21.Pierre Aubenque, “Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). In Memoriam,” 269.

22.“Heidegger aujourd’hui,” Magazine littéraire, no. 117 (1976): 7.

23.Jean-Marie Benoist, “De Héraclite à la Forêt-Noire,” Magazine littéraire, no. 117 (1976): 9.

24.Ibid., 10.

25.Ibid.

26.Respectively by François Laruelle, Youssef Ishaghpour, and Gérard Legrand.

27.“Le langage des origines,” a conversation between Lionel Richard and Robert Minder, Magazine littéraire, no. 117 (1976): 21–22.

28.Ibid., 23.

29.This poem was only published three years later in the booklet “Aisé à porter,” quoted by Beaufret in Dialogue avec Heidegger IV, 128.

30.René Char’s letter from May 28, 1976, reproduced by Éryck de Rubercy and Dominique Le Buhan, Douze questions posées à Jean Beaufret à propos de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Aubier, 1983), 79.

31.Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz and Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

32.Jean Beaufret and Wolfgang Brokmeier translated “Die Sprache im Gedicht,” while the other texts were translated by François Fédier, who was also responsible for reviewing the whole text. This translation, begun in 1962, was undertaken with great care. But it was challenged, at its very core, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (“De l’impossibilité de connaître Heidegger en français,” La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 264 [October 1–15, 1977]: 18–20). According to Lacoue-Labarthe, this translation is a “pure and simple scandal,” not because of the lack of competence of the translator, but because of “the ideology of translation” that it follows. The latter obeys “the logic of the gloss” and carries many paraphrases, which are often specious: “How can one distinguish—which is after all indispensable . . . —between what Heidegger actually wrote and what the ‘translator’ added?” Among the numerous examples given by Lacoue-Labarthe, we can mention Wesen, which was rendered, not without any argument, as déploiement [unfolding], but without letting the reader know that the word is usually translated as “essence” (this initial choice, incidentally, was not always respected: Wesen is translated on page 16 as “existence,” and on page 228 as manière d’être [way of being]. Lacoue-Labarthe gives other examples: die Unverborgenheit des Seins becomes la retraite de l’être [the withdrawal of being] (25) and (even more incomprehensible) die Stimmung becomes la corde [the string] (154).

33.“For René Char, with thanks for the poetical abode during the time of the Thor seminar, with friendly salutations.”

34.André Glucksmann, The Master Thinkers (New York: Harper Collins, 1980).

35.Ibid., 240.

36.Ibid., 182.

37.Ibid., 183. See also on the previous page this passage: “Heidegger made pro-Nazi speeches during a few months of 1933. . . . Let us leave to those learned men, who are so fortunate as to have avoided this wretchedness the task of showing that it is exclusively a German wretchedness—that we ought to burn Heidegger at the stake for his six months’ sympathy with National-Socialism, while glossing over the fifty years spent by others in hailing the (national) socialism of the fatherland of the Gulag Archipelago.”

38.Ibid., 183. See also the references to Heidegger in the notes on pages 300, 301, 302.

39.Jean Beaufret, “A propos de Questions IV de Heidegger,” Les Études philosophiques, no. 2 (1978): 235–245. Reprinted in Dialogue avec Heidegger IV, 75–87.

40.Alain Renaut, “La fin de Heidegger et la tâche de la philosophie,” Les Études philosophiques, no. 4 (October–December 1977): 485–492.

41.Ibid., 485–486.

42.Ibid., 487.

43.Ibid., 492. This return to Hegel is accompanied by a critique of Heidegger who is taken to be trying to “desperately find an outside to the concept” (ibid., 490).

44.This article, published in Études Philosophiques, no. 2 (1978), was reprinted in Dialogue avec Heidegger IV, 75.

45.Ibid., 79. Concerning the translation of Gefahr by péril, no justification is offered either by Renaut (who was opposed to it) or by Beaufret (who was in favor). On the disputed translation of Nachstellen as traque [hunt], Beaufret emphasized that traquer can mean “being in pursuit of” and is in no way limited to the technical sense of a trap set for animals (das Hetzen).

46.Ibid., 77 and 80.

47.Ibid., 80.

48.“As for the rest, I strictly have nothing to say.” Ibid., 75.

49.“Monsieur Renaut speaks today as Gabriel Marcel did more than twenty years ago when, at Cerisy, he amusingly said of Heidegger: ‘He excels in confusing everything.’” Ibid., 83.

