When do you think you heard Heidegger’s name for the first time?
I think it was probably in hypokhâgne and not in my high school philosophy class. I was in the philosophy class during 1947–48 and it doesn’t seem to me that Heidegger’s name had been mentioned at that time. In hypokhâgne, I am sure of having heard his name in lectures. I had a rather remarkable hypokhâgne teacher, Jan Czarneki: he gave lectures on the history of philosophy that were very synthetic and precise, in which he covered everything, from the pre-Socratics to modernity; I remember having heard him speak of Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
At the same time, I was reading Sartre, in particular, Nausea, and Being and Nothingness: Heidegger’s name appeared many times in the texts. And (these are memories of texts as well as of places, and of landscapes), I remember having read, in the University of Algiers library, on the one hand, texts by Sartre—and notably a text on the history of truth published in the journal Bifur—and on the other hand, texts already collected and edited by Corbin in a small volume containing fragments of Sein und Zeit and Was ist Metaphysik?
But I was also very aware of him, because of classes and because of the role that I saw him play in the French intellectual landscape—with Sartre notably, and more distantly Merleau-Ponty—(but the fact is that it took place through Sartre: Heidegger’s influence on Sartre, and the references in Being and Nothingness to Heidegger); it is there that things started, during the 1948–49 academic year. And so I read these fragments from Sein und Zeit. I remember, by the way, that during that year, in the written assignments, the question of the origin of negation had drawn me into these debates in Being and Nothingness and in Was ist Metaphysik? The question of anxiety, of the experience of nothingness before negation, corresponded well to my personal pathos, much more so than the cold Husserlian discipline, to which I came only later. I resonated with the pathos that was felt during that period, right after the war. One spoke of Christian Existentialism and Atheist Existentialism. The whole landscape was already there: Marcel, Sartre. Naturally, I felt that Heidegger was behind this entire edifice—both more originary and more important than his representatives, his mediators, his interpreters, his French posterity. But my reading remained both academic and preliminary.
Afterward, I entered khâgne at Louis-le-Grand School. I spent three years there: the first and third years, I had Borne as a teacher; the second, in the middle, Savin. But neither of the two had any affinity with or precise knowledge of Heidegger. In any case, they never showed it in their lectures. Their references to Heidegger were frequent but they were somehow “quite generic,” and there were no readings of texts. In khâgne, one didn’t read the texts; one learned how to make arguments. References were used rhetorically—but there were no demanding readings.
I read Heidegger more on my own. I would not be able to say precisely how. I do not remember having read Sein und Zeit directly at that time, but I have the impression that I was more interested in Heidegger—or at least, more interested than was required by the khâgne program.
The written assignments were often constructed on the basis of references to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Already, I wrote essays that Borne told me were “Plotinian.” The fascination with the epekeina tēs ousias dates from this period. Naturally, once I came across this reference in Heidegger, my thought became connected to his discourse. I remember an essay based on a somewhat more rhetorical opposition between the Sartre of Being and Nothingness (who distinguished the in-itself and the for-itself and dreamed of a metaphysical synthesis of a phenomenological ontology as synthesis of a certain “human reality”—I knew already that this was a disastrous translation of Dasein) and Merleau-Ponty. There was, on the one hand, this Sartre, whom I allowed myself already to criticize for his Cartesian dualism etc., and, on the other hand, Merleau-Ponty, who was much more ambiguous, not deciding between or dividing up these two regions. These problems of regions of being, not at all in the sense of phenomenological regions, in Husserl’s sense, but of regions of being in the Sartrean sense, kept me very busy. I already felt, at least intuitively, that these were simplifications in relation to Heidegger. I don’t know to what extent I was able, at that time, to grasp this clearly.
Were you fluent in German?
This is an important and difficult question for me. German was my first foreign language. But I always had a resistance to German, which is why, in khâgne, my English became better than my German; I inverted the priority of my foreign languages and made English my first language and German my second. I was not competent in Greek at that time. I learned Greek at the École Normale. I did not read Heidegger directly in German. At the same time, I always referred to the German. I would do it to verify, to specify, to refine an argument or a translation.
So that is what happened in khâgne, where, despite everything, the rush of the written assignments, the pressure, and the anxiety of the concours won out over demanding readings. It was only at the École Normale, during the 1952–53 academic year, that more “responsible” readings started. In any case, this period that we are talking about is quite short: amounting to about four or five years.
A lot of things were reaching me, following trajectories that I cannot reconstitute now, by way of a sort of general porosity. At that time, Heidegger was spoken of indirectly. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were living philosophers on the scene. Merleau-Ponty was on the entrance exam committee. One read him as a potential examiner: the Phenomenology of Perception as well as the texts on Cézanne and on painting. It was useful for the written assignments. He administered the orals with Jankélévitch. I would go and observe the orals where Merleau-Ponty and Jankélévitch were at work. Those were the only times when I saw Merleau-Ponty. When I made it to the oral phase, Alquié and Vuillemin were the examiners. One could write entire chapters on each one’s relationship to Heidegger. Alquié took himself to be—this is visible in his books, but also in his lectures, in his spontaneous discourse—a worthy rival of Heidegger. He claimed Heidegger had somehow stolen his notion of the “nostalgia of being.” He looked at it as some kind of theft. Vuillemin, too, had a relation to Heidegger: in his readings of the Critique of Pure Reason and of its legacy, he interpreted the Analytic in terms of Cohen and the Aesthetic in terms of Heidegger. In that case as well, we read Vuillemin because he was an examiner—and a certain Heidegger was communicated and transpired.
At that time, quite early on, there had been a debate concerning Heidegger’s politics. But, so far as I can remember, for the khâgne students that we were, the political question concerning Heidegger did not arise. It was only later that I encountered it, at the École Normale. In the second year, I wrote my thesis on Husserl (1953–54); my reading was, in a certain way—it is difficult to show this in a preface, but I think that it is visible in the book—largely influenced by the references, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, to Heidegger and to a certain questioning of Husserl by Heidegger. Which is to say that this master’s thesis, which eventually became a book, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology,1 was a work that would not have been possible without Heidegger. Sometimes I mention it, sometimes I do not, but the questions that I address to Husserl, or the type of reading that I venture at that point in time, implied a certain relation to Heidegger.
Your thesis advisor was not Hyppolite but Gandillac?
At the École, in 1952, Hyppolite was not there yet. He came the following year. I followed some classes he gave that made reference to Heidegger, and to Husserl. I know that Heidegger was quite present, but this is difficult to reconstruct; I do not have any particularly clear memories of Heidegger with Hyppolite.
It was Beaufret, finally, who came to give lectures to Agrégation students when I was at the École. His lectures were not on Heidegger. We knew that he was a great expert and friend of Heidegger’s, but he gave lectures that were extremely precise, useful, etc., on Leibniz, and on Descartes, without referring to Heidegger.
What then can I say about my relationship to Heidegger during those years at the École? I think that there were, in the year ahead of me, students who were reputed to be knowledgeable about Heidegger, and that is how we looked upon them. It was also an occult atmosphere: there was Granel, Gourinat, Faucon-Lamboi, and perhaps even Grenier. There was a kind of respect for those who had an access to the original texts. This also implied a certain style of thinking, of questioning: Aubenque had come to give lectures on Aristotle and, naturally, they were not without references to Heidegger. Foucault gave lectures, but he referred more often to Husserl than to Heidegger. I am trying to bring more precise things back to memory.
Naturally, in my student assignments I referred to Heidegger. I can remember an assignment concerning time. At that moment I read Heidegger. Read, well, one never reads him enough—but I had, let us say, a more cultivated and more rigorous relation to Heidegger’s texts, during those pre-Agrégation years.
In 1955, I failed the orals, but in 1956 I passed. Then, for a year, I went to the United States, to Harvard, where I had great freedom. I began to translate Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry.
During that time, I worked a lot more on Husserl. The goal that I shared with a number of people at that time was to replace a French phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Sartre), which cared little for science and epistemology, with a phenomenology that would be more attuned to the sciences. The question of scientific objectivity occupied us a lot. There was also a political concern. Tran Duc Thao played a great role in this domain. I was not strictly speaking a communist, or a Marxist, but there too, it was a question of atmosphere. It was Foucault who told me about Tran Duc Tao’s book, by saying, and I later thought the same thing, that the first half was very interesting, while the second half was more problematic. The first half was a relatively faithful commentary on a certain Husserl who was interested in genesis, in the problem of time. Then, the more dogmatic Marxist moment became more problematic. It was through Foucault that I heard of it. Subsequently, I read it for myself and naturally if I chose the problem of genesis then it was because I had identified in it—in that interval I read quite a bit of Husserl, notably Ideas I, the Philosophy of Arithmetic, and the Logical Investigations—I had been able to pre-identify there, in some way, the question of the history of science, and of the genesis of objectivity. And so the choice of this subject could be explained through this context that is both historical and academic. We were telling ourselves: “and what about science?” In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty was occupied with the nonscientific phenomenon. Then, one has to account for ideal objectivity, for scientific ideality, and for the history of truth. So from that point on I dedicated myself to the Husserlian discipline, to which I have always remained faithful: the reductions. I became a sort of “disciplined disciple” of Husserl, despite all the questions that arose.
The “Heidegger” conference in Cerisy took place in 1955. We knew that something important was happening. The conference gathered Beaufret, Gandillac, Marcel, Goldmann, people who were part of that Parisian landscape that, after all, was ours. I was not able to go to Cerisy, but the following year, in the winter that followed, Gandillac, who had befriended me, invited me to his home. It was at his home, in the salons of Gandillac (I, who came from Algiers!), that I met people who, from the point of view of the history of Heidegger, were not just anyone. It was there that I met Axelos, Wahl, and Goldmann, and we spoke about Heidegger. The winter following the conference, in Madame Heurgon’s apartment in Paris, there was a reception where recordings from the conference were played. I was a student at the École Normale and I heard Heidegger’s voice for the first time in a salon in the 16th arrondissement. I remember one sequence in particular: we were all in the living room, we were listening to this voice. In those days, tape recordings were not as clear as they are today; I remember, above all, the moment in the discussion following Heidegger’s talk: questions from Marcel and Goldmann. One of the two, basically, made the following objection to Heidegger: “But do you not think that this method of interpretation or this manner of reading or questioning is dangerous?”—this was a question concerning methodology, that is to say, epistemology. And I can still hear in my ear—there was a silence—Heidegger’s response: “Ja! It is dangerous.” This is a memory of a student who was about to take the Agrégation exam.
We are still in 1956. The emergence of the problem of metaphysics and Heidegger’s evolution in relation to Sein und Zeit only arose later?
I suppose. It makes me sad, but I am not able to reconstitute this evolution and this transformation for myself, in other words, the moment I arrived at the schema of deconstruction (the word Destruktion, for example, I don’t remember—but is my memory reliable?—having paid attention to it thematically during those years). I think it is later. I wouldn’t swear to it.
Faye says, in Le piège, that the word déconstruction appeared around 1966–67 thanks to you and to Granel.
That’s true. It is in Of Grammatology, as far as I can remember, that the word appears, in 1965. That being said, I did The Origin of Geometry during the academic year 1961–62, in which there are quite a few references to Heidegger. In my reading of Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in 1962–63, naturally there are many references to Heidegger.
At that moment, I was already teaching. I was an assistant at the Sorbonne and I gave courses on Heidegger. On returning from the United States, I did my military service (as a teacher in a school for children of soldiers—without wearing a uniform), and then I began to teach in hypokhâgne, in Le Mans, in 1959–60. I know I spoke about Heidegger in hypokhâgne. Then, I became an assistant at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964, and I gave entire courses on Heidegger: on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and on “Irony, Doubt and the Question.” It is probably during those years as an assistant that I read Heidegger most continuously, and most systematically, while referring to him. I remember teaching “What Is Metaphysics?” and lectured on possibility, and negation. And when I began to be caïman2 at the École, my first course, which has never been published, was on “History in Heidegger”; that was in 1964–65.3 At that time, incidentally, I was thinking of writing a book on Heidegger, which was announced by Éditions de Minuit. I never wrote it. The title that was announced was The Question of History.
The advertisement for it can be found in the journal Critique. Axelos was to have published it. I never wrote it, but the course itself was completely prepared. Starting in those years, obviously, my relationship to Heidegger became intense and constant. Let us say: regularly intermittent. I never stop returning to it.
Indeed, in Speech and Phenomena, we read: “Perhaps it is already apparent that, while we appeal to Heideggerian motifs in decisive places, we would especially like to raise the question whether, with respect to the relations, between logos and phonē, and with respect to the pretended irreducibility of certain word unities (the unity of the word being or of other ‘radical words’), Heidegger’s thought does not sometimes raise the same question as the metaphysics of presence” (74n4). Heidegger against Heidegger?
That note is a miniature photograph of a landscape or of a gesture that, in fact, never stopped repeating itself a thousand different ways.
Yet, in 1967, Ousia and Grammē was published first in the homage to Beaufret, right?
As far as the text itself is concerned, it was first a seminar (what the context was, I no longer remember). In any case, the thing was written when Fédier asked me to participate in this homage to Beaufret. At first I hesitated since I actually did not feel particularly close to Beaufret, with whom I had good relations; but I did not consider myself Beaufretian nor Heideggerian in the Beaufretian mode, and since in “Ousia and Grammē” there were some troubling questions concerning Heidegger, I thought of declining. But Fédier insisted, and he was extremely kind with me (this did not last); his manner was a little seductive. I asked myself: “What if, finally, I were to publish this at least in order to establish a critical work, on the occasion of this homage to Beaufret and to Heidegger?” (it was actually a book on Heidegger). After a long hesitation, I accepted. I gave this text to Fédier, who warmly and approvingly confirmed reception. And then, one day, once he had the text, Laporte and his wife came to lunch at my house, in Fresnes, in the winter of 1967–68 (probably 1968 already). During a desultory discussion, Laporte, who had been his student, spoke to me about some anti-Semitic remarks made by Beaufret. Disturbing remarks. He reported some of them, which concerned Levinas, or the fact that the alleged exterminations of the Jews were as little believable as the rumors that circulated concerning the horrors in Belgium after the war of 1914 (that the Germans were killing and slaughtering children); and finally, he spoke to me about remarks of this type that seemed shocking to me not just because of their anti-Semitism but because of their violence. And so I was shocked and upset. Laporte was a bit surprised. Perhaps he had not predicted the effect that this could have on me.
So he hadn’t mentioned it to you in order to warn you?
Oh no! He was not thinking that it would explode! And obviously, in me, it exploded. Immediately, the same day, or the next one, I wrote to Fédier (I kept this entire correspondence that I entrusted to Bident): “Listen, I have just become aware of this; I do not want to make a public scene out of it, I do not want to bring this out into the public, but allow me to withdraw my text discreetly.” But voila! Fédier did not intend on keeping the matter secret. He reacted with violence: calumny, etc.! I have his letters. Obviously, I had not told him that I heard this from Laporte. After some time he found this out, but I don’t know how. Laporte became the true suspect among Beaufret’s friends, who closed ranks around Beaufret. There were many episodes, exchanges of all sorts, until a day when a meeting was arranged, in my office at the École Normale, between Beaufret and Laporte; a confrontational meeting unfolded. Beaufret arrived. All were pale with emotion. Beaufret and Laporte, who knew each other, were teacher and student. Beaufret arrived with Vezin. The four of us were in my office; Laporte confirmed the charge, while Beaufret, naturally, denied it violently. And that’s where things remained.
Since Laporte, paradoxically, felt more and more accused—he was the one who was turning into the accused and it made him very sad (because there were protests from others who were friends of both Beaufret and Laporte like Munier, Fourcade—neither Deguy nor Granel showed themselves); he took it very badly. And it was Jacqueline Laporte who, I was told, had alerted Blanchot in order to protect her husband. Blanchot too, was in the situation of having given a text to Fédier. Obviously, the Laportes knew that Blanchot was very sensitive, irritable, and anxious about these questions. So, as soon as Blanchot was alerted, he contacted me. I didn’t know him at that point. I had read him, of course; we had exchanged a few letters, but I had never met him. It was on the occasion of this affair that I met Blanchot quite frequently, during this limited period in 1968, during the “events” as one says. We met several times, asking ourselves what we should do—whether we should withdraw our texts or not. And then, after endless deliberations, we were in agreement: Beaufret did not admit to having said these things and we could not prove that he had—it was witness against witness, it was Laporte’s word against his—we did not have the right to accuse Beaufret publicly of something that he denied, therefore we had to allow the promised texts to appear. But we thought, Blanchot and I, that it would be good for us to explain ourselves to other contributors to the volume—who were already informed—by saying: “Voilà, this is what we have heard, not having any proof, we are going to give Beaufret some credit; we cannot accuse him publicly and so we are leaving our texts in. But this is what happened.” So we wrote this letter, we signed it together and we decided that, making as many copies as there were contributors, it would only be sent out once the book had appeared: we did not want to ruin the book’s publication. The day the book came out, we mailed our letter to each contributor in order to explain our position during this process.
I happened to be in the United States in September 1968. I had typed the letters, and I had prepared them; there were eighteen or twenty copies. We had signed them and I had left them with Blanchot who was supposed to mail them the day the book came out while I was at Johns Hopkins. Thus Blanchot mailed them—and the letters never arrived. He had mailed them “in care of” the publisher. Apparently the letters had been intercepted because nobody received them. Our hypothesis or our suspicion was that Fédier intercepted them. We could not prove it, of course. In any case these letters never arrived . . .
Another thing as well: Blanchot said: “We have to talk to Levinas about this.” Thus, I remember one day when I had made an appointment with Blanchot and I picked him up with my car (he lived on rue Madame in those days), and I took him to see Levinas, to whom we then revealed this whole affair, since Levinas had been involved by name, having been the subject of the comments attributed to Beaufret. Levinas took things in a very relaxed way: “Oh, you know, we are used to it.” He was less emotional about the affair than we were. So there you have it! What else can I say? The book came out. Obviously the relationship with Fédier ended. Not just because of the affair but also because of this business with the letters. Fédier became increasingly hostile toward me.
I have to add another thing: my relationship with Beaufret was not seriously affected by all this. Later, after this story, I exchanged some friendly words with him, and there were a few signs, on several occasions, that indicated that he did not hold this against me and that he still respected me! As for me, I let him know that the matter was a past issue. It was long afterward that there were issues of denial.
I saw Beaufret again. I invited him to meet, if my memory serves me. I had invited him; it was Jambet who had come to see me, a Jambet who was close to me and then deferential. He was in khâgne at that time. He wanted to organize a talk for his khâgne friends on Artaud and Heidegger or on Artaud-Heidegger-Nietzsche, at the École Normale. I organized a session for him, and Beaufret came. I remember having seen Beaufret listen to this young fellow’s talk. This was after the affair.
Although you were invited to contribute to L’Endurance de la pensée, the same cannot be said for the seminars in Le Thor in 1968 and 1969?
In 1969 I was already persona non grata! Before, I was not considered a bona fide Heideggerian nor was I one. I read Heidegger, but I was not known in those circles as someone who had a privileged connection to Heidegger.
When you published “Ousia and Grammē” in 1972, in Margins, did you not add a note (62n37) where you criticized, simultaneously, both Heideggerian devotion and anti-Heideggerianism for the same refusal to read?
The note was not added. One can read it already in the original volume, L’Endurance de la pensée (266). Because I found myself, I still find myself, with others, in the situation of a nondevotee who, at the same time, cannot stand the anti-Heideggerians. We are caught in the cross fire. I am as allergic to the Heidegger devotees as I am to the run-of-the-mill anti-Heideggerians. I strive to find a path, a line, a place where one might continue to read Heidegger seriously, to question him without giving in either to political Heideggerianism or to its opposite . . . There is nothing original in this: there are a few of us who respect this rule. I wanted to emphasize this.
In Positions, I read: “What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions . . . but despite this debt to Heidegger’s thought, or rather because of it, I attempt to locate in Heidegger’s text . . . the signs of a belonging to metaphysics” (9–10). You add later: “I sometimes have the feeling that the Heideggerian problematic is the most ‘profound’ and ‘powerful’ defense of what I attempt to put into question under the rubric of the thought of presence” (55). This is in 1972.
Indeed, I found a knot there, which at bottom I have always thought was there, whether rightly or not. But in order to speak about this, one would have to consider things again in depth. It is less easy than telling stories!
From that moment on, in 1968, an endless Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger was engaged and set forth in all my texts. This is why it would be difficult for me to speak about this because that gesture is reproduced and displaced in all of my texts—with some regrets. Sometimes I complicate matters further. But it would be difficult to discuss this in this informal setting. The question of presence, that’s a very complicated thing, particularly in “Ousia and Grammē.”
You even told me that you had given up on the expression “metaphysics of presence.”
Even if I wanted to defend myself against the attacks, from this moment on—I have said this repeatedly, you can read it in Margins—I did not think that there was only one metaphysics of presence, delimited by a linear circle. It is a plural field, and this closure is not a simple one. Nonetheless, since this expression was misleading, since it was often interpreted in polemical works and simplified as if I ignored or neglected all sorts of internal ruptures and interior differentiations, I abandoned it. It clarified and formalized issues at a certain moment, but I no longer use it.
Is this also related to the question of the closure of so-called metaphysics?
I distinguish between closure and end; closure is not a unilinear closure, it is not a closed totality. Closure is a certain type of exhaustion that does not simply imply an inside and an outside. The notion of closure is not very satisfactory either. I no longer use these words. It is not that I deny that pedagogical or strategic moment, but I think it is inopportune to use these words any further.
There was also the reading of Nietzsche (with and against Heidegger) that must have played a part in this evolution?
As early as these first texts, starting with Of Grammatology obviously: I addressed the question of writing and of style. Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, which I have always found extremely powerful and which I worked on quite intensively at that time, seemed very strong to me but it also misunderstood a certain gesture of Nietzsche’s, which is why I tarried so long on the questions of writing and signature.
It is in “The Supplement of the Copula,” a text in Margins, as well as in “White Mythology,” that Heidegger plays an important role, even though the conclusions, if one can speak in this way (this word is not very appropriate), are not Heideggerian. But whether the issue is metaphor, or the verb “being” in “The Supplement of the Copula,” in the debate with Benveniste (the opposition between Benveniste-Heidegger-Vuillemin) or whether the issue is the concept of the human in “The Ends of Man,” in each case Heidegger is a major organizing reference, but at the same time there is an opportunity to question some of his positions.
In Writing and Difference there is a relatively corrosive expression about Heidegger: “With as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction” (356). Is this a conflictual relation?
In any case, it is one of admiration, respect, recognition, and at the same time a relation of profound allergy and of irony; which is why he is always present. For example, in the book on travels that is called Counterpath, there are discussions of Heidegger, both in Catherine Malabou’s essay on me as well as in the letters that I address to her—and there, as in The Post Card, there is a certain figure (a little Hebraic, for fun) of Heidegger, as a permanent witness, who always accompanies me like a ghost. For me, he is something like a watchman, a thinking that always keeps watch over me—an overseer who is always watching over me, a thinking that, I feel, has me under surveillance. It is a model—against which I naturally rebel too, I pose questions, I am ironic. There is all that, and one would have to succeed in putting all that on stage with an extreme ambivalence, and it is why I cannot tolerate either devout Heideggerians or the anti-Heideggerians.
It is a very tense relation, very singular . . .
Unique. For me, it is unique. I know of no other thinker, either in this century or in general, with whom I have had, with whom I still have, a concerned relationship of frustrated admiration. Really, I am never bored when I read him. I know it will be endless, I know that I will never ultimately settle matters with him. For me, it is an inexhaustible relationship, which is made of, again, movements of positive admiration, of recognition, of debt and then, sometimes quite severely, of critical impatience, and always very ironic.
For me, there are two images of Heidegger: there is the image of Heidegger as a great thinker, and there is the image of a slow, heavy, somewhat vulgar man, uncultivated in certain respects—from the point of view of literature, or of the arts. I remember once, in Rome, during a conference on Benjamin, and I can see myself walking down a street in Rome, at night, with Beda Alleman, who said to me: “You know, Heidegger is uneducated. He knows nothing about so many matters in German literature, in contemporary art . . .” And I was flabbergasted at having heard this man who knew Heidegger well, say to me directly, calmly: “You cannot imagine Heidegger’s lack of culture!” I remember this often and I understand him even better now. I have to say that there are aspects of nonrefinement in Heidegger, and I am as sensitive to them as I am, inversely, to his extraordinary cultivation, his reading, his knowledge, his expertise in Greek thought, in German thought, and in Christian theology.
These days, what is happening for me with respect to Heidegger increasingly takes place in terms of traditions that I am not familiar with but that I intend to study: such as Eckhart, whom I know fairly well, as well as Luther, whom I am not directly familiar with. I feel more and more that Heidegger is illegible without this background. I had already identified Silesius and Eckhart, who, apparently, were familiar reading for him. And then there was the Lutheran tradition. Even the word Destruktion—I learned this from John Caputo—stems apparently from a Lutheran usage of destructio, the Latin word that designates (I haven’t read the texts, I am reporting what I read in Caputo) the desedimentation, the deconstitution of a later theology that would have obscured the original biblical message. Therefore, destructio would consist in reconstituting, by an act of remembrance, the original biblical message by destroying and deconstructing the theological strata. Hence, we have a Lutheran gesture, a Lutheran word—this teaches us much that is useful. Heidegger often says that deconstruction is an act of remembrance, of reappropriation—not of destruction, but of reappropriation by remembrance—of a hidden originary meaning. Increasingly, I tell myself that it is by reading Luther, and Schelling as well, that one has access to a certain Heidegger whom I have not finished reading, despite frequenting the texts for multiple decades . . .
Did he conceal certain sources?
He did not conceal them, but we did not go to look for them. I cite this reference to Luther because, in fact, my endless debate with Heidegger concerns the meaning to be given to “deconstruction,” the usage of this word. What concept corresponds to this word? This is an endless explication.
One of the things that has interested me the most in Heidegger is this very important moment toward which Françoise Dastur oriented me, which I evoked in a note in Of Spirit:4 it is the Zusage that precedes, in a nonlogical and nonchronological sense of the term, the Fragen as Frömmigkeit des Denkens; Zusage, as affirmation, acquiescence. This gesture is important for me, I have reappropriated it while displacing it into other contexts, into other discursive forms. There is something “older” and more serious than the question. The question itself is carried by an affirmation that is not a precritical, dogmatic affirmation. A yes conditions even das Fragen, or the most critical, the most deconstructive question. It is, in my texts, a very important theme that I relate often, at least in its logical, somehow descriptive form, to Heidegger. At the point where he says, “I have often said that das Fragen was die Frömmigkeit des Denkens, but one must understand what is meant by Frömmigkeit; etymologically (Heidegger insists on this) it is not just piety, there is something more—neither first nor originary—that is enveloped in das Fragen.” And this gesture, is for me, of great use, even if I then transpose it.
And that would allow one to resume the dialogue with Levinas?
Yes, no doubt. Levinas, with whom I have an equally complicated relationship. In other ways.
But less sarcastic?
It is not the same sarcasm, it is not the same type. There are also moments of impatience. In all my texts on Levinas, there are also “negative,” “critical,” “sarcastic” moments. In all of them. Regardless of my admiration. I am in the process of writing a book on Jean-Luc Nancy, about the question of touching, and I encounter Levinas, who speaks of the caress and of Eros. In that book, I wrote some very “critical,” somewhat mocking, sentences.
In the end, when I try to analyze or to establish a sort of typology of my relationships with respect to those people whom I consider the great thinkers of this century, Heidegger, Levinas—and Blanchot, with respect to all three there is some violence. It is not the same violence in all cases; the one who resists best is Blanchot. There are, in Blanchot, some very discrete passages on friendship, on fraternity, that I have also come to suspect (not to mention directly, the political past). There are questions, but in the end with respect to Blanchot I feel fewer tensions, fewer highs and lows.
Can we discuss Of Spirit? What is surprising is that you anticipated in some ways, but in a more interesting manner because it was more philosophical, that great shock that took place around the political question.
It was almost simultaneous, it is very curious. In 1987, the “Farias” book came out in a space of a few weeks from my book.
When you say at the beginning: “I shall speak of the ghost, of the flame, of ashes and of what is meant, for Heidegger, by ‘avoiding,’” one is very worried!
Yes. But the whole book turns around this citation, “avoiding.”
Has sufficient attention been paid to the ambiguity of avoiding? . . .
Clearly, the book was published at the moment that the affair broke, Farias’s book created the uproar that you know, and curiously, I was identified by Farias as a Heideggerian although my approach was not at all Heideggerian, to say the least. It was very complicated from the outset. I tried to explain myself in Le Nouvel Observateur. I do not know how we can reconsider this tangle of knots, which were so overdetermined at that time in France. Things have abated now. But what remains?
Wasn’t the result a relative disaffection among the students? Heidegger no longer seems to be “fashionable” . . .
Really? I am not aware what is happening among students, but my feeling, from a distance, is that this affair, this Farias moment, has not at all hurt the reading of or the interest in Heidegger. On the contrary, I have had the impression—I do not have any statistics here—that it has not at all discouraged the reading of Heidegger, and I am glad.
Of course, it is not a huge readership, but I find no fewer students today reading Heidegger, or who are interested in Heidegger, than at the beginning of the 1980s, and this is very encouraging. I would say the same thing, mutatis mutandis, about Paul de Man in the United States: one could have had the impression that they were going to burn him at the stake; on the contrary, however, the good students were not impressed by the invective; they read him without dogmatism, and without being slavish . . . This will never concern the masses. Since it has been addressed by scholars, philosophers, and teachers, and since it played a productive strategic role, I have the impression that the “affair” was not at all detrimental to the consideration of Heidegger in studies that matter. There are, everywhere, philosophers who think; Heidegger’s political history has not discouraged nor distracted them.
Certainly not at an essential level. But it has to play a role at the more superficial level of relations of influence, of “academic power,” for example, when it comes to hiring. Let us say that Beaufret himself thought he had been a victim of this, since he never had a university career . . .
I think this played a considerable role; I think of Beaufret’s resentment, for example against philosophers who had some power, Wahl, Jankélévitch, etc. He accused them of having sidelined, or marginalized, him, based on political anti-Heideggerianism. I think that it was because of this that he perhaps let himself rail against the “great Jewish professors” of the Sorbonne who, like Jankélévitch, no longer wanted to hear talk of Heidegger. . . . Wahl, for his part, gave lectures on Heidegger and neither foreclosed nor ostracized him.
What do you think of the Gesamtausgabe, the collected works?
I feel guilty for not having read the ones that have appeared lately, but there is therein an incalculable future. Heidegger’s future will emerge from the deciphering of these texts.
I have read the Beiträge but not yet seriously enough; I feel guilty for not having worked on the recent publications of the last decade as I worked on what came before.
And what do you think of my project?
“Heidegger in France” does not designate one of the possible sites of immigration or transplantation for Heidegger’s thought. There is no “Heidegger in Russia,” “Heidegger in England,” or “Heidegger in America.” “Heidegger in France” is an original outgrowth, an incomparable event, from a national point of view. In France, there was much more than a reception of Heidegger; there was something different. I think there is a Heidegger to whom we had no access. If there is a Heidegger-Event in this century, France will have counted no less than Germany. I would not say this of any other country, even if in other countries there is at times excellent knowledge of Heidegger—in Italy, in the United States, in Spain (it is there that Sein und Zeit was translated for the first time). Nonetheless, in none of the three countries, a fortiori anywhere else, was there an event that could be referred to in the same manner: if someone said “Heidegger in England,” everyone would laugh; “Heidegger in France,” that is a different story . . .
And in Germany?
Even in Germany there was little fruition. The organic metaphor, the vegetal metaphor, the metaphor of phusis, comes to me perhaps too quickly, but there was no flowering, no emergence of an irreducible thinking. This is because what happened in France, despite the importing or the debt, was an idiomatic event. To explain this, one has to take into account other factors as well: in the background, there is the entire French contribution. There, an incomparable transplantation took place, a hybrid—what is it called these days? A genetically modified organism. There was something of this order: Heidegger in France, a genetically modified organism—unique.
What I just said about transplantation, about the absolutely original hybrid, Heidegger would not have understood. He had no access to this. He continued to think that France was a country where people were interested in him, but he did not, in my opinion, have any access to this kind of growth, of birth. He was not interested in what was irreducibly French in French Heideggerianism. He had the following prejudice: the French are lightweights (see what Kant says). He could not take French thought seriously.
“Heidegger in France” is, in any case, a phenomenon, and its signs must be sought out not only among all those whom I have been talking about, those who cite Heidegger, refer to him, people who have explicit recourse to Heidegger (and I am among them), but even among people who do not cite him, or are in denial in relation to him, those who seldom cite him, or rarely, but who are just as much influenced by Heidegger as the others, like Foucault, Deleuze . . . Foucault said this at the end of his life without further explanation. I think that the hybridization that I am talking about is visible not just in the works of those who explicitly dedicated texts to Heidegger, but also among those who silenced the name of Heidegger but for whom he was just as important. Lyotard too. One would have to determine this further. Because in the end he is everywhere. Among journalists too, as among journalist-philosophers, it is the same thing. I have the impression that they reacted to the Farias affair as a counter-cathexis. And even if students do not read him much, or the general public for example, Heidegger definitely (one should do a study), even on the streets, is the name of a famous philosopher; even if people know nothing more, he is the most famous German philosopher. If one were to ask people on the street, “who is Heidegger?,” one would be surprised, it is my hypothesis, that there would be more positive responses than for Hegel, Nietzsche, even Bergson.
For people of our generation, there was a moment when, during the last two decades, we came into contact with remarkable Heideggerians who were neither French nor German, namely, Americans. It is known that there are good readers of Heidegger in the United States. People like us have communicated with Americans and Britons, and we have come to respect a certain competence there, a certain vigilance, a watchfulness . . . The American Catholic universities were at the forefront: Notre-Dame, Loyola, and Villanova.
Coming back to the Farias affair, I would like to know what you felt when you did the interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. Was there not a sort of hostility toward you when, for example, Maggiori wrote, “Derrida keeps Heidegger at a distance”?
That interview was reprinted in Points. I can remember the atmosphere back then. All of a sudden, there was this, shall we say, journalistic explosion. I had just written Of Spirit, which, in its own way, posed political questions to Heidegger, which, I dare say, were serious and radical. And then—a chronological coincidence to which I was naturally very sensitive—the moment when I presented this talk (in an international conference on Heidegger), I felt—as in the case of all those who had been interested in Heidegger for a long time—on the one hand, that I was aware of the political question, and on the other hand, in my own way, not wanting to carry out a quick trial, I was posing substantive questions. Then the Farias book came out, and it was greeted by the press or by those in the university who have an easier time speaking in newspapers than elsewhere, as a quite scandalous revelation, the great discovery about Heidegger’s shameful past! Then, I read Farias’s book and I explained my position in the interview in l’Observateur. Besides the fact that I could not find anything fundamentally new, I was shocked, simultaneously by the claim to novelty, by the astonishment of the journalist philosophers (these journalists are philosophy professors) who not only made some fuss, which was not the worst part, but an accusatory racket not so much with respect to Heidegger, but with respect to those people in France who, according to the journalists, had cultivated their Heideggerian affiliation for a long time without any questions, and without any shame, etc. I found this to be very shocking. Maggiori’s little clever line—“Derrida keeps Heidegger at a distance”—was an attempt at a play on words implying that he was quite attentive to the fact that Of Spirit was critical of Heidegger, in a very muted style, very discretely—basically without fireworks, and that in the end, I did not seem to be upset by the Shoah, and that I spoke calmly. “Keeping at a distance” meant that I, naturally, distanced myself from Heidegger (which is something I had always done, well before 1987) but that I respectfully continued, at the same time, to spare Heidegger, contrary to Farias. So, I found his reaction both quite odd since it was spread over two pages, with a lot of noise, and quite typical of the journalistic reaction in general. I found this gesticulating very shocking and unfair with respect to those who had been attempting to think with Heidegger for a long time—and perhaps against him—but not simply to follow him. It was unfair. It was a little heavy-handed, a little crude and naive: these people were discovering the matter; now the political question concerning Heidegger had been raised for the last thirty years! It was in that Stimmung that I responded to Didier Éribon’s request for an interview with l’Observateur, where I tried to say all this in a different manner. I remember having been sarcastic and scathing about Farias, but above all I remember having tried to state my reservations concerning Heidegger’s thinking, and my respect, indeed, for that thinking, as well as my feeling that if it were necessary to pose political questions without holding back, then it would have to be done with the vigilance of thought that was required. In short, that one would have to begin by reading. It is a clarification that I wanted to make as carefully as possible.
This interview, which was later translated, started an entire scandal in the United States. Let me explain the story briefly: one day, maybe two years later, I am in New York and I see a book by Richard Wolin and, in the middle of this somewhat accusatory book written in Farias’s style, I find translated and published my interview, with innumerable errors in translation, serious errors, and inscribed within an interpretative paradigm that was very violent toward me. I therefore reacted against the fact that this had been published without my consent and in a context of which I could not approve, etc. This article was at the center of a major American affair, once again, and as always, it was journalistic-academic in nature. It is nonetheless interesting from a structural-typical point of view that all these affairs are managed in some way, and one can indeed say managed, by people who are neither purely or simply journalists, nor academics, but go-betweens, by philosophers who write for magazines and who always do this under conditions that are hardly respectable. And, in the United States, this was the case of Thomas Sheehan and others who wrote appalling things, unworthy of elementary deontology. Afterward, I published a response to all this in the American translation of Points. The leavening of all these affairs is always tabloid sensationalism. It is from the moment that things are taken up, simplified, and inflated in the press that it rises.
In Counterpath, I see a note on page 55 where you speak of the attacks of an illiterate commentator who called Heideggerians “precious damsels [précieuses ridicules].”
That was Polac. I did not want to name him; he is an expert, a specialist in this type of degradation, of denigration, of vulgar insults: resentment, hostility, and triumphant incompetence.
Things have calmed down a lot since this affair. And what of the aftermath?
Having a relatively rich experience of these stories, whether it be Heidegger or Paul de Man, I note that in both cases one has to deal with a journalistic or academic armed revolt, eager to settle a score, all sorts of scores, and not necessarily nor essentially with the accused or the dead—but with living people, all sorts of living people. But in the end, once the fight is over, and it had been ferocious, violent and discouraging, everything cools and settles down, and the essential issues remain. This does not discourage scholars from continuing to read Heidegger and de Man. I can testify to this in both cases. One might have thought, if one were to have read Maggiori in 1987, that Heidegger was going to be “shelved.” But the research on Heidegger continues and it is more and more rigorous and extensive. This teaches us that we should not be impressed by eruptions in the tabloid media type. This makes me appreciate the university—it opens another time, a different duration, another filtering (it is not always the best filtering, no doubt, but there is another time, for evaluation). And when a corpus has to withstand such attacks, it resists. This is the case for Heidegger. This in no way exonerates Heidegger of the political responsibilities we have mentioned, but it shows that there is something else that is at stake, and even from the political point of view, that it is worth continuing to work on.
I have to say that while I continue to be impressed by and drawn to Heidegger’s thought in my teaching, I know that I will never stop coming back to it and that I will never be done with an infinite task. Despite all my questions, all the reservations that I might have, I continue to think that an enormous task awaits me and that I must confess that these last years, I have not succeeded in following, as I should have, all the publications, all the translations. I would like to have the time, the leisure, the freedom to start reading again: to start everything all over again. From time to time, I go and glean something, but I have not been able to carry out this work. What constitutes Heidegger’s irresistible force for me is that I sense that there is still a lot in reserve. This word “reserve” must remain ambiguous: my reservations [réserves], his works in reserve . . .
. . . and in Counterpath you say that Heidegger is your “overseer” [contremaître].
As it turns out, the word “counter” [contre], if I may be allowed to emphasize it myself, plays a very turbulent role in this text. I am always going on about “counterparts,’” “counterexamples,” “counterpaths,” etc. I present myself as someone who relates to himself all the time as a counterexample—or as the counterpart of himself; someone who has to incorporate, take into account the counterpart or the counterexample of what he is, does, or thinks. I am the counterexample of myself, I am in a sort of contradiction. Thus, I say—I think it is in Circumfession—that deep down, I, more than anyone else (or at least as much as anyone else), am a metaphysician of presence: I desire nothing more than presence, voice, all these things I have questioned; therefore, I am, as it were, the counterexample of what I am advocating. I formalize this logic of counter-exemplarity and of the counterpart, which plays such a large role in Circumfession. I say that I am my own counterexample. This comes back very strongly in Counterpath not just because of the word “counterpath,” which I try to put to work, but because of the word “counter” and of contra. When I say: “counter to Heidegger’s order” (Counterpath, 56), it is because he haunts me, in Counterpath as in The Post Card; he is always there, watching me and reproaching me for something. I do what Heidegger would not like to see being done or would not do himself, for example, traveling, taking an interest in technology, etc. I am always in the process of disobeying a Heideggerian injunction, which I, nonetheless, sense in myself. And so he is there, he haunts me like a sort of strict father and, for example, I have fun imagining him reproaching me for travelling: you can’t think while traveling, its distracting. He who never travels! I do the opposite all the time—but under his watch. He is a sort of specter.
In Athens, Still Remains precisely, I questioned his attitude as a traveler, while I, on the other hand, have great respect for it. He takes issue with tourism and photography. And then there are these pages that he wrote in Sojourns, on Rome and Greece, and on Orthodox churches. There is a classic protest by him—this will bring us back to the word “counter”—against Latin and against Roman culture, which, to him, represent metaphysical decadence. Let us return to the word “counter,” specifically to Latin and to Heidegger’s criticism. In the passage in Counterpath where I say “counter to Heidegger’s order” (Counterpath, 56) while underlining “counter,” I was interested in the usage of the Latin word contra and I especially emphasized the semantics of the Latin and on everything tied up with it. “Counter to Heidegger’s order,” is not against his thinking of Gegend, etc., which is why I insist, as it were, on the Latin. It is also a question of writing: I have the impression that when I rely on the resources for thinking that are provided by the Latin language, and the French, then I am already betraying Heidegger. And I do it all the time. So I have fun, on this point as well, of speaking against Heidegger before Heidegger. My admiration is compensated by mocking his heavy-handedness, his inability to play, to understand literature. All these are my reservations. Heidegger is present and challenged from one end of the book to the other. In a certain way, I try not to protest against what he says of Gegend, or of Begegnen, but to reorient the thinking of traveling in terms of encounter. Because at the same time, it would be unfair to say that he is against traveling: he didn’t travel; he was opposed to a certain type of tourism, but he probably had nothing against another type of travel, the “Hölderlinian” type for example. Nonetheless, there is, in my book, an atmosphere tied to the experience of traveling that is not attuned with the Heideggerian atmosphere, and so I try to account for this, to assume it. There is thus, in this passage, a play against Heidegger and at the same time an attempt to assume, in a thinking of the event as encounter of the unexpected, as what falls upon us, something of what Heidegger says about Gegend and Begegnen: a thinking of the event that is at the same time close to Heidegger and very far from him.
In what I say of the event, there is something that cannot be easily rendered in Heideggerian terms. I am on the side of dislocation, of dispersion, of dissemination. It would be unfair and a simplification to say that Heidegger negates difference, dislocation, or dissemination: one could have a reading of Heidegger that would show that he does think dislocation. But there is a force that draws him toward gathering, toward being near oneself. The difficulty is one of knowing whether one can think Versammlung while including in it, integrating and assimilating into it, the play of difference, of dislocation, of dissociation, or whether it is only to the extent that there is an irreducible risk of dispersion, of singularity, of dissemination, that Versammlung can emerge. It is a very abstract way of saying something whose stakes are found everywhere. For example—in Specters of Marx I speak about it with respect to justice—when Heidegger legitimately attempts to withdraw dikē from the Roman thinking of jus, he comes back to a thinking of harmony and of Versammlung, to legein, and gathering in a certain sense. I try to oppose this justice (even if it is thought or if it thinks beyond something that arrives later, namely Roman law) with the necessity of dissociation, of infinite alterity: there is no justice except where there is an insurmountable dissociation and disharmony. I would not want to give in to the pathos of the tear [déchirement]; nonetheless, justice, a certain thinking of justice, assumes disharmony, absolute dissonance, alterity, and absolute singularity—something that does not allow itself to be gathered. I say in a very abstract manner that there is something whose stakes are, I think, immeasurable. It is another axiomatics: thinking the One, gathering, legein or Versammlung based on the possibility of the different, of dissociation, of the incommensurable, rather than the contrary.
Here we find what you have said elsewhere regarding the retreat of metaphor.
In this case as well, we have a trace that cannot be gathered, a repetition, thus also a division. I hesitate to speak of it too quickly: I am convinced that one could find in Heidegger the means to think this difference, this dissociation. He indeed conceives of conflict as that which gathers adversaries, that which holds together two opposed poles; while I think of a difference that would not even hold together what differs. There are Heideggerian texts on polemos, on conflict, on the rift, adversity, and opposition, but also on that which holds enemies, or adversaries together. I try to think a difference that cannot be gathered. Obviously, the consequences of this debate extend in an incalculable fashion across the entire field of thinking, the entire positioning of the history of philosophy, of epochality.
This also puts into question the conception of history: according to Heidegger, is not the destinal sending the unique sending of the West?
In the end, the sending is gathered. I understand the necessity of this logic, but even if Heidegger does not embrace a teleology, there is still the pole of a destination for the sending, for the dispensation that must be gathered. If one thinks this destination based on errancy or on nondestination, what I call “destinerrance,” one puts into question a certain interpretation of the unity of metaphysics, and one takes technology into consideration. But I can imagine Heidegger’s reply, or that of certain of his interpreters; they would say that clearly Heidegger’s texts also contain this “destinerrance”—and it is true that in very early Heidegger there is this idea of “errancy,” even if for him it always emerges from the horizon of a gathering, from a sending of being.
Being matters here, whatever one might say. It is being, in its difference from beings, and different from the concept of being, that gathers and harmonizes the legein and the Versammlung, and that is where things are decided. While I sense the necessity and the force of this thinking, I resist it in the name of what no longer allows itself to be gathered—alas! Alas and no, in fact, because the fact of resisting the gathering might be felt as a distress, a sadness, a loss—dislocation, dissemination, the not being at home, etc.—but it is also an opportunity. It is the opportunity of an encounter, of justice, of a relation to absolute alterity. Whereas on the contrary, there, when this risk and this opportunity do not exist, the worst can happen: under the authority of Versammlung, of logos, and of being, the worst can advance with its political figures. If we had the time, I would attempt to show that, on my side, the side of dissociation, obviously there are the threats of the worst, of death, but also of the best opportunity. And inversely, on the side of the gathering or of the logos of ebbing there is, clearly, the chance of gathering, but also surely the chance of a nonencounter, a certain blindness to the other, a certain cancellation of the event, a certain pure noneventfulness. That would be the argument. I can imagine that people who would polemicize or would plead Heidegger’s case against what I am trying to propose could find resources in Heidegger to say things similar to what I would like to say. And they would, no doubt, be right, to a certain extent. The question is, in the end, that of emphasis, insistence, of the extent, of the stress. And there, undeniably, Heidegger stressed gathering—this is what has to be interpreted historically. Why was he led to stress Versammlung and not the contrary? With respect to the side to which I am drawn, not “on my side,” but the side toward which I feel carried in my reservations with regards to Heidegger, the stress is instead on the side of alterity, of dissociation, of infinite distance, of dispersion, of the incommensurable, of the impossible, and of “destinerrance.”
To account for this gap different arguments can be considered. One might, at first, talk of a generation gap. Historically, Heidegger is a thinker of the interwar years; the formation of his thinking belongs to a different period. This is a question of generations, but also a question of nations. On the question of Judaism, I would be very careful. I grew up in a cultural milieu that was as Christian as it was Jewish.
Since you allude to it, this might be the moment to append a question about what you think of Marlène Zarader’s work (in The Unthought Debt) concerning Heidegger’s secret Hebraism.
Basically I think that she is right. Heidegger silenced every reference to Jewish thinkers, from Spinoza to Bergson, to more originary Hebraic matters, and to what one calls the “Old Testament.” One can perceive a factual violence, deliberate or not, with respect to the Jewish tradition. What Zarader says is, on the whole, convincing. It remains to be seen why, where, and how Heidegger did this. I wonder if it is because he was seeking the non-Greek or pre-Greek that would lead necessarily to the other of the Greek. Whether he did this on the basis of his background as a Catholic theologian, he knew the Bible, and the entire Protestant and Catholic traditions. Despite everything, when we speak of hearing, did he hear these texts, directly or through Protestant texts, which contain considerable Judaic material? Where did this hearing occur? He made no legible or explicit effort to refer to Judaic texts. This is indisputable. Why? This would be one of the great ideologico-political dossiers.
To come back to my humble case, what I say about the letter or about disassociation can refer either to a Judaic tradition or to Levinas. But I would be very careful, since I think the matter is more complicated; paradoxically, I am still less knowledgeable about Judaism than Heidegger was. He encountered it by way of theological texts, but I did not. I have no knowledge of Judaism—unfortunately. Even reading the Bible seriously is something that I only did later. On the other hand, Levinas, for me, is something as complicated as Heidegger. So there we have a knot, a great number of knots. In order to untie them, one would need a lot of time and a lot of care. My relation to the Jewish question is almost as complicated as my relation to Heidegger—or as complicated as Heidegger’s relation to the Jewish question! None of this is clear for me.
Can we dwell for a moment on The Post Card?
We can return briefly to the relevance of the postal service and to what I tried to articulate in The Post Card. From the moment when one puts into question this authority of the sending, this prevalence of the destinal sending that governs, in sum, the Heideggerian interpretation of the epochality of being, then one is forced to reattribute to the technical dimension of sending—what I call “postal service” [la poste]—an importance that Heidegger would probably not have given it. He would have found this interest of postal, in the history of postal services, in the history of techniques of transmission, of emitting and receiving, a derivative and limited consequence of metaphysics. Thus he would not have accorded it the importance that I was driven to give it. On the other hand, if one is no longer satisfied with the gathering of the sending and if one speaks of a “destinerrance” of sending, of a sending that also depends on the addressee, that moment, clearly technological, takes on a determining dignity and is no longer just a secondary side effect. And at that moment, all of philosophy, metaphysics, and Greek philosophy, all that constitutes the corpus of Heidegger’s questioning, is situated, on the contrary, in a more enveloping history of the postal service, a history of sendings, of techniques of destination. I often have a lot of fun, in The Post Card, in presenting the Master-thinkers as Postmasters: people who control the passing on of messages, who intercept messages, and who, in a Nietzschean gesture, attempt to mark their authority and their power by appropriating the means of transmission, in other words, with the history of the techniques and means of communication, the history of routes, and the political history of postal services. I suppose Heidegger would have considered all this some sort of technico-anthropological effect that, even if it were interesting in itself, did not have the dignity of what he calls a “sending.” That is where I attempt a sort of displacement, in a constantly uneasy explication with Heidegger. In The Post Card, one finds basically the same scenario as in Counterpath, where Heidegger is present, watching over my gestures, and where I try to justify myself before him, to challenge him, and to argue against him while striving to take him seriously.
It is always the same scenario, from Heidegger the master to Heidegger the overseer: someone whom I oppose with a sort of irreverent respect. But here, the argument that I am attempting to reconstitute is a little better articulated in The Post Card, with respect to this history of the postal service. Obviously, The Post Card dates from 1980: I attempt to be consistent with what I had written about the trace much earlier, that is to say regarding separation, the fact that the trace departs from me, leaves me, and basically wanders errantly without a predetermined destination, or with such a destination that can only be determined based on the response of the other. Everything that I say about the trace against presence, against the gap of presence, attempts to be consistent with the history of the postal.
Heidegger himself sent letters, in particular the “Letter on Humanism,” which turned into a book: did he unify them?
What is curious is, if we want to return to a form of contemporary political journalism, that the Sloterdijk affair, this business of letters, the debate with Habermas, comes back paradoxically to the premises of what we are now discussing, of course without referring to it. The thematics are clearly that of reading and that of the letter to friends. The relation between letters, postcards, and what I had called the “politics of friendship.”
As far as I am concerned, I am very torn between my love for books, for the letter, and my acceptance of the machine; even if I speak about the end of the book, starting with Of Grammatology, I do not greet the arrival of all these machines without great concern. It was not only an immediate concern, but also a more reflexive. I realize that I belong to a time, that I do not want to give anything up, and that I would like to try to contribute to saving the book, saving everything that is associated with the culture of the book, without at the same time rejecting, condemning, or having a reactionary attitude with regard to post-book machines. Undeniably, Heidegger—even though he often criticizes what he calls literature or in any case writing in favor of the spoken word, to say it quickly—is on the side of the book. In the field that we are discussing, he is on the side of the culture of the book and not the culture of word-processing machines. I, like people of my generation, err between the two.
That is where Heidegger is very strong: he gives thought to what is happening, and even to the danger of what is happening. He spoke of cybernetics his whole life. It is certain that he has given thought to the matter, in his own way. It is necessary to have neither a taste for nor an expertise in technology in order to think technology more profoundly than the technologists and the technicians, and I think that Heidegger indeed understood what was happening with technology.
Everything that we said moments ago about the event, the encounter, the dissociation, everything that resists a certain emphasis of Heideggerian thought—all this can be transcribed in a thinking of hospitality, of unconditional hospitality, that is to say, a hospitality that is exposed, with no horizon of expectation, to the surprise of what comes. All this, in fact, takes precedence over a certain phase of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, while being, I would hope, consistent with that moment. Obviously, it would be simplistic to say that there is no thinking of hospitality in Heidegger: there are many texts on Heimat and on welcoming, on gathering. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, I tried to distinguish between gathering and the welcoming that is an exposition to the other rather than a gathering (this latter being on the side of reception), but naturally, if one were to be honest and sympathetic to Heidegger, one would be able to find elements of hospitality and of friendship in Heidegger. And yet, it is not at the center of his thinking. This brings us back to the question of ethics in Levinas, back to the manner in which Heidegger treats the question of ethics. On this point too I am perplexed, I would not want to give the impression of playing Levinas against Heidegger, because again, my relation to Levinas, which is also very much one of debt and admiration, is not one without reservations. It is true that in the course of these last years, it was the theme of friendship that pushed me, at the end of The Politics of Friendship, to question Heidegger in the texts concerning polemology, hospitality, the beyond of cosmopolitanism, and of a “democracy to come.” Obviously, Heidegger is not a democrat. I, for my part, attempt to think, under the heading of a “democracy to come,” a hospitality beyond the nation-state: a new international. Along all these paths that would be difficult to recollect quickly now, I no longer see Heidegger. Even an exchange with him is no longer foreseeable, and this is the case for all the books that I have written these last years, from Specters of Marx, The Politics of Friendship, to the little book Of Hospitality.
Apparently, the exchange with Heidegger has grown weaker, even if it has not been interrupted, but I think that one could reconstitute it. In Specters of Marx, it would be around themes of justice and dikē; in The Politics of Friendship, it would be in the very last text on polemos, on polemology. And then all my critical or “deconstructive” readings of Carl Schmitt, in this text, are inscribed in a scene where Heidegger is not absent. I do not at all want to reduce Heidegger to Schmitt: there was a truly intractable differend between them, but there was also a common space, and, in order to talk about this seriously, one would have to go back to Schmitt and to Heidegger, not on the political question, but on the question of decision, of the enemy, of war, of the state, of the nation-state, and of sovereignty. In the end, if I were to reread Heidegger now with these questions in mind, I would go and look at what he said, if he spoke of it, about citizenship, and about the nation. In the “Letter on Humanism,” he says that internationalism is a sort of nationalism. How far did he pursue this line or reasoning? Today, I am interested in questioning the idea of sovereignty, the onto-theologico-political idea of sovereignty with all the contemporary stakes, in particular the death penalty. I would try to see if there is in Heidegger any trace of a reflection on the history of sovereignty, the history of the state. There are things on the polis: I would like to reread Heidegger from this perspective, through another prism of political questions concerning the state, citizenship—and democracy.
There might be, within an apparently circumscribed and certain field, events of thought whose effect would be to disorganize or to reorganize the entire hierarchy. A technological, biological, or techno-biological event could require a rethinking of the entire general organization and the hierarchy of the fields. It is an idea to which Heidegger was not very receptive. Neither was Husserl nor Hegel. One has to accept being provoked by things that come from places where they would not have been expected. But what we can affirm, in the fields of theory and of French thought, is that people have, in general, wanted to make a choice between, on the one hand, Husserlian, Heideggerian fundamentalism—the “serious philosophers”—and on the other hand, people like Foucault who disputed this choice, thinking that they would do all the work as historians of this or that field and in excluding Heidegger. I think both are necessary. When something happens, it is between the two. But I do not see why one should choose between a gesture of the Hegel-Husserl-Heidegger style and a more local, regional gesture. Each calls for the other. The distinctive trait of what is happening, in our time, the time of philosophy, of the sciences, and of the technologies to come, is perhaps the necessity, that we should be increasingly aware of, of this exchange (I should not say exchange, it is an awful word), of this violent, reciprocal, troubling provocation. Someone like Stiegler is seriously interested in Heidegger and also in technologies of information, and in bioengineering. This is what is calling us: that we should not choose between the style of fundamental questions and that of local questions. That is the journey.
Do you not think that Heidegger would only accept what you are suggesting in one domain: his dialogue with Char?
For him, poetry was not a field, it was a “parallel” peak (one “beside the other”), at the same height as thought. It was not a region, it was another peak. But what he did for poetry, he would not do for anything else. Even if he had some knowledge of physics, or of zoology, he used it only to remind the specialists of a fundamental questioning that they were wrong to ignore or neglect.
Is there not another domain that he disdained, namely, that of the discipline of history as a science?
The history of historians or of anthropologists. The history of sacrifice, for example. I think there is in Heidegger a fundamental, a founding, thinking of sacrifice. But he never showed any interest in anthropological studies of sacrifice. I feel I am between the two. I do not want to have to choose. In my own personal history and taste, I am more of a “fundamentalist,” so to speak, on Heidegger’s side; but I feel guilty enough to consider that I should be more interested in local questions. When I speak of prosthesis, I speak at a fundamental level, somewhat quickly; in order to discuss it better, one would have to go and take a closer look. I would like to read more history, more sociology . . .
If we wanted to go back to what we were saying about gathering and dispersion, the difference between France and the United States is that in the U.S., there is a great dispersion of styles and of philosophical centers, whereas in France there is great concentration. There is a model, the figure of the philosophy professor. From the point of view of society, we think we know what a philosophy professor is, whereas in the United States, a philosopher who teaches analytic philosophy is not the same as someone who teaches traditional philosophy. At the university where I teach, in California, the philosophy department is analytic, which is why, although I am part of the philosophy faculty, I teach primarily in a literature department. And yet I teach philosophy there, but as far as the philosophy department’s students are concerned, it is as if they did not have the right to come and listen to me!