What were your Heideggerian “moorings?”
My moorings are straightforward enough. I knew nothing about Heidegger until, perhaps, 1961. I’d never heard of him before; I was a khâgne student in Toulouse, then at Louis-le-Grand, and Lakanal. None of the teachers mentioned him. The year at Lakanal I met François Warin, since he lived in Sceaux.
That was when you and François Warin translated Heidegger’s text on physis in Aristotle?
Yes. We translated the text in its entirety, which was then published in two issues of Aletheia, a journal run by students associated with Axelos. Warin suggested the project to me because I was fluent in German. We became friends and he introduced me to Heidegger, whereas at the time it was Hegel who was my passion. Warin and I remained friends, my oldest friend among philosophers. He had been a student of Beaufret’s and had become associated with Fédier, and Vezin. I can’t remember if he spoke to me about these people because he had already been cut off from their circle. He was, however, very much a Heideggerian and was mostly in contact with Axelos. Very much captivated and fascinated by Beaufret, he was under the ethico-political expectation of the Catholic milieu: his father was in the resistance, had been deported, and died in a camp; Warin lived with his mother and his two brothers. He also took me to a church that Ricoeur would go to sometimes. He was an uncompromising leftist. That is perhaps why there had been an initial discord with Beaufret and his followers. But Warin had introduced me to Axelos and had taken me to see him.
So it was in those years, 1963–64, that you began to read Heidegger?
In any case, my first contact with Heidegger wasn’t very promising. Warin had me read the “Letter on Humanism” and I laughed out loud. I told him, this guy, with his whole peasant-pastoral motif, was ridiculous. I would put little notes in his mailbox with somewhat crass jokes about “the shepherd of being.” The following year I played a trick on him, I wrote a pseudo-Heideggerian text on Auguste Comte, and I was delighted because Warin took the bait and showed the text to a few of Beaufret’s followers. I had fun parodying Heidegger. I used to say that you had to hear a more originary resonance behind his spoken word, etc. That just goes to show you that I wasn’t very favorably inclined toward this material.
This phase passed very quickly, however, once I realized that there was something else there besides what struck me as ridiculous. In a word: I understood the thinking of finitude. Warin was also very important to my education, as was Birault; but despite all that, I didn’t become what one might call a Heideggerian. My contact with the Heideggerians was a bit disconnected. Warin left for Germany, then Tunisia, and he stayed abroad for a long time. Also, I never encountered Heidegger’s work during the course of my studies. Then there was a leap of sorts: in 1964 I discovered Jacques Derrida’s first writings: not his introduction to The Origin of Geometry at first, but the opening sections of Of Grammatology.
Which had been published in Critique, as well as other texts later gathered in Writing and Difference?
Yes. For me, that was another revelation. The difference between Heidegger and Derrida is that Derrida appeared more contemporary to me. I didn’t know that there were people like him, right in the middle of contemporary philosophical work. I didn’t have the clear feeling that Heidegger was still alive, that he was still present.
To that extent? Didn’t you, given your fluency in German, have direct access to some of the Heidegger texts, but also to Nietzsche?
No. My philosophical interest at the time was Hegel, I had hardly any direct knowledge of Nietzsche, none of Husserl—and yet I had been a student of Ricoeur. He became the director of my MA thesis, which was on Hegel’s philosophy of religion. My interest in religion was quite strong; I wanted to work on the question of religion. I’m returning to it now. Hegel has always been my favorite author. The first book that I wrote alone was The Speculative Remark in 1973. Once I passed the Agrégation, I asked to be sent to Strasbourg in order to study and get a degree in theology. I was given a hypokhâgne position in Colmar. I was happy. That’s how I then found myself in Strasbourg. In the meantime, I had discovered Derrida’s texts, and this opened up new dimensions to me. That is how I was led back to Heidegger, whom I had ignored for a while. Ricoeur offered me a job correcting his translation of Ideas. When I saw the size of the work I turned him down. But I stayed on good terms with Ricoeur, and I enrolled with him for a dissertation on religion. At that point I began to read Nietzsche because of Christianity. There you have it: I cannot even say what happened to Heidegger in this entire scene.