50.Ibid., 86.

51.Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, “Heidegger en question: Essai de critique interne,” Archives de philosophie 41, no. 4 (October–December 1978): 597–639.

52.Henri Birault, Heidegger et l’expérience de la pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).

53.It must be recalled that in 1976 Renaut was still publishing two extraordinarily “orthodox” Heideggerian texts, in a tone inspired by Jean Beaufret: “The decline (Verbergung) . . . harbors unearthed wealth and is the promise of a treasure that awaits nothing else that its discovery.” Such is the conclusion of the essay “La nature aime à se cacher” [Nature loves to hide”], Revue de métaphysique et de morale (March 1976): 111. See also the long essay “Qu’est-ce que l’homme? Étude sur le chemin de pensée de M. Heidegger,” Man and World 9 (1976): 3–44.

54.The essays by Cotten and Bourdieu have been previously cited. The one by Jean-René Ladmiral is called “Adorno contra Heidegger,” in Présences d’Adorno (Paris: Plon, 1975), Revue d’esthétique, 1.

55.Ferry and Renaut, “Heidegger en question: Essai de critique interne,” 603.

56.Ibid., 637.

57.Ibid., 638.

58.The monumental and detailed reconstruction of Heidegger’s itinerary by Arion L. Kelkel in La légende de l’être: Langage et poésie chez Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1980), shows a similar spirit. A scrupulous rereading, which clarifies many details, this enterprise remains nonetheless on the threshold of critical confrontations, which it addresses in its concluding questions (see ibid., 611–624): Must not the dialogue with the thinking of language be supplemented by a (more objective) study of the language of thought? Must philosophy become “philo-logy” to the point of concentrating exclusively on the “source words?” Does Heidegger, nolens volens, not become a metaphysician?

59.Birault, Heidegger et l’expérience de la pensée, 138.

60.Ibid., 221–273.

61.Ibid., 184.

62.I am making here use of formulations and notions taken from a critical study that I dedicated to this book under the title “Henri Birault et l’expérience de la pensée,” in Les Études philosophiques, no. 2 (1979): 229–234.

63.George Steiner, Martin Heidegger, trans. Denys de Coprona (Paris: Albin-Michel 1981). English edition: Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

64.“It is his complete silence on Hitlerism and the Holocaust after 1945 which is very nearly intolerable” (ibid., English edition, 123). Yet Steiner does not limit himself to this: “To which one ought, in fairness, to add the possibility that the enormity of the disaster and of its implications for the continuance of the Western spirit may have seemed to Heidegger, as it has to other writers and thinkers, absolutely beyond rational comment. But he could, at the very least, have said this, and the interest he took in the poetry of Celan shows that he was fully aware of the option” (ibid., 125). Next to this crucial clarification, it seems negligible (although indispensable) to note a factual error that casts a shadow on the end of the book: the “Biographical Note” mentions the Thor seminars given “to a group of French admirers and disciples, which includes the painter Georges Braque and the poet René Char” (ibid., 159). Braque received Heidegger on a visit only once, in 1955, at his home in Varengeville in Normandy, and obviously attended no seminars! As far as Char is concerned, we have seen that he received Heidegger as a friend and outside of the philosophical work sessions.

65.Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

66.Ibid., 54.

67.See ibid., 63–66.

68.“[T]here is no longer A metaphysics,” (ibid., 66).

69.Ibid., 63.

70.See ibid., 477–479, and the entirety of the final essay, “Le facteur de la vérité,” 411–496. See also “Freud and Heidegger, Heidegger and Freud,” 357.

71.Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität: L’auto-affirmation de l’université allemande, trans. Gérard Granel (Mauvezin: T.E.R., 1982). See “Rectorship Address: The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Reader, 108–116.

72.Gérard Granel, “Pourquoi avons-nous publié cela?” in De l’Université (Mauvezin: Éditions T.E.R., 1982), 99–143.

73.Ibid., 107.

74.“To say nothing of the Church and of Western democracies, rushing to recognize the new power and to making all sorts of compromises with it,” (ibid., 106).

75.On the necessity of this questioning, see Heidegger, “The Rectorship Address,” in the Heidegger Reader, 111–112.

76.Granel, “Pourquoi,” 136.

77.Ibid., 142.

78.Ibid., 123.

79.Among these, there is an apparently minor fact that merits our attention (Raymond Klibansky pointed it out to me): Heidegger’s translation of the passage from the Republic (497d) that concludes the address: (ta megala panta episphalē, “Alles Grösse steht im Sturm” [All that is great stands in the storm]). Chambry translates more plainly: “great undertakings are always hazardous,” but Heidegger gives a serious “emphasis,” overly determined by the circumstances, to the adjective episphalès (“unsteady,” “unstable,” “slippery,” “even dangerous”). Furthermore, it should be noted that this passage concerns the way in which the State is to treat philosophy: one cannot dare think that this is a coincidence.

80.See ibid., 143.

81.Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros in collaboration with the author (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

82.Ibid., 1.

83.As a committee member, together with Pierre Aubenque and Emmanuel Levinas, I among others raised this objection to Reiner Schürmann at his oral defense at the Sorbonne in June 1981.

84.Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 6.

85.Ibid., 3.

86.Ibid., 43.

87.See ibid., 168–181 (Eon, Physis, Aletheia, Logos, Hen, Nous).

88.See ibid., 182–202 (Will to Power, Nihilism, Justice, Eternal Return of the Same, the Transmutation of all Values, the Overman).

89.See ibid., 203–229 (Ontological Difference/World and Thing, ‘There is’/Favor, Unconcealment/Event, Epoch/Clearing, Nearness/Fourfold, Corresponding/Thinking).

90.Particularly the ones that were raised at his oral defense.

91.Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 4.

92.Ibid., 17n46.

93.It is even oddly noted by the Le Canard Enchaîné (Wednesday, September 29, 1982, 7), in an article titled “Ask Inside about What You Don’t Find on Display,” which interprets the book as an inquiry into the extent of Heidegger’s allegiance to Nazism, and takes advantage of this in order to delve into Heidegger’s personal life, including his relationship with Hannah Arendt.

94.Evoked by Gérard Granel in “Pourquoi avons-nous publié cela?,” 103, in an allusion to three publications: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s 1981 study, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” in Typography, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), and the 1982 special issue of Exercises de la patience and of Nouvelle École.

95.Lacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” 269.

96.Ibid., 268.

97.“No concept of the political is powerful enough to broach the Heideggerian determination of the political in its essence” (ibid., 287).

98.Ibid., 297.

99.Ibid.

100.Ibid.

101.Luce Irigaray’s book, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), is worth singling out. Atypical (insofar as it is neither an academic nor a thematic study), this essay is a dense and difficult reflection that assumes Heidegger’s concern for the “clearing” (Lichtung), but disputes its grounding in the earth, interpreted as still metaphysical. The aim: “To take away from him this solid ground, to rid him of the ‘illusion’ of a path that holds up under his step—even if it goes nowhere—and to bring him back not only to thinking but to the world of the pre-Socratics” (2).

102.This is the title of a volume published by Grasset in 1980 (it would deserve a reprinting); the initial occasion was a conference organized in Paris at the Collège des Irlandais, June 24, 1979. Organized by Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen O’Leary, this anthology, divided into three parts (“Thinking God,” “Thinking the Tradition,” and “Dialogues”), also contains texts by Heidegger on the question of God and is ripe with tension between Heideggerian orthodoxy (especially Beaufret and Fédier) and the “non-convergence” taken note of and emphasized by Levinas (invoking the God of monotheism beyond its philosophical idea to which Heidegger remained ultimately attached). An undisputable attestation to this remarkable critical openness is offered by the “Introductory Note” written by Paul Ricoeur. The latter spared no words in deploring Heidegger’s “systematic avoidance of the confrontation with the entirety of Jewish thought” and his reduction of ethical thought to a “thinking of values.” “This misunderstanding seems to me to parallel Heidegger’s inability to take ‘a step back’ in a way that would allow us to adequately think all dimensions of the Western tradition” (ibid., 17). In chapter 12, I will return to the substantive question concerning the possibility of an encounter between Heideggerian thought and the Christian message.

103.In Paris, August 7, 1982.

104.This is the title of the fourth volume of Jean Beaufret’s Dialogue avec Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985). Claude Roëls, who directed this publication, noted that Beaufret “had reviewed and corrected all the gathered texts in this fourth volume.” Of the last two, from which the title is drawn, let us note that “En chemin avec Heidegger,” which appeared in the Cahier de l’Herne, was originally a lecture delivered at the Paris Goethe Institute, January 8, 1981, and presented again at the University of Freiburg, May 7, 1982, three months before Beaufret’s death.

105.Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger IV, 13.

106.Ibid., 70.

107.Eryck de Rubercy and Dominique Le Buhan, Douze Questions posées à Jean Beaufret à propos de Martin Heidegger; Jean Beaufret, Entretiens avec Frédéric de Towarnicki. Published one year after Beaufret’s death, these two books correspond nonetheless to conversations that would need to be carefully dated. The Douze Questions appeared first in 1974, in issue 5 of the journal Les Lettres Nouvelles, and were later modified. The Entretiens were recorded in May 1981, at the instigation of Yves Jaigu, who was then director of France-Culture, and were broadcast on that radio station in July 1983.

108.Beaufret, Entretiens avec Frédéric de Towarnicki, 81.

109.“Pythagoras would have shouted, it’s madness! Now Mr. Descartes, calm down!” (ibid., 80).

110.Ibid., 21.

111.Ibid., 32.

112.Ibid., 77. These last lines borrow from the end of an article that I had dedicated to these Entretiens in Le Figaro of May 11, 1984, 29.

113.The article by François Fédier, “Heidegger, l’édition complète,” Le Débat (November 1982): 31–40, is dedicated to this task. This text is as it were a technical presentation of the planned edition. Nonetheless, Fédier responded to the objections made by Hans Martin Sass and Hartmut Buchner, who protested against the nonscientific character of this edition (which obscured, according to them, the sources). He maintained that “Heidegger wanted his Collected Works to be his last path” (38) and that “the refusal of a scientific edition is not a refusal” (ibid.), in the sense that it did not show “animosity towards the scientific method.” Announcing further the planned translation of volumes 21, 24, 26, 32, 39, and 51, as well as the Vezin translation of Sein und Zeit, he concluded in the following way: “Everything seems thus ready for a decisive renewal of Heidegger studies in France” (40).

114.Exercices de la patience, nos. 3/4 (Spring 1982). This issue, prepared by Francis Wybrands, gathered important contributions (from Munier, Levinas, Birault, Vattimo, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, etc.). It did not attempt to be as encyclopedic or as carefully balanced as the Cahier de l’Herne would be.

115.Concerning this whole paragraph, see Michel Haar’s preface to Martin Heidegger: Cahier de l’Herne, 11–13.

116.Ibid., 20–24.

117.Ibid., 17.

118.Ibid.

119.Ibid., 333–353.

120.This dossier would continue to grow during that same year, 1983, with Fédier’s translation of the text written by Heidegger in 1945, although not initially intended for publication: “Le rectorat 1933–1934. Faits et réflexions,” Le Débat, no. 27 (November 1983): 73–89.

121.See Jean-Michel Palmier, “Heidegger et le national-socialisme,” in Martin Heidegger: Cahier de l’Herne, 334.

122.Ibid., 339.

123.Ibid., 341.

124.Ibid., 351.

125.Roger-Pol Droit, “Le long voyage de Heidegger,” Le Monde, Friday, February 24, 1984, 17: “With . . . precision and objectivity, a complete dossier by Jean-Michel Palmier on ‘Heidegger et le national-socialisme’ renders justice to all the misunderstandings and wild claims provoked by the ten months.”

126.“The enormous volume that the Cahier de l’Herne dedicated to Heidegger, which was edited by Michel Haar, avoided the trap of hagiography as well as the absurdity of a final assessment, ignored the obscure jargon used by different factions as well as reductive classifications. Neither a mausoleum nor a melting pot, this Cahier is already indispensable for any reading of Heidegger that is more attentive to his words than to his reputation” (ibid).

127.“La réserve de l’être,” in Martin Heidegger: Cahier de l’Herne, 255–268. Chrétien had just published another excellent article, “De l’espace au lieu dans la pensée de Heidegger,” in Revue de l’enseignement philosophique (February–March 1982): 3–21. Starting from the critique in Sein und Zeit of Cartesian extension, he shows the richness of the analyses of the spatiality of Dasein, not without noting the paradox of the Heideggerian thinking of place: “It is essentially unifying and gathering, whereas it seems to be, from the perspective of a unique space, closer to a fragmentation and a splintering” (ibid., 50). But the “gift of the open-region” grants the chances of a thought that itself would be “spacious” (20–21).

128.“Histoire de la métaphysique,” “La pensée de l’être,” “L’époque de la technique,” “Politique,” “La question de Dieu,” “Signes et Chemins.”

129.Martin Heidegger: