1983.29 Including the translation of this latter publication, it contained the Spiegel interview, but also texts of self-justification or of reflection that were not explicitly political.30 The title, Écrits Politiques, 1933–1966, does not quite reflect the contents. More strange still is the composition of the volume. Over 322 pages, almost half (counting the notes) are by François Fédier. In his long preface, he developed a genuine defense in favor of the accused entitled “Revenir à plus de décence” [A return to greater decency]. One would not expect him to make any other case. But does such a publication not offer us the opportunity to establish a genuine account of the debate, to elevate it philosophically and depart from the narrow context of the problem of Heidegger’s personal guilt? Not only did Fédier limit himself exclusively to the famous “ten months,” not only did he not envisage in any way the problem of the relations or connections between the work and the political proclamations, and did not dwell on the question of the persistent belief in the “internal truth and greatness of the movement,” but he devoted two-thirds of his preface to a historical, academic, and sententious analysis, an exposé from which Heidegger was practically absent, as he addressed the crisis of the Weimar regime, Hitler’s diabolical cunning, various betrayals, and so on. On the basis of all these historical references, which diluted the Heidegger case, he emphasized that there were extenuating circumstances that led the philosopher to believe in Hitler. We learn for example that “the situation was at the very least confused.”31 No doubt about that, but it is all the more surprising that at the end of his heavy-handed defense, the lawyer pronounced the most severe moral judgments with respect to his “client”: not only did he make a grave error of judgment, but he had indeed “tarnished”32 and “shamed” himself.33 What was the criterion for this sudden moral condemnation? We know nothing else about that alleged shame that Heidegger experienced during his life except on the basis of this “testimony.” Fédier took great pains to maintain that Heidegger belonged to the party without enthusiasm and even that “he did not want to be rector [sic].” But what did this poor man—whom we are told was neither a hero nor a coward—want?34 Was he a follower or was he the thinker of the will and Spirit? Is such a psychological judgment appropriate for the greatest philosopher of the century? Was it really without enthusiasm, and without intending it that he proclaimed that “the Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law”?35 If this declaration provoked shame in Heidegger himself for some time, why was the author of the preface so forgiving when others were so severe with respect to the Master? Is it only a lawyer who can accuse his client in his absence? It is in fact a strategy well known in legal procedures that an important accusation that is accepted allows the occultation of other points or the indulgence of the court in general. In the present case, does the matter receive the treatment it deserves? Is it what one expected from this Gallimard publication? Does it guarantee the seriousness, impartiality, and “decency” requested by the author of the preface, even though he managed to black out [TN: English in the original] the considerable debate concerning Heidegger and Nazism, both within and outside France?36 By concluding his preface on purely psychological considerations concerning the person of Heidegger, Fédier reduced the debate to the level of 1946 when Sartre wrote: “He lacked character. That’s all!” That is to take the reader of today for a fool or uninformed. Let us conclude, with respect to this publication, with a significant example: the text entitled “The menace that threatens science.”37 In principle, the idea of translating and publishing this very interesting text, until that time unpublished in French and even less known in Germany, was excellent. But the result leaves something to be desired. The translation of the title “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft” by “The menace that threatens science” is at the very least one-sided: literally “The menace of science” conveys the ambiguity between the subjective genitive and the objective genitive (the menace that comes from science and that which turns against it). Why was the subtle ambivalence of the original expression not respected? Was it in order to suggest that for Heidegger in 1937, it was Nazism that represented a menace weighing on science? In perplexity, let us return to the text: it is Heidegger himself who speaks of an “internal menace” [innere Bedrohung] and writes: “The true menace of science comes from itself and comes through itself.”38 To translate in a “detached” manner as did Fédier, by occulting the ambiguity of the genitive, blocks access to the richness of Heidegger’s thought in a text that is still relevant.39
It is of course also necessary to know how to situate oneself at another level and to do justice to serious works, which, in various ways and degrees, have advanced the critical understanding of Heidegger’s work in France, at the same time that new translations were being published. To consider that these works were the result of a sort of erudition is not at all pejorative, if it is true—as Chamfort thought—that “a lack of philosophy leads to a disdain for erudition; an abundance of philosophy leads one to appreciate it.”40
The chronology that the publication and the reception of fundamental works follows is not the same as that of “scandals” and “affairs”: we are once again concerned with the long-term perspective, while earlier we were situated in a “short-term chronology.” In fact, this disparity of rhythms allows us to refer again conveniently to a date slightly prior to the publication of Farias’s book: six months earlier, in April 1987, a book appeared titled Le Tournant dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger,41 which addressed what is no doubt the most central difficulty of the work, the meaning of the famous Kehre. While this word is not the most mysterious one of Heidegger’s terminology, it is sufficiently challenging to its interpreters. If the translation by tournant [turn] seems the most acceptable, the question to be determined is whether the turn is a bend or represents a complete about-face. Following Gadamer’s reference to Swabian usage, the word represents “the bend in the path that goes up a mountain,”42 but it is obvious that a Kehre can also be “negotiated” on the way down. The actual usage of the term is less rustic: it is part of skiing vocabulary, Heidegger’s preferred sport . . .
The semantic debates do not engage the problem of interpretation. Why accord so much importance to the “turn” to the point of giving it such a celebrated status? It is indeed well-known, ever since the Master himself, in the “Letter on Humanism,”43 and then in his preface to William Richardson’s book,44 recognized the pertinence of the term in the evolution of his path of thought. Henceforth, between “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II,” following Richardson’s terminology, which was rapidly adopted in France,45 the “turn” became the key word for any research into this work. Even the adversaries, who refused any strictly internal interpretation—Bourdieu, Faye, Ferry, and Renaut—refer to this “turn” for their own interpretation while denouncing the pitfalls of Heidegger’s “self-interpretation.” Is the only choice between the latter, on the one hand, and “external” interpretations” that were mostly biographical, on the other hand?
Jean Grondin’s study offered a more subtle approach. With a concern for clarity, he took as his priority texts in which the Kehre was explicitly in question, and established that contrary to the chronology proposed by Heidegger himself (1937), and following instead the explicit indications and the internal logic of some of Heidegger’s texts, this “bending” appeared much earlier: as early as the incompletion of the project of Being and Time and as early as the summer of 1927 (the 1930 lecture “On the Essence of Truth” was also of pivotal importance). Now, the question of the determination of the date is only preliminary to understanding what is at stake. It is on this sensitive point that Grondin did a precise and useful work, since he showed that the very meaning of this “turn” changed for Heidegger himself: first, a search for a temporal foundation of ontology (as well as for the existent henceforth understood “ek-statically”), this movement of thought then became a questioning of subjectivity and of metaphysics, a quest for “the truth of essence” (Wesen), and finally, the discovery that being itself is the origin and the site of the turn. From a formal perspective, one can thus distinguish five forms or “aspects” of the turn (the “vulgar” or biographical conception, the thematic conception, the “ontochronical”46 turn, the reversal [retournement] of the essence of truth into the truth of essence,47 and finally the turn in being itself).48 But one can, after all, still recognize a continuity: “This multiplicity does not exclude a unity.”49 There is a unity of the quest for the truth of being, first in the context of Dasein, then on the basis of the deconstruction of the meaning of being as presence, which would lead to a more originary site, the clearing [Lichtung] of being resituated in its own withdrawal. Grondin succeeded then in reconstituting Heidegger’s itinerary, and in maintaining his distance from the “self-interpretation” that tended to harmonize an interrupted work retrospectively. Heidegger, far from doing an about-face, radicalized his questioning from 1927, while giving this radicalization its own truth and style.50
A fruitful work, this study nonetheless encounters two objections. On the one hand, it lent, to an excessive degree, an “intrinsic reality” to the notion of “the turn” without preserving sufficient critical distance in relation to its hermeneutic limits. On the other hand, by maintaining that there is a philosophy of the Kehre and by speaking constantly of the “later philosophy” of Heidegger, Grondin maintained a position that was very close to Gadamer’s. But he contradicted Heidegger himself, who rejected the use of the label of philosophy to refer to his thought. It would have been necessary to thematically justify this questioning of the differentiation between meditative thinking and philosophy itself. Is it too fine a point? We do not think so: it is indeed the question of the overcoming of metaphysics that is thus at issue. Either one follows Heidegger in his quest for a nonmetaphysical thinking and the “turn” is recognized (whatever its avatars) as an initial breakthrough preparing a destinal transformation, or one maintains that it restores philosophy as a radical ontology of finitude and of temporality, but in this case the “turn” was only the displacement of difficulties that were not really overcome. One discerns that Grondin leaned to the latter position, but his conclusion remained excessively elliptical: “As a figure of a new philosophical paradigm, the turn always orients the Kehre to a reason to which it corresponds.”51
It is also from the hermeneutic perspective (but this time under the implicit authority of Ricoeur rather than Gadamer) that a monumental study by Jean Greisch52 appeared some years later, offering for the first time in French more than a literal commentary on Being and Time, “a thorough interpretation.” Although it is obviously impossible to give a detailed account of this highly technical work, we should at least characterize its spirit. The project is not only very ambitious: it is new, because it is a question for the first time of reflecting comprehensively on texts that, for the most part, were not translated into French. In this case, we are in a period prior to Being and Time. The publication of the courses of the young Heidegger at Freiburg and at Marburg allows us to retrace the path that led to the major work of 1927. An expert with respect to the Collected Works, Greisch can thus offer a close reading of Being and Time that is enriched by all the new information that allows for a detailed reconstitution of Heidegger’s itinerary during the “phenomenological decade” (1919 to 1928). Following the text, paragraph by paragraph, Greisch undertakes to “render the ‘ground plan’ of Being and Time intelligible.”53 In this way, those who make the effort of carefully following the work will see, if not the difficulties, many of the mysteries and strange passages disappear. Greisch’s concern is pedagogical (his book was originally a course) and he manages this task by avoiding jargon, by proposing schemas and even—a stimulating innovation—“excerpts” from texts (Heidegger’s and others) to support his commentary. Faced with formidable translation difficulties, he proceeded with common sense and without bias, reconsidering the key terms of the original language and explaining them patiently, without hiding his preference for Martineau’s54 translation, but also citing Vezin and sometimes even agreeing with him.55 Another innovative aspect of this work is the constant reference to the contributions of several generations of admiring readers or critics of Heidegger’s major works, from Gilbert Ryle to Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur.56 The reader is holding “a strong hand” (with access to primary as well as secondary sources) such that one can understand how the young Heidegger made the transition from a hermeneutic of facticity to an explicitly ontological undertaking (as early as 1923), so as to arrive at a work that was “incomplete in a twofold sense,”57 and finally (in 1928) to arrive at a first “self-interpretation” of this “failure.” The repetition of the question of being did not emerge fully developed from the brain of Heidegger: the emergence of this question was gradual, but that did not deprive it of its profound interest. Certainly, the work was in some sense demystified, but was in no way diminished in terms of its importance—far from it. It was first approached as what it has become, a great classic, akin to Aristotle’s Metaphysics.58 Jean Greisch took a salutary distance from the French quarrels; and one can affirm without exaggerating that Greisch undeniably advanced research in France. At the international level, only the work of Theodore Kisiel59 can be compared to it, at least from the point of view of detailed textual research, since, philosophically, it is Greisch who seems to be a better resource. But his rupture with a certain French “tradition” is perhaps excessive. It is significant that Jean Beaufret is cited only once and in passing.60
Nonetheless, henceforth every student and every reader of good will would have a solid research tool available to them (which is, however, not the only one to be recommended).61 Being and Time is no longer to be considered as an esoteric work—a strange and unapproachable hermetic block, “fallen from an obscure disaster,” as was its legend over the course of too many decades for the vast majority of the French public.
At the beginning of 1992, the French translation of an essay written by Heidegger thirty years earlier, while returning from a cruise in Greece, was published with an attractive cover.62 This short and serene text contrasts with the austerity of the vast majority of the academic works by Heidegger: it is quite readable, thanks to Vezin’s translation, which avoids in this case the audacious neologisms found in his version of Being and Time.63 Is the anecdotal relevant to the essential? In part, certainly; but we will see that more than a detour, these sojourns are revelatory.
Why refer to this publication as a fragile in-between? First, insofar as it does not relate directly to the principal corpus, and constitutes a sort of intermediary, it constantly engages the scientific and technological destiny of the contemporary world (multiple allusions would confirm this): it thus operates in an interval that the wide range of the work (between the ontological thematic and its technological forgetting) has not completely addressed. It is also a fragile in-between for Heidegger himself, who was uncomfortably suspended between two images of Greece: on the one hand, the ideal Greece that he sought in vain at Olympus, that he imagined at Delphi, and that he found at Delos; and on the other hand, the all-too-real Greece damaged by unregulated development, invaded and almost overrun by the tourist industry.
It can also be considered an in-between from another perspective: between the “intimate, familial character”64 of these pages (written by Heidegger for his wife Elfride and offered to her on the occasion of her seventieth birthday), preserving the esotericism of a thought following its own path, and the public role that the philosopher agreed to play, more than once (from the engagement of 1933 to the posthumous Der Spiegel interview). As marginal as this writing may seem, it represented a sort of pleasant pause for the author, and for the reader, the unexpected occasion to hear something more personal.
Heidegger confessed to having hesitated for some time before deciding to take this trip, which had been planned in advance with his friend Erhart Kästner. The hesitations and the doubts are perceptible in the narrative itself, at Venice, Corfu, Ithaca, and even Olympus. In several cases, for example at Rhodes, but also at Cos and Patmos, Heidegger refused to leave the boat. A difficult traveler? Actually, Heidegger was not a traveler at all! A thinker inhabited by Hölderlinian Greece, as well as by the unforgettable words and visions drawn from Homer, Pindar, and the tragic poets, he was terribly afraid of being disappointed. Which lover of ancient Greece has not felt this fear during his or her first trip? What is less banal is not that Heidegger waited until he was seventy-three years of age to undergo the experience and to take this “risk,” it is rather that he had harbored the hope (the illusion?) within himself of encountering that which is “properly Greek” through a simple visit to the principal sites in the context of a comfortable cruise.65 There is something touching, and almost pathetic (or irritating?) in his stubbornness to avoid what could be instructive, picturesque, or indeed moving in the life of the Greek people today (in distrusting the Mycenaeans66 and even—although in careful terms—the strangeness and frivolity of the Minoans in Crete).67 He avoided as well the human, all-too-human, activities that created the life and the destiny of an ingenious, aggressive, voyaging people, in order to almost exclusively attach himself to a certain ideal of the Hellenic divinity, an ideal that was purified by Hölderlin, and thematized by the works of Walter F. Otto.68 He finally found his sacred places—even if through tenuous etymological analysis—on the Island of Delos (where the mind was “occupied with thinking the secret of Aletheia”69) and at Egine, at the temple of Aphaia: “what determined the sojourn of the Greeks in the world and their relationship with everything present showed itself again around the temple: namely aletheia, the unconcealed concealment.”70
Is it too easy to object that Heidegger carried his Greece with him, an ideal homeland that shelters Aletheia, and in which he could find only in a few fleeting visions? He himself raised the objection: is it only an arbitrary representation or romanticism?71 Obviously, there was no need to go to these sites to find this “original” Greece—an interpretive assumption that was acquired deep within himself after many years and that remained a hapax, which, for the most part, was not shared by classicists. This sojourn only played a role of illustrating belatedly his thoughts on Greece and within—perfectly respectable but quite “personal”—limits. Furthermore, if one reconsiders the thread of the Heideggerian argumentation that determines the theme of the forgetting of being, discerned as early as Parmenides, one is constrained to observe that the Greeks themselves never succeeded in thinking aletheia, the key word supposed to rule their existence in terms of “unconcealment”—but instead always understood it in terms of the soundness of the statement.72 It was thus through the centuries, and not directly with their past lives, that Heidegger claimed to engage again the essential unthought of that existence. How could this purely intellectual matter not be even more fragile, in attempting to encounter such places—those inspired days, charged with grandeur and destiny, prior to any explicit philosophy? Is this “properly Greek essence,” which the thinker carries within him, and believes he knows better than the Greeks themselves, not sheltered within the Greek language itself rather than in some places or some ruins?
It was a learned sojourn then, since place reveals its “truth” only in the light of unforgettable words and through the perspective of (or in spite of) a philosophy that conveyed almost straightaway the forgetting of that for which it was an original ethos. It was indeed a sojourn that was much more uncanny than the wise watercolors of Elfriede Heidegger, and the occasionally prosaic clarifications of the Master himself, would indicate. It was in the end a personal sojourn, a hesitant sojourn, reassured and enlightened by certain sightings (Delos, Delphi, and the Acropolis—especially its museum).
One would wrongly object that we have forgotten the other pole, that of techno-science. We have not. We just left a serene and reassured thinker. However, is there not in this work, apparent in many passages, a more distressed aspect that was unsettling for him as well as for us? In contrast with a text increasingly influenced by this “inceptual” Greece, one can discern the dark web of uncompromising critiques and hostile reactions against the technological world and the science that engendered it. There are numerous instances of irritations,73 taken up sarcastically by Jacques Derrida: “Following the footsteps of Heidegger, who, near the very same Greek orthodox temple (Kaisariani monastery) did not fail to indict yet again in his Aufenthalte, not only Rome, along with its Church, its law, its state and its theology, but technology, machines, tourism, tourist attractions—and above all photography, the ‘operating of cameras and video cameras’ which, in organized tours, ‘replaces’ the authentic experience of the stay or the sojourn.”74
The many critics of Heidegger were all too happy to conclude that his philosophy was “antimodern” and even driven by a genuine hatred toward science and technology. Was Derrida among them? Certainly not. By advocating and practicing a kind of voyage resolutely opposed to the sage path of Heidegger toward an ultimate Appropriation (it suffices to read Counterpath to confirm this), he was able to paradoxically indicate in Heidegger’s work “a completely unheard of sense of voyage: neither literal, nor proper, the originary opening of all paths, of all destinations and all destinies.”75 But this unusual path—so elusive in the too prosaic and “ontical” course of the Sojourns—can in no way be reduced to a metaphor (too metaphysical): it is through a critical reconsideration of the most essential themes of Heidegger’s thought that it is necessary to both follow it and question it.
Thus, an important discussion on the meaning of the destiny of the West as metaphysical sending (Geschick) is outlined here. The least that one can say is that Sojourns, accessible to a wide audience, is not one of Heidegger’s more rigorous texts on the question of the essence of modern technology, in which precisely it is a matter of overcoming the subjective and arbitrary character of “attitudes” or opinions, whether optimistic or pessimistic, pro or contra.76 Let us not forget that these Sojourns were the work of an elderly person and that the author did not really intend the manuscript for publication. It is entirely understandable that his wife wanted to mark the one-hundredth birthday of the Master with this pious publication. The best intentions nevertheless have their limits, and these—which are incontestable, whatever the charm of a few pages—remind us that the greatest works are not always at their optimal level. But it would be equally obtuse to refuse to heed this warning: “Modern technology together with the scientific industrialization of the world is about to obliterate any possibility of a sojourn.”77 A questioning thus emerges: What is a sojourn? What are its conditions? Has our technological civilization eliminated its possibility? These are interrogations that arise because of science and technology.
In the course of a half-century of the reception of Heidegger’s thought in France, we have seen the evocation of numerous themes, and noted that nearly every intellectual circle was affected in various ways. Nevertheless, a vast domain still has not been affected by these debates: science and epistemology. And there is nothing surprising about this: even if he took a few courses in physics when he was young, and remained current in the developments in contemporary physics to the point of discussing it with Heisenberg,78 Heidegger never presented himself—and with good reason—as an expert in these matters. Above all, the principal axis of his thought—the question of the truth of being—completely diverges from contemporary scientific research. If the majority of French scientists must have heard of Heidegger, either at the end of their secondary studies or through the press or the media, neither the name nor the work seemed to particularly retain their attention. One exception confirmed the rule: the controversy provoked by one of Heidegger’s statements: “Science does not think.” Even if the immense majority of the scientific community was hardly troubled (budget cuts, for example, were a matter of greater concern), this provocative phrase provoked a kind of mini-uproar, many misunderstandings, and perhaps an actual debate.
Must we see in Heidegger’s formula a scandalous provocation against science, or a useful warning? The question is obviously worth posing, and all the more seriously since science has acquired a dominant position in our civilization. We are going, however, to establish that for the most part Heidegger’s statement was cited out of its original context and in ignorance of the meaning that it held for its author. It is thus useful to reconstitute the context clearly and elucidate this understanding, so as to clarify the stakes of the discussion that would follow.
René Thom dates “Heidegger’s chilling condemnation” in 1929.79 This is the date of the famous lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” One will search in vain for the phrase in question,80 which is in fact to be found at the beginning of the course given in 1951–52, “What Is Called Thinking?” Here is the passage:
Science does not think. This is a shocking statement. Let the statement be shocking, even though we immediately add the supplementary statement that nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking. That fashion, however, is genuine and consequently fruitful only after the gulf has become visible that lies between thinking and the sciences, lies there unbridgeably. There is no bridge here-only the leap. Hence there is nothing but mischief in all the makeshift ties and asses’ bridges by which men today would set up a comfortable commerce between thinking and the sciences.81
Two things are evident from the reading of this passage: first, the use of the shocking formulation was a deliberate strategy; second, Heidegger absolutely did not want to deny that science involves a specific mode of thinking, a denial that would be an absurd falsehood. How then can the “provocation” that claims that “science does not think” be justified? Are we not obliged to recognize the obvious: science exercises a rational activity that implies deliberative consciousness, hypotheses, reasoning, verifications, and so on: all forms of thinking.
Heidegger’s position seems even more radical, and paradoxical, if one wants to consider that he affirms, from the beginning of his course, that philosophy itself does not think,82 and that, in a general sense, we still do not think! What is such a thinking that is so lofty that it seems almost inaccessible and eludes our mental skills and our ingenuity? Without any doubt, it is a meditation on what is essential. But what is that? It is a thinking of what metaphysics and science have not thought: their “unthought.” It is in no way a question of rejecting the knowledge and representations that have permitted the attainment of a high level of knowledge and culture, but is a question of recognizing their limit and their scope in regard to the truth and the destiny of being. To think in this sense is not only to know, but to appraise, to reflect, or to gather through memory. The consonance of Gedachtes [“what is thought”], of Gedächtnis [“memory”] and of Dank [“gratefulness,” “thanks”] ensures the singularity and the dignity of “thought” in the sense that Heidegger understood it henceforth, by differentiating it from metaphysical activity itself.
Whether one follows Heidegger or not in this elaboration—a careful exaltation of a meditation on the truth of being—it becomes clear that the “shock formulation” supposes, in order to be understood, the understanding of the specific meaning that Heidegger gave to Denken. We can identify here an explicitly circular path that is stated at the beginning of the course: “We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think.”83
What is thereby clarified is Heidegger’s notion that a “leap” is necessary in order to enter into the circle, as well as the refusal of all the “beaten paths,” that is to say, passages that are too rapid, too direct, and too rhetorical or opportunist, between the sciences and philosophical discourse.
Without wishing to minimize the new meaning given to Denken, let us note that neither the theme of the “leap” nor that of the radical difference between science and a philosophy worthy of the name is original. For Hegel, it was indeed necessary to leap from the representative sphere to that of speculative thought; and philosophy is different from specific sciences in that it is not directly concerned with an object delimited by a region of reality, but concerns itself with the Whole and its truth.84 Kant already emphasized at the beginning of the Prolegomena that philosophy is distinguished from other sciences by its difficulty in establishing its constitutive limits, in an indisputable manner. The positive reverse of this aporia involves the reconsideration of its own presuppositions, a critique of the conditions of possibility that the sciences cannot undertake with such radicality.
These clarifications help us understand that Heidegger’s provocative statement not only has its own coherence but can be read in such a way that it becomes reinscribed in a long philosophic tradition (going as far back as Plato to the extent that all the particular sciences must be understood and oriented in terms of the “anhypothetical” epistēmē of the Good). Certainly, one can judge the “superior” tone adopted by Heidegger to be excessively peremptory. But is it necessary to neglect the questions raised by (on the occasion of) his “provocation”: Does science reflect upon its foundations? Does it reflect upon its effects?
These questions preoccupied René Thom. Far from opposing Heidegger, he cited him in the interest of helping or supporting his own attempt at a speculative renewal of the contemporary scientific project. Undertaking an inventory of the scientific and technological progress realized since 1950 (taking account of the fact that since that date humanity has devoted more of its resources to science than it did during the entirety of history), he noticed a diminution of technological inventiveness (that he referred to as a bricolage), and he diagnosed above all an “epistemological impasse.”85 For Thom, contemporary science describes rather than explains; its epistemological deficiency is due to its obsession with immediately useful results, in defiance of any theoretical knowledge. “Science must learn to think again.”86 A renewal of “natural philosophy”87 is necessary to reverse the decline toward a catastrophic drift that is both technical and obscurantist.
There certainly remains a gap between Thom’s conception of thought and that of Heidegger. The former, faithful to the enlightened tradition of the Renaissance, remained attentive to science, found its inspiration from it while orienting it at the same time, granting theory its entire interpretive dignity; we have seen the latter appeal to a “leap” that renders it more independent, but also more secret. Even if the comparison cannot prevent a misunderstanding, it was made possible by a common critique of the domination of technical efficiency. In fact, when Thom refers to “What Is Metaphysics,” it is not entirely inadvertent: his own point of view agrees with the project of a regrounding of the positive sciences in a philosophy that would be revitalized. One surmises that he was ready to subscribe to Heidegger’s position in 1929 (“the rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has atrophied”88) and even perhaps to the call for a fundamental philosophical renewal: “Only if science exists on the basis of metaphysics can it fulfill in ever-renewed ways its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge, but to disclose in ever renewed fashion, through a revelation that is constantly renewed, the entire expanse of the truth of nature and history.”89 Nonetheless, in Paraboles and Catastrophes, after having cited Heidegger’s formulation with praise, Thom also imputes the failure of “natural philosophy”90 to the excessive claims of certain philosophers (Hegel above all), by clarifying that he would not want to be transformed into a “crypto-Heideggerian”!91 It is, according to him, the task of mathematics to provide the models of a morphological theory worthy of the name.
In this debate on contemporary science and its future, the antithesis of Thom’s position was represented by epistemologists or scientists who were completely indifferent to the very thought of Heidegger, and who found in their rejection of the formulation, “Science does not think,” an occasion to rail against what they perceived as an irrational antiscientism. Thus Dominique Lecourt,92 followed on this point by Jacques Bouveresse,93 maintained that Heidegger was the victim of a strictly neo-positivist conception of science: the science that “does not think” is that of Carnap and the Vienna Circle (at least its “inner circle,” because some—like Schlick—assigned a fundamental role to philosophy).94 Thinking he was criticizing science, Heidegger in fact was taking issue with its stylized or even caricatured image, which had been bypassed, for the most part, by contemporary science.
Jean-Michel Salanski also shared this critical perspective, although he intended to add to his refutation an account of Heidegger’s hermeneutic contribution. In an article simply titled “Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht” (Science does not think),95 he studied Heidegger’s provocative phrase on several levels: in the context of fundamental ontology, it means that the scientific project is always regional with respect to the fundamental concern of philosophy; in order to understand the essence of thought, it is necessary to go to a more essential level, that of the hermeneutic envisaged according to the “circular” conception that Heidegger presented first in paragraph 63 of Being and Time and then rethought and deepened in many reconsiderations in his later work. This hermeneutic model of “thinking as elucidation-that-assumes-the-circle”96 is not decisive for philosophy alone; it also offers resources to account for the aporias and interrogations that twentieth-century science, contrary to what Heidegger claimed, had elaborated. The point of contention occurred when Salanski turned the Heideggerian hermeneutic against its exclusion of science. For Salanski, it was possible and even desirable to develop a “formal hermeneutic” exploiting the most speculative reflections of logic, contemporary mathematics, and physics. This research perspective, developed elsewhere,97 aimed to oppose a more open and deliberately “technological” hermeneutics to Heidegger’s own “literal” hermeneutics (which was still too attached to a theological model).98
The debate did not always have this theoretical dimension. The irritation of a certain Claude Allègre during a radio interview with Alain Finkielkraut testifies to this.99 When Finkielkraut cited various critiques of science formulated by Jünger, Heidegger, and Henry, his interlocutor did not respond regarding the contents, but only addressed one of the authors cited: “Let us not speak of Heidegger, who never understood anything related to science, or anything else for that matter. Personally I find it difficult to understand Heidegger’s popularity in the philosophical world, including his positions with respect to the Jews, which is lamentable.”100 Do we expect a great scientist to be able to speak about what he does not know? One would expect that Allègre had read more than one line of Heidegger in order for him to claim that Heidegger knew nothing about anything. There were no arguments given, even concerning Heidegger’s (non)comprehension of science.101 What followed from Allègre deserves to be cited, but does not merit a commentary: “I think a man is a unity. I do not want to believe that a man who missed the point on such a serious problem can think in a proper manner on other subjects. This is my point of view on Heidegger. I have no interest in debating it.”102 After this refusal to enter into discussion, “the correct thinking” having determined scientific correctness [TN: In English in the original], there is indeed nothing more to say, if not perhaps: “Does this ‘scientist’ think?”
It would be too easy to remain on that point. While it was necessary to show this sort of rejection, quite simply because it exists and represents a temptation for a respectable number of scientists irritated by any philosophical questioning (an attitude that did provoke some strictly adverse reactions103), it is more instructive to be attentive to the efforts made by other scientists to heed Heidegger’s warning, if only to disagree with him: science thinks and can even think better, but it must demonstrate it! Without strictly accepting René Thom’s approach, and without agreeing to enter into the play of Heidegger’s thought, this conception recognized that there is something true in the statement concerning the deficient nature of critical and philosophical reflection within contemporary scientific activity. Thus Prigogine and Stengers, while making allusion to “Heidegger’s more than dangerous theses”104 (to the extent that they directly linked the very project of rationality to the will to power), intended to demonstrate that the metamorphosis of contemporary science illustrates the contrary: the potential for a renewed listening to nature; and they give a particularly significant example of this in the recognition by contemporary physics of the plurality of times.105 For his part, Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond repeated the question in an apparently less ambitious, but perhaps methodologically more efficacious, way, on the basis of an explicit reference to Heidegger’s formulation, in “chapter zero” of his book Aux Contraires: having established the “properly machine-like intellectual functioning” of science, he added, “For it is true, in a certain sense, that ‘science does not think’—this is even the secret of its efficiency. Science makes a considerable effort not to think by perfecting remarkable symbolic and formal machines that take charge of the difficulty and fatigue of thought, just as our domestic and industrial machines support and extend our limited physical capacities.”106 This partial concession is, however, counterbalanced by a challenge quite different from Heidegger’s: to restore science “to culture”; to reintroduce critical reflexivity in order to counter the hyper-specialization of disciplines and the hierarchy of functions. In this way, thanks to work on the great antinomies, a “plea for thinking in science”107 takes form, seeking to illustrate the fact that the practice of science—far from excluding the exercise of thought—summons it and makes it possible.108
What then does it mean to think? It is not a meditation on the destinal scope of science itself, as is the case in Heidegger’s work, but a reflexive and critical exploitation of the great aporias of contemporary science. One then returns to a more classical sense of the exercise of thought, thanks to the detour produced by the shock of the Heideggerian “provocation.”
We are going to see that the shock must still be analyzed more fully because it involves more than questioning the constitutive limits of science: it clarifies its intimate connections with technology. If science “does not think,” is it because it is entirely caught up in its technological destiny? This aspect of Heidegger’s questioning has profoundly troubled contemporary French thought.
Heidegger, a critic of technology? This is an understatement if one considers the numerous clichés already encountered throughout this work. For most of the interpreters, it was contempt and hatred that seemed to drive him in the face of the multifaceted deployment of our technological world.
In order to reconsider the animated debate calmly and clearly, we should not forget what was just said about science. Certainly, the expression “techno-science” was not Heidegger’s; it is not even found flowing from the pen of his translators. Its recent prominence109 is justified, however, provided that the conditions of its coinage are clearly specified. The term is not understood here principally in the strict and technological sense that it might have, especially since the 1950s: information technology, for example, illustrates the extraordinary expansion of a field of interaction between programming theories and the progress of electronic equipment. In a Heideggerian context, the expression “techno-science” has a connotative range that is much more general and radical:110 it designates not only the interdependence of science and technology, but also the fact that the scope of modern science is technological in the essential and destinal sense that Heidegger gives the word Technik. “The essence of technology is by no means anything technological”:111 this statement is to be understood not as a reference to “essence” in the classical sense but as a grasp of the new ontological relation that, since the beginning of the modern era, led to the mastery and domination of nature. Modern science is no longer pure knowledge; it is intimately conditioned and oriented by its technological objectives. In fact, it is pointless to refer science and technology to each other as long as one has not understood that they are both the result of a profoundly metaphysical destiny by which the relation to the real is determined on an entirely new basis.
This clarification will allow us to approach the most serious philosophical critiques formulated in opposition to Heidegger’s thesis. For about a decade, we saw the emergence of a genuine “resistance,” best represented, from our perspective, by Jean-Pierre Séris’s book on technology.112 A frontal ideological assault limiting itself to some clichés was no longer sufficient: one noticed that Heidegger’s thesis had a philosophical coherence that had to be recognized. It was robust and even—at least in appearance—accorded “technology an unprecedented dignity in the history of thought.”113
How did Séris formulate and articulate his critiques against the Heideggerian interpretation of technology? First, we can note that he made a real effort to characterize this interpretation while respecting its literality: he devoted a whole chapter to it,114 including—even if reluctantly115—numerous citations, and not without scrupulous attention to the original German (in particular, obviously, in the case of Gestell). Séris did not stop there: he pursued his analysis by showing the interconnection of two themes in Heidegger’s work: instrumentality and discontinuity. To instrumentalist anthropology, Heidegger answered that technology is a “concept of knowledge” and that it manifests itself as an unlimited and irresistible command. The discontinuity is that of the fundamental change of attitude toward nature, a major discontinuity that is nevertheless accompanied by a “genuine continuity” (technology as unconcealment).116 After all is said and done, the originality of Heidegger’s interpretation resides above all in the idea that contemporary technology represents “the ultimate confirmation of the closure of metaphysics”;117 this means that such originality resides in the direct link established between the essence of technology and the will to power (accomplished in the will of the will). Heidegger is therefore neither an avowed enemy of technology nor a “postmodernist.” His position was very speculative, and his hopes revolved around a new (essentially poetic) relation with language.
Séris’s critiques were not as developed or even as vehement as one would expect. They can be clearly grouped around two points: in the first place, the Heideggerian conception is not as original as one would claim (the rupture of modern technology in relation to technē and to the “arts” is generally recognized; the affirmation of the autonomy of the development of the present technological stage has become commonplace, and remains to be discussed; finally, the character of a “theoretical mutation” of the beginnings of classical science is a correct idea, but not at all revolutionary); in the second place—and this is the properly critical part—the criticism addressed to Heidegger concerns his indifference “to the life (or the death) of human beings,” as well as to work and to workers, to material life, to production, to the market, and so on. It is the “indifference of the privileged,” forgetting the social place from which they speak.118
If one attempts to give an account of Séris’s work, one sees that his verdict, however cautious it is in the end, tries not to misrecognize the philosophical dignity of Heidegger’s thought and even its pertinence on certain points (the least original!). If its correctness is ultimately contested, it is not because of the usual flaws that are attributed to it (antitechnology, antirationalism119): it is because of its abstract character in relation to human, historical, and social complexities. For Séris, Heidegger’s interpretation of technology is almost too coherent: it is in particular too schematic, preferring to eschew actual responsibility in favor of the pathos of poetic language and the destiny of metaphysics, to the detriment of a lucid vision of the social realities in which technologies are found. In sum, this is not to detract from Séris—who died too young and whose legacy is infinitely respectable—but to recognize that he did not manage to conceal his aversion to the Heideggerian project, to its alleged incantatory style, to its distance from reality, from being, and from language. One must here take into consideration a nuance that pertains to both philosophical “sensibility” (which in his work is closer to Marx and Comte) and pure argumentation; nonetheless, Séris has made a great effort to observe the rules of fair play [TN: In English in the original].
It is somewhat surprising to note that Jacques Bouveresse, although taking the opportunity to pay homage to Séris, appeared much less scrupulous. His text is entitled “Les Philosophes et la technique” [Philosophers and technology],120 and Heidegger figures there only indirectly, following some generalities concerning the technophobia of philosophers. Many of them will have found in Heidegger’s work the expression of their “discontent” or “refusal” of technological civilization. Thereafter, we are told about the need to address Heidegger’s “case” through a long citation by Jeanne Hersch in which, claiming to make a determination about the heart of his philosophy, she sees not the expression of wonder in the face of being but a contempt of almost everything that constitutes the common life of human beings: rules, institutions, democracy, rationality, and so on. Bouveresse’s verdict immediately follows, and without any other argumentation than Hersch’s authority (which in fact extends beyond the “subject” of technology): “What is expressed in Heidegger’s reflections on technology is not, from my point of view, a more profound understanding of its nature, but in effect, the lofty contempt of which Jeanne Hersch speaks.”121
The entire Heideggerian interpretation of technology is reduced, then, to a sentiment (or rather a ressentiment), which, it must be said, is not the most helpful approach. We have seen that Séris was reluctant to reduce the essence of Heideggerian thinking to such a technophobia. To this reduction, Bouveresse adds an erroneous reading of Séris: “According to him, there is no philosophy of technology in Being and Time. And neither is there anything, in Heidegger’s diagnosis and judgments, which can be considered genuinely original.” It is this last sentence that misinterprets Séris’s thinking (with respect to Being and Time, his position,122 which is quite acceptable, is not entirely negative: Heidegger approached technology as a “question” only well after that book). Séris in no way denied Heidegger any originality,123 but on the contrary situated that originality (which is often missed) in his interpretation of the accomplishment of metaphysics (and in close connection with Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche). We have noted, furthermore, that Séris’s argument against the originality of certain Heideggerian theses does not exclude giving them some credit (at least regarding the nature, already noted, of the “theoretical mutation” of the beginnings of classical science).
Following an excursus on Spengler (whom he does not confuse with Heidegger and whom he associates appropriately with a Nietzschean biologism), Bouveresse pursues his severe examination of the Heidegger “case.” We can see once again that he does not share, in this respect, Séris’s methodological scruples. Since what is at issue is the Heidegger “case,” how could the question of his “Nazism” not be addressed? Bouveresse proceeds in a way that is quite polemical and moralizing (it is a question of “moral failing”124). It was as if for Heidegger Nazism had been the “solution” to the “problem” of technology; finally, Heidegger was attacked for the henceforth famous sentence from 1949,125 his only allusion—albeit problematic—to the gas chambers. “Despicable and absurd”: Bouveresse’s guillotine is without mercy.
What is somewhat strange in this intervention is not that Heidegger is criticized (one hardly expected Bouveresse to defend him); it is the way in which the text, an homage to Séris with a very general title, turns finally to a sort of settling of accounts with a philosopher whom Bouveresse has otherwise (nearly126) ignored in the rest of his work. It is as if the presence maintained by this obvious absence became too embarrassing! Furthermore, the methodology—in spite of some efforts not to be overly unfair127—was rather expeditious: Heidegger’s thinking with respect to science was judged on the basis of the only televised interview he ever gave,128 while no reference was made to the more significant texts (The Question Concerning Technology, Science and Meditation and “What Is a Thing?” among others). Admitting that he did not succeed in understanding how a “rational man” could seek the mastery of the phenomenon of technology in Nazism,129 Bouveresse gestured toward good old common sense, but he himself had not read nearly enough of either Heidegger or Séris, who had discerned that Heidegger no longer sought the “mastery” of the technological phenomenon (which he never reduced, moreover, to a “problem”), and that the most original feature (perhaps the most “incongruous”130) of Heidegger’s interpretation of technology was its connection to the metaphysics of the will to power.
The irritation that we just perceived in Bouveresse’s work was not shared by all the ideological adversaries of Heidegger’s conception of technology. If some discomfort can be perceived in the work of Dominique Lecourt in the face of the tough “resistance” of that thought, the tone is more serene: it is a question of being a fair and of analyzing the situation. Recognizing that Heidegger was “the only philosopher who had taken on . . . in a radical manner” the task of the elaboration of a general philosophy of technoscientific rationality,131 Lecourt concedes that everything in Heidegger’s work does not lead to an apocalyptic technophobia (although the pathos of “salvation” leads there eventually):132 the methodical critique of the ordinary, anthropological, and instrumental conception of technology prepared for the meditation on the metaphysical “essence” of a radical transformation itself initiated by the mathematized theory of nature at the inception of modernity.
Whereas we expected a refutation, Lecourt proceeded rather to some pessimistic comments: the dignity accorded to technology by Heidegger is more apparent than real; for his disciples, it only offers a “pretext”;133 above all, its influence is explained by its synthetic character. Even while opposing it, Heidegger appropriates a positivist conception of science, a technical concept of technology that we all share for the most part.134 Heidegger’s prowess would be that of passing off as profound a clever recasting of the commonplace clichés, or at least deeply rooted prejudices. This is an idea that we see shared, with some variations, by the “technophile” adversaries of Heidegger’s thought.135 What is interesting in Lecourt’s work is the recognition that the (ideological) “enemy” is found within us: is it not within the logic of a discourse that intends to vanquish, precisely in each of us, a very powerful feeling: fear in the face of techno-scientific progress?
This project was already that of Gilbert Hottois, who vigorously criticized “philosophical technophobia,” and called for a new nonanthropological humanism, reconciled with technological expansion and its polymorphic resources. It is striking to note that Heidegger was already both questioned and relied upon in this enterprise. Accused of being one of the principal promoters of this technophobia, Heidegger was nevertheless credited with having recognized “the real scope of technology.”136 There is an ambivalence that one finds in the thinking of our author with respect to the sign and to technology: one wonders if, even while reproaching Heidegger for remaining excessively “logocentric,” Hottois has not borrowed his general conception of “techno-science” as a system of operations that are essentially asymbolic from Heidegger. Even if he sought to distance himself from them, Hottois remained in the debt of the Heideggerian “provocations.”137
Overall, in the course of our reading of the contemporary French works about Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophy of technology, we have seen similar ambiguities, albeit in different forms and with different degrees of attraction or repulsion. As a whole, Heidegger is generally criticized by specialists, who are nonetheless constrained to take account—whether they like it or not—of his interpretation of contemporary technology, an interpretation that incontestably stimulated reflection.
The last decade of the twentieth century is characterized, for French philosophy, by a variety if not dispersion of approaches and even a certain eclecticism. Since no particular school of thought imposed itself, nor any great figure, the time belonged to encyclopedias, collective work, and conferences. An important work of translation was finally the order of the day, which does not mean that the attempts to import Anglo-American philosophy were always successful. This climate of more or less feverish work and activity corresponded well to the increasing insertion of France into Europe and into the context of the globalization of the economic and information network. Far from conflicting with each other, the demands of scholarship and those of techno-science blended well and complemented each other, as is the case in the United States. In a free-market society dominated by economism and technism, there is room for all specialties (even the most orthodox Heideggerians publish an international journal titled Heidegger Studies,138 in the usual format). Why, among so many incitements offered to our developed civilizations, would Heidegger’s thought eternally play the role of a troublemaker? And in the academic and encyclopedic form of the Collected Works, did that thought not become integrated within a system of knowledge more so than Nietzsche’s disconcerting and subversive illuminations?
A desire that is quite legitimate came to light: that of establishing a serene, balanced, and documented record of the seismic shocks provoked by Heideggerian thought. Such was indeed the concern of Jean-François Courtine in an important volume published in 1990,139 which was organized in three parts: the ontological tradition, the Husserlian institution, and perspectives on the renewal of phenomenology. From these detailed clarifications intended essentially for specialists, there are a few pages that should be discussed, some because of their phenomenological interest, and others because of their critical rigor. The first pages bear on practical themes (the hand,140 the friend,141 the founding of presence in equipmentality, and the fragility of the openness to the other in an existential analytic in which the Existent is above all a self). Courtine granted great significance to the work of Franco Volpi, who had shown the extent to which Heidegger’s conception of praxis, in Being and Time, was based on Aristotle,142 but with nuances that need to be interpreted (in particular the emphasis on the “poietic” in relation to the practical dimension proper). But what is surprising in this detailed and careful work is the emergence of quite severe judgments: in spite of all denials, there is indeed a Platonism in Heidegger (which includes the division between the theoretical and the practical, as well as the contempt for doxa);143 the “ontological solipsism” forbade him access to a genuine deployment of the intersubjectivity of dialogical space;144 the rejection of “trivial” conceptions of the dialogue sublimates it (in connection with a very personal reading of Hölderlin), at the expense of its co-belonging with ethics, politics, and religion;145 and finally, the axe falls on the last page of the book: the orientation of the later Heidegger toward a tautological phenomenology involves “a disastrous or catastrophic character for the very possibility of phenomenology.”146 Avoiding hostility and systematic thinking, as well as biases, such a critical distance was new in the work of an interpreter closely linked to the “Heidegger school.” It puts him in proximity in several instances to the talented pioneers such as Jacques Derrida147 or Jacques Taminiaux.148
Although, on the whole, the 1990s saw the French situation stabilize and “normalize,” some residual polemics remained. Furthermore, the approach of the end of the century almost required taking account of Heidegger’s influence: was Heidegger really the last thinker, and in a sense even more radical than the retrospective baptism of Sartre as the “last philosopher”?149 Or did he prefigure the continuing resistance of “meditative thought” to the assaults of “calculative thinking”?150
In the category of significant polemical “flare-ups,” we must mention the essays by Jean-Pierre Faye, Henri Meschonnic, and Dionys Mascolo.
While the monumental enterprise of Langages Totalitaires devoted itself to reconstituting the cultural milieu and the semantic variations of the entire epoch of German totalitarianism, La raison narrative, which is supposed to constitute the relatively abbreviated151 second volume, accords a central importance to the collusion between Heidegger’s thought and Nazism. This is not to say that Heidegger was the sole topic of the book: weaving, in his ten sections, the complex fabric of the philosophical narration with the social narration through different works and epochs, from the Hebraic Haggadah to Nietzsche, from Averroes to Spinoza, Faye analyzes the operation of all these “narrative machines” in their transformations, organization, and ruptures. This approach to reading is applied to Heidegger’s thought in order to demystify it in two major respects: the “shock” of the texts pledging allegiance to Hitler in 1933 and in particular the monumental enterprise of “dissimulation” in the Nietzsche courses. It is necessary to return anew to this deciphering (whose clever nature has already been noted) in order to judge its value and discuss its pertinence. Its value cannot be denied: it consists in shedding new light—brought from the consideration of the historical context—on the Heidegger courses devoted to Nietzsche beginning in 1936: Heidegger, accused by the Rector Krieck of “metaphysical nihilism,”152 invented a clever defense involving the identification of nihilism with metaphysics from its very origins, and including Nietzsche’s thought therein, through his categories of the will to power and the eternal return. It is certain that attacks by Krieck—a powerful person in the regime—were extremely dangerous, and one cannot be indifferent to the fact that Heidegger wanted to clear himself of the charge of nihilism on the very terrain of a philosophy considered by National Socialism as almost official. Should we, however, reduce the scope of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche to this clever maneuver? Do we not risk missing what is important by wishing to prove too much? If the identification of metaphysics with nihilism was thus made by Heidegger without sufficient precaution,153 did it not depend, in spite of everything, on Nietzsche’s questioning of Platonism and (as early as The Birth of Tragedy) of the Socratic model of “theoretical man”? Above all, Heidegger gave this thesis a new philosophical dimension that involved an entire reinterpretation of that metaphysics (Nietzsche’s “five fundamental expressions” were articulated with the onto-theological structure in a tension between essence and existence). Even if the countermaneuver to Rector Krieck played a role, how could the extraordinary interpretive scope of the “turning” be explained? Even if it was only the opportunistic misrepresentation of an absurdity, Heidegger truly exhibited—giving it such a thematic coherence—the skills of a “professional” (to speak like Bourdieu) usually attributed to a magician. But with or without Krieck, does the question raised with respect to the destiny of metaphysics merit examination as such? Did it not nourish, precisely with respect to Nietzsche, a passionate debate in which Faye himself participated154 in order to refute the entirety of the Heideggerian project? Even admitting that Faye was right with respect to the trigger mechanism (and the “response”) provoked by Krieck’s attacks (and if he was completely right, that would be something of a historical irony!), one can add: from small causes, big effects. Now, while debatable, those played a role in the interpretation of Nietzsche. Faye went on the attack again in 1994 in Le piège,155 where he reexamined the entirety of the “Heidegger dossier,” seen from the perspective of the tensions internal to National Socialism. The tract is fortunately supported by many documents. If it gives the impression of needless repetition (and of a sort of merciless hounding of Heidegger, and of any “deconstructionist” school), he separated a part of the work that he appreciated—the writings on the poets (Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl) and What Is a Thing?—from “the infernal sequence.”156
For his part, Meschonnic, a linguist and rhetorician, intended in principle to limit himself to the critical examination of Heidegger’s treatment of language, particularly in the texts devoted to the poets: Hölderlin, Rilke, Trakl, and others. He claimed from the outset that his book “circumvents the game of being for or against Heidegger.”157 In fact, the rest of the book doubly contradicts these stated intentions: he is not only quite polemical but does not hesitate to extend his strong criticism to all of Heidegger’s themes and even to the Heideggerians of all ilk (Blanchot, Derrida, Lacan, Levinas, and even the “postmoderns”). At the center of his war machine, Meschonnic situates this reproach: “Heidegger essentializes everything.”158 It is logical that this classical philosophical flaw is imputed to Heidegger’s “Parmenidian tendencies.” That which is most surprising is that after being charged as “indefinitely repeating Parmenides,”159 the Master of Freiburg is at the same time accused of merely using clichés and of being unoriginal. Does Heidegger’s historicism mask an essentialist abstraction? One might be more easily disposed to admit it on the basis of a precise reading of the Heideggerian corpus on history, historicity, historicality (or on the interpretation of a poem by Hölderlin, as Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, who was a pioneer in this regard, attempted160). In spite of numerous citations, Meschonnic seemed above all dedicated to denouncing the mirages produced by the “Heidegger effect” in contemporary thought. In passing, however, he posed some important questions: did Heidegger not overestimate language as such, but also, certainly, the German language in its very Germanness? Did he not sacrifice the syntactical to the exhibitive? Was his lack of interest in scientific linguistics not more of a hindrance than a help?
Dionys Mascolo is an author161 who has been known for some time in other circles (above all critical Marxism) and whose interest in Heidegger was not known. It is true that this interest is entirely negative. By taking Heidegger as a “model,” Mascolo did not hide his intentions or conceal his irony with an excess of rhetorical precautions. Why did Heidegger become such a loathed character? It was less a matter of having been a Nazi (some years later, Mascolo declared his dissatisfaction and his helplessness in the face of the passionate outbursts provoked by the publication of Farias’s book) than a matter of the archetypical role played by the thinker in the philosophical field. Exposing Heidegger as “the incarnation of the philosophical soul,”162 Mascolo reproached him for both his schematizing abstraction, his scholastic character,163 his simple-mindedness [niaiserie],164 and his vain wordplays,165 and he chronicled a list of “Heidegger’s foolish remarks.”166 The exercise could have been quite humorous, if it had been carried out with all the necessary precision and above all with intelligence. Unfortunately, Mascolo only listed his pet peeves in a dramatic form that detracts from their relevance.167 Citing a confidence of Queneau to Michel Leiris (“There is no love in Heidegger’s work”),168 Mascolo added that laughter, play, sex (and women!) are equally absent in Heidegger’s work, and he prefers the great boulevard of the poet vagabond of cinema (Charlie Chaplin) to Heidegger’s path.169 This is a respectable and even understandable preference, but it does not justify such a careless reading of rigorous (perhaps too “serious”!) texts where perhaps a greater sense of the play than Mascolo would believe is revealed. Most importantly, why confuse Heidegger with “the philosophical soul”? It was by wishing to encompass too much that he missed the Heideggerian “model,” and misrecognized, in the end, the astonishing diversity of philosophies of the twentieth century.
On this point, on the contrary, Jeffrey Barash presented a careful account of the Heideggerian “exception” resituated in its century.170 Barash, an American scholar who has chosen to live and teach in France, had accomplished something that is quite rare: to be accepted by the French university (he teaches at the University of Amiens). The author of an excellent thesis from the École des Hautes Études, published in English with a preface by Paul Ricoeur,171 Barash is certainly not the only one to have written on the question of historicity in Heidegger’s work. An additional drawback is that his book is a collection of articles, which seems to detract from its unity and novelty. Finally, the style is clear, but sober and discreet: there is nothing that would dazzle or scandalize the Parisian intelligentsia. This book nevertheless merits our full attention, because it is able to adopt, without being aggressive, but rather on the basis of reliable documents, an approach that clarifies the point from which one should understand Heidegger in the light of the debate with his contemporaries, in particular with post-Hegelians. Those authors (notably, Dilthey, Windelband, and Simmel), having been struck by the intellectual crisis that only worsened following the shock provoked by the war of 1914, placed historicity at the center.
By carrying out this work of “recontextualization,” Barash avoided two separate pitfalls: either reducing Heidegger’s thought to a Nazi ideology or considering Heidegger as an isolated great thinker, in exclusive dialogue with the giants of the history of Western philosophy. It is necessary to question the status of history and historicity in Heidegger’s thought precisely because Heidegger was the one who admitted (in particular in 1936 to Karl Löwith) that his vision of historicity was the basis of his political engagement.172 That confession in no way means that the one can be reduced to the other, but means that—if there is a link—it must be delimited and questioned. At the center of the critical studies that follow Heidegger’s evolution in his difficult dialogue with Jaspers, or in his reading of Dilthey and Augustine, in his confrontation with Arendt, a principal objection takes form and meaning: if it is true that the movement of history is interpreted with an impressive unity that allows the march toward scientific mastery of phenomena to be better understood, the reverse of this interpretation entails the fragility that results from his refusal of the universal criteria of validation and of its distance with respect to the ethico-political dimension. Barash traced Heidegger’s weakness to his contempt for historiography and the fact that he ignored the emergence, since antiquity, of a concern for impartiality in the work of Tacitus (but already in Thucydides). He found failure in the difficulty or incapacity to take account of the “contextual” plenitude of the historical situations as regards “a common world shared with others.”173 He even wondered whether the existential and ontological singularity, which distinguished Heideggerian historicity, did not doom the project of this thought, by cutting it (or isolating it) from the network of its determined symbolic significations, which constitute historical and social communities. The most convincing essay concerns Heidegger’s ambiguous interpretation of WWII:174 certainly that war “determined” nothing with respect to the destiny of being and only accelerated the general course of techno-scientific power; but the radical relation of this war to the most profound movement of nihilism effaces the identification of determined causes and responsibilities. This interpretation allows Heidegger to maintain unacceptable positions (a certain denial of German responsibilities, and an acerbic criticism of the “ahistorical” nature of the United States).
In the light of Barash’s critical reflection, Heidegger’s thinking no longer appears as an absolute exception in the twentieth century, but rather as the revelation, both exemplary and symptomatic, of the difficulty of rethinking the tragic history of the century. Barash does not condemn; rather he tries to understand (and helps us in the process).175 Recognizing the extraordinary provocation of Heidegger’s thought, he intended to counter it with a critical vigilance explicitly inspired by Arendt and Ricoeur. He then testified—against the grandmaster style of Heidegger himself—that it is possible to patiently advance the critical elaboration of the very foundations of the political question, without neglecting the hermeneutic exigencies of a reappropriation of the values of the Western tradition. This critical elaboration also seemed to signify that the epoch of the ideological quarrels of the “grand” Parisian intellectuals was past or outdated. At a time when the techno-scientific competition intensified, there is a place for an erudite approach that could allow the French intellectual community to benefit from universal values that it must find again by virtue of its very vocation. While losing its fascinating singularity, “Heidegger in France” finds, within its limits, a more modest stature, but one that is capable of encouraging new research.176
The relatively calm and studious climate of the last decade no doubt prefigured a division of labor that needed to take place in France and elsewhere: on the one hand, a patient reading of the texts, freed from the weight of ideology, above all concerned to reveal the interaction of presuppositions and to analyze the methodological stakes; on the other hand, a recentering of the interpretations around the question bearing on the meaning of techno-science.
It was indeed in this spirit that the recasting of my own research unfolded. My reading of the texts was first focused on Being and Time. Give honor where honor is due: since the masterwork of 1927 remained at the center of Heidegger’s self-interpretation, it was important to submit the work to a richer and more detailed exegesis. Moreover, the “competition” between the two complete translations could only encourage the indispensable and constant confrontation with the German text. It was in this spirit that Jean-Paul Larthomas and I decided to organize a seminar on Being and Time. We wanted to invite Martineau and Vezin successively or conjointly, according to their respective wishes. This idea was obviously utopian. I recalled earlier the correspondence exchanged with François Vezin, who did not seem to rule out, and even appeared to want, a debate concerning his translation. I can only limit myself here to mentioning and regretting his silence since that time.
The seminar on Being and Time took place, nonetheless, from November 1987 to May 1988, with the participation of distinguished scholars. The calm atmosphere that prevailed was somewhat surprising since Farias’s book appeared in October 1987. But Nice is not Paris. There were no microphones or cameras to record public comments. Above all, we decided to undertake a very basic work that took the form of interventions focused on the difficulties of method (the question of being, subjectivity, the status of discourse, everydayness, the problem of history, etc.). Jean-Pierre Cometti was kind enough to help me publish these contributions with Éditions Sud, in Marseille.
I prepared for this seminar by undertaking a complete rereading of the original text of Sein und Zeit at Tübingen during the previous summer. Forgive the frankness of the confession that will follow, which is in no way intended as an argument from authority or as exegetical necessity. It is only a question of reporting here, quite superficially, some impressions of the reading, reconstituted from memory, a memory that is at times faulty. To recall the challenging nature of the project will surprise no one. But what surprised me (and of this I am certain) was my lack of enthusiasm, my occasional irritation, my disagreements, noted in the margins of my own copy. The heaviness of the style, the repetitions, and in the end, the terribly academic tone struck me more than ever before: was it due to the fact that I had to take in the work all at once, instead of contenting myself with small doses and successive readings? I was above all troubled by the excessive schematization of everydayness and of “the they,” and their opposition to a haughty and solitary authenticity. I experienced scant sympathy for the quasi-Jansenist tonality of guilt [Schuld], of the fall [Verfallen], and the return of “conscience” [Gewissen]. All that seemed much less innovative than I myself had previously thought. And the end of the work, where the brilliant intuitions on “ecstatic” temporality remain quite elliptical, seemed excessively historicist to me, reducing the Self to its “generation” and the choice of its “heroes.” These words can seem inappropriately iconoclastic. Although sincere, they testified to a state of mind, at a given moment, and no more than that (nonetheless confirming what I have long known on the subject: unlike what was the case for leading intellectuals—Ricoeur in particular—it was the second Heidegger who captivated me, and not the reading of Being and Time). The history of the reception of that work (including its strange detours and delays) allows us to establish the extent to which its themes were “filtered” through partial translations, commentaries, citations, and displacements (of which Sartre was the clearest example) in such a way that no French philosopher of my age directly experienced, like the pioneers of the ’30s, the impact of reading Sein und Zeit.
More recently, in the course of the last decade, the texts of the Gesamtausgabe (most recently the Beiträge), became the topics of studious seminars with Michel Haar, Jean-François Courtine, Françoise Dastur, Éliane Escoubas, and Jean Greisch, to name a few. At Nice, no priority has ever been given to the establishment of a “Heideggerian school” because the priority was first to respond to the needs of the students (most often according to curriculum requirements and to the Agrégation program). On the contrary, the names that were just cited testify to the existence of a genuine intellectual community, relatively small in number, but lively and working on the reading of Heidegger’s work in a spirit that one could describe as one of “faithful distance” or “critical attention.” It is not really a question of a particular school, and significant differences can be discerned between two antithetical inspirations: the internal interpretation and the frankly critical reading. One who was oriented more and more clearly in the latter sense was Jacques Taminiaux: always precise and forceful, he almost became the representative for Hannah Arendt in her confrontation with Heidegger, principally concerning ethical and political thought.
We have seen, in the course of our narrative, some who prioritize friendship or even devotion to Heidegger the man, and others who subordinate personal relations to the work on the texts. It is clear that I felt increasingly closer to the latter group. For them, the close and attentive reading of Heidegger corresponded not to a personal allegiance, but to the constancy of a philosophical reference and an inspiration. But even if we limit ourselves to the friends and colleagues mentioned, it would be necessary to add another dimension—and distinguish between those who, on the one hand, continued to consider Heidegger’s thought as the best possible source for thought and those, on the other hand, who were more critical.
Furthermore, by emphasizing the question of techno-science, I do not want to say that Heidegger offered the last word on a complex series of problems and questions whose weight will only increase in the century to come (his contribution is in no way limited to this field). It is the very urgency imposed by an uncontrolled evolution of the world that should oblige us to reconsider serious questions long repressed by hyper-technical Marxism and capitalist opportunism: What is the status of science today? Can one maintain the fiction of a “pure and disinterested science”? How can one recognize the inevitable, destinal character of these changes without blindly giving into their irresistible pressure?
These questions have been instrumental in the development of renewed researches on temporality, in which the dialogue with Heidegger once again proved both indispensable and tricky. Both on the terrain of the phenomenological method and in the very contemporary research on the effects of technology, the experience of time is crucial: between the mastery of its measure and the dispossession of its meaning. A “minimalist phenomenology” does not neglect the lessons of the Heideggerian critique of the Husserlian eidetic, but it tries not to leave the authenticity of description to “tautological” repetition, completing it with a careful description articulated in an intelligible way. Not wanting to dwell on my contribution to the debate concerning these orientations of French phenomenology, I would only clarify that I am not by any means a representative of some Heideggerian orthodoxy, even if I have taken issue with various readings of Heidegger’s texts. In the debate on the “theological turn,” the split was not exactly between Heideggerians and non-Heideggerians. The reference to the necessary disjunction between phenomenology and theology certainly rests on two citations (one from Luther and the other from Goethe) given by Heidegger in Phenomenology and Theology; but the renewed recourse to immanence was indeed inspired by a French practice of phenomenological description (in the work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty). I next had to confront the following delicate question in Phenomenology “Wide Open”: to what extent does Heidegger’s thinking remain phenomenological? We saw the renewed style of listening and the new apprenticeship of the regard (with Heidegger’s recognition at Cerisy of the beauty and depth of this French word). Even the insightful grasp of the “scope” of contemporary technology is phenomenological in this sense. But is there not more to phenomenology than that? Did the turn toward tautology, as rich as it was, not excessively divert precise articulations determined by experience? This deficiency can be felt gravely in the ethical consequences of such a phenomenology.
It is also by posing the question of the plurality of possible styles in phenomenology that the problem of the ethical reappropriation of duration (and of long duration time span) has been posed. Why would this reappropriation not take form? There is, vis à vis the Derridean deconstruction, a difference to be noted: must the questioning of the Proper go so far as to suspend any reappropriation? Does an ethics of dissemination not dissolve itself? Must not a “Heidegger revisited” be the answer to Derrida? Unless Derrida’s evolution (recognizing the character, both unconditional and undecidable, of the call of the Other) anticipated the objection.
A last word that is almost too pedestrian. In order for a critical meditation on the basis of Heidegger’s work to develop, a qualitative solitary research, always unique, must find outlets. This remark arises out of experience, and it certainly does not relate to Heidegger alone. Whether it is a question of a fundamental work on the texts, of translations or critical discussions, nothing will take place without impartiality and without a shared passion. We live in the era of innumerable symposia and of constant publications. Genuine fertilization takes place through more secret, and also more lively and amicable, channels. This is why, in his time, Jean Beaufret had an influence that was infinitely superior to his “actual power.” One must see things as they are: it is extremely difficult to develop emulation and organize a competent circle that is willing to work, since the degree of specialization is extreme. There will be no rich and lively reading of the Gesamtausgabe without the seriousness, impartiality, and passion of which I have spoken. Will that happen? In Paris? In Nice? On the Internet (where an Ereignis site already exists)? Time will tell.