Heidegger certainly figures in your writing, but without being the guiding thread. Is it perhaps in “Sharing Voices,” in 1982, that you devoted your attention to Heidegger?
It is a commentary on what Heidegger says about hermeneutics in Being and Time, based on the critical distance offered by the “Conversation with a Japanese.” And it is true that twenty years after my beginnings, Heidegger had become an integral part of my thought and work milieu. How did that happen? I could not say. Certainly it was through Derrida’s influence; but there are not many of Derrida’s texts explicitly devoted to Heidegger. The ellipses in Voice and Phenomenon intrigued me. And in Positions, Derrida simply admits: “What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions.” It took me some time to realize that différance (with an a) was an operation carried out at the heart of the ontological difference.
Isn’t your path different from that of most Heideggerians of your generation who were influenced by an influential intermediary: Beaufret, Birault, or Granel?
My intermediary was not a professor, since it was Warin. I was initially under the influence of the spirit of left-wing Catholicism that constituted the central axis of my intellectual formation. It is even what made me become a philosopher, but with a very political style. It was first in Esprit that I began to write an article on Nietzsche, and then another one on Althusser. This “sensibility” didn’t make Heidegger too accessible to me. However, the encounter with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe played an obvious role. There was an important circumstance too: a study we did together around 1970–73 on Lacan. It was a little improvised because nobody here understood any of it. We wanted to take on the challenge by using a kind of academic method: reading the text itself. In The Title of the Letter, we found key passages where Lacan spoke of Dasein, of the “thing,” etc. We noticed the “hidden layers” of the Lacanian text: Bataille on the one hand, Heidegger on the other. My interest in Bataille showed me that there was a much greater proximity than is usually acknowledged between Bataille and Heidegger. Bataille acknowledged this proximity, but in treating Heidegger like a professor!
Let’s jump forward about fifteen years and turn to Of Divine Places. There we read for example: “There is always a last God to be born.” Isn’t this an echo of the Heideggerian theme of “the God to come?”
I don’t think that the relation is very thematic or very developed. It is rather at this point, today, that I would like to take up the question of “the last God.” I can remember a lecture by Courtine, here, in the ’90s, where he spoke about the Beiträge and gave a very critical analysis of “the last God.” Lacoue-Labarthe was in agreement and, paradoxically, I was the one who felt more Heideggerian. I have forgotten the arguments, and one would have to go back to them. But when Philippe said to me, “This return of the religious is despicable,” I think that things are not so simple. I don’t think that we can reduce this to the return of the religious. It’s much more complex, just like the “affair.” With respect to the latter, too, my relation has been, let’s say, fairly unemotional. What I had learned before Faye’s publications in Médiations (for example Guitton’s visit to Heidegger) hadn’t really shaken me. Since then, what has interested me is to understand where in Heidegger’s thinking this takes place: where to situate not the political fault, but the philosophical problem. Philippe did very important work on this, and you as well, and Derrida, as well as Taminiaux, but there are still paths to be pursued.
What I want to say is that I am now interested in delimiting this sort of contradiction at the limits of Heidegger’s perfectly legitimate thought, namely that it is in death that the highest possibility of existence presents itself, this possibility of identifying with the impossible, that it is the possibility of the end of the possible. I would say on the contrary that it is the place where Dasein becomes entirely Mitsein. And therefore, we have to take account of the others in the analysis of death, whereas Heidegger excludes them. What is a dead person if not what he or she instantly becomes in representation, in language, in the presence of others? But Heidegger neglects mourning and the presence of the dead in their tombs. There is an entire thematics therein, which I have always found interesting. Heidegger introduces “being-with” in a position that is detached from any other form of derivation of the other—no intersubjectivity, no empathy, etc. He never turned, later, in the direction indicated by Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation (of which I am not a great fan either). Curiously, Heidegger sets up Mitsein as a sort of brute fact! He does not analyze the “with” [mit]. Not a word! “Being-with” is already given. Yet when we see where the word mit comes from in German, it’s not at all the same as avec, it’s not at all the idea of proximity that stands out. It’s the idea of the milieu: “in the midst of.” It is obvious what the later Heidegger could have done with that; but the fact that I am always with other Daseins is resolved very quickly in Being and Time, into the relationship to the world, to equipmentality, etc. It’s strange that there is no place in these analyses for other ways of being mit, in other words, for a phenomenology of affect, of encounter, of gaze, or of touch, etc. . . . Fürsorge remains rather elliptical. What is more, there is an entire tradition that comes back later: of the Volk, of the history of a people struggling with their spiritual identity. Of course it’s very old, it goes through Hegel, and Herder . . . It is surprising to think that all those people who were not on the left in the 1930s, in Germany as elsewhere in Europe, allowed themselves to be reduced to this destiny of a people or of a nation.
There is no doubt that Heidegger already had some sympathy for the themes of the extreme right before 1933. His wife was more explicit: she was in a youth movement, or something similar.
His relationship to others, revealed by Heidegger’s correspondence with Arendt and Blochmann, is very interesting. It’s at the same time close to and in contrast with Sein und Zeit. Everything happens as if there was a certain authenticity in the relation to the other, which involved love in the case of Hannah, and loving friendship with Elisabeth. But love is absent from Sein und Zeit, as is sexual difference. Heidegger was a male chauvinist to an extreme, and he had a way of saying to Hannah: “You are a woman, you have to fulfill your feminine essence, etc.” He did not tell her that she had to stay home, but one can sees that for him the man has a heroic, strong, virile role, etc. There are also emphases that completely corroborate the analysis of das Man and that are of the following type: when one is alone on the mountain, far from all the vain agitation of the city, that is when one is drawing close to authenticity. But Sein und Zeit doesn’t suggest that. We expect something else, a different grasp of “everyday” existence.
These are tonalities that one also finds in volume 29/30 of the Gesamtausgabe (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), where he develops the theme of boredom and of its different degrees. Should one then see in his allusions to current events an antidemocratic sensibility?
Yes. That sort of sensibility drove many people in that period to look favorably upon everything that destabilized the Weimar Republic. The vast horizon of the Red Menace was still present. It was hard for many people to avoid being Stalinist, or Social-Democrat, or Trotskyite, it was not easy to find a “just” left . . . This has to be said because it is perfectly clear and true. We have to avoid closing ourselves up in a retrospective democratic good-conscience like that entire American movement that took great interest in showing the latent fascism of a certain number of the French. Of course there are a lot of things, good and just, to be said on this matter. But retrospective judgment should not oversimplify things . . . Should we, could we have made the same choices in 1920–30 as we would today? I am always ready to say that if I had been twenty in 1920 I have no idea what I would have become; I have to admit it honestly. I was of course captivated in the postwar years by a discourse aiming at the future with grand visions, in the style of the left. So? When we read certain texts from the ’20s and ’30s, the protests against “materialist” civilization, a lot of things become clear. People in general don’t want to talk about it. We tried, together with Michel Surya, to dedicate an issue of the journal Lignes to this. We weren’t able to do so. No one responded to us. It was the same situation for an issue of Cahiers de l’Herne that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and I wanted to do on Blanchot in 1985. A number of people didn’t want to, under the obviously false pretense that “He is too great for me . . .” People don’t want to discuss the problems of democracy; they prefer to attack those who are not democrats, which remains a bit shallow.
On page 184 of your book The Sense of the World, where you hardly speak of Heidegger, there is nonetheless a note in which we read: “It is doubtless Christianity that will have persisted in Heidegger, never really subjected to deconstruction, remaining perhaps the secret resource of the deconstruction of ontotheology.” Can you discuss this point, which is alluded to only elliptically in the book?
I believe indeed that something lies behind Heidegger’s avowed anti-Christianism. It seems difficult to reduce Christianity to a Roman bastardization of the Greek heritage. It’s suspicious. Is there not in Heidegger’s work a secret re-elaboration of Judeo-Christian themes (Geworfenheit, Gewissen)—a matter in which we would also find a secret re-elaboration of Spinoza. Why nothing on Spinoza? Why pretend (in the “Letter on Humanism”) that there hadn’t been a treatise of fundamental ontology or of first philosophy named Ethics? It’s staggering. The title Ethics says something different from ethics as separated from logic: it says something like what Heidegger wants to make it say.
I would wager that Heidegger borrows something from Spinoza (a sense of ethics prior to any division between theory and practice). And he borrowed the messianic theme from Judeo-Christianity, perhaps with the “last God,” and above all a remarkably intelligent grasp of finitude as corresponding to the Christian creature, to Christian man. As a result we have the entire complication with respect to metaphysics, which is itself the originally Christian complication of the intimior intimo meo. It’s a very Augustinian Christianity, a very Pascalian one. There are, by the way, striking resonances with respect to monastic life, for example in the correspondence with Elisabeth Blochmann. From another perspective, the short text of 1945, Armut, develops the theme of the future of (spiritual) communism based on a phrase from Hölderlin. Let us oppose spiritual communism to the vulgar political communism, and there he invokes the great Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition.
On the way toward this detachment, Heidegger was guided by other mystics, and by Eckhart in particular.
A certain mysticism can even mix with anti-Christianism . . . I suspect that those who advocate anti-Christianism are those who refuse to go through to the end of the self-deconstruction that is Christianity at its heart, in other words, those who avoid to truly arrive at atheism. But even within atheism, the very need to refer finitude to the order of presence and even to the presence of a God, I don’t agree that this is religion. I am not sure what this has to be called, in the end. It involves a presence to come, even if it arrives only by absenting itself, like in Heidegger’s posthumous interview: “Only a God can save us”—or the absence of a God. But “salvation” is not the right category . . . It is a very complicated affair, at the heart of which we find finitude—Heidegger’s fundamental contribution. I feel compelled to reread him, even though I am always troubled by Ereignis.
What, in your opinion, is the future of Heidegger’s thought in France? The intellectual landscape today is quite fragmented. Are we moving toward a marginalization of Heidegger, or even of the great German tradition?
I am unable to make forecasts. I was recently astonished by a colleague’s remark: “It is analytic philosophy which will now become prominent.” It may be true on the institutional level, the juries of the exams, etc. But, as far as the work of thinking is concerned, how can one break with the German tradition? How many times have people said to me that I was a Heideggerian terrorist! The Nazi affair has obviously played a role, but even more there has been a lack of work on Heidegger. Yet, I don’t want to be too optimistic, but I see signs of interest on the part of people from Eastern Europe, emerging from Communist domination, for example, or coming from Japan, from India, Latin America . . . and even from Germany!
This development can certainly affect the nature of Heideggerian questions, but perhaps most of all the style, the manner, of posing the questions?
It is necessary to look beyond the French philosophical landscape. Whether in the United States, in Central Europe, in Italy, in Germany itself, people continue to work on Heidegger.
Is there a reshuffling of the cards?
Yes, for a more profound reason, which is tied to a surprising turn in philosophy, which leads to all kinds of developments. What prevails, in France, is another mode of the marginalization of Heidegger: the neo-Husserlian mode, which is quite strong. In France there are young philosophers, who are very gifted, who seem to mostly refer to Husserl, but who are manipulating motifs that are in fact Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian. Instead of going directly to Heidegger, they use tools that they borrowed from him, such as the motif of the event. The event is everywhere, but once again people are indefinitely analyzing Kant and Husserl . . . Of course I am very glad to see that Husserl-studies are concerned, for example, with passivity and the body. But after Husserl there is Heidegger. In this respect, I remain in sympathy with Granel, in particular with his introduction to the Krisis.
Is there some reticence on the part of the new generation to speak about Heidegger directly? Is it opportunism, or is it prudence?
I don’t know. I have been at the University of Strasbourg for thirty-two years, and Heidegger has become no more accepted than he was before. Occasionally, one may study one of his texts, no more than that. He has never been chosen as an author for the Agrégation examination program. Why is this the case? Is this because of Heidegger himself? The Nazi affair? A reaction to the Beaufret group? Against the “Derrida-effect?” But perhaps it is just and desirable that things don’t get institutionalized.
Can Heidegger become an ordinary author like any other? Why is it so hard for him?
That’s a good question. I would lean in the direction of saying that the reason is extremely profound and that it has to do with what Heidegger tried to say concerning the step back from metaphysics, the Schritt zurück. I often like formulating this by referring to someone who is unexpected in this context: Bouveresse. In the introduction to one of his great books on Wittgenstein, he says something like: “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Freud together were the witnesses of what might well be called the end of metaphysics.” I mention his comment in order to say that even someone like him can make this observation; and it is very appropriate to include Freud in this constellation. It is true: there was something that turned in between the two wars, something that took a long time to find again, on the political and social level, as a movement, a fault line; because the postwar years were dedicated to repairing, sealing off. It was then thought that they were returning to an older vein. It had not yet even become clear to what extent the 1920s–1930s had already touched the roots of what was considered as socialism and the problems tied to it. We have to return to the question of the end of philosophy and of the task of thinking: we might say that all is not lost!
It is very important to recognize that political action served as a screen: not always and not everywhere, but in a certain number of cases; in academia, it was surely a conscious and organized pretext; in other cases it was an unconscious pretext. Several years ago, in Libération, a journalist wrote that if you saw a Heideggerian on the sidewalk you had to cross to the other side! At about the same time, when the German translation of The Inoperative Community was published, there was a revolting article in the Taz, a leftist Berlin newspaper, titled: “Nochmals der Führer.” It began with “Nancy has a problem: he likes Heidegger.” And it went on: “He is right in stating that there are many problems with social relations, but you know what he proposes as a solution: community, Gemeinschaft, so he is a Nazi!” Already in 1973–74, in Berlin, at the end of a talk with Lacoue-Labarthe, presenting The Title of the Letter, the first question was: “Do you know who you are talking about when you refer to Heidegger?” We were stunned, anguished. It was the time of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Things are very different today. But the result is still a gap in the education of the younger generation. I remember a graduate seminar where, about eight years ago, a student asked me what I meant by this “ontological difference.” A student from the École Normale Supérieure told me that at the École people thought that there were two types of Heideggerians: the abominable fascists and the other ones, who in any case were not to be associated with.
It seems like people refuse to consider what is meant by “the end of philosophy” . . . In Germany, basically, the situation is not very different, with the reign of the Frankfurt school and of its more or less socio-psychological or “ethical” offshoots; but there are nonetheless informed and innovative young people.
I am not too pessimistic, because I have confidence in deep history and not in mundane and institutional episodes. There is an in-depth work that must rise to the surface again. But I share a different worry with you: a certain religiosity could attack philosophical questioning from a different angle. There is the Levinasian climate, which is always moralizing . . . Which leads to a question that today lacks an answer: how could Levinas have constantly and so thoroughly misunderstood the meaning of being for Heidegger?
It was a counterreaction: Levinas was almost too Heideggerian in the 1930s!
Yes, but the misunderstanding is still bizarre for someone who was so intelligent and whose thought is so widely admired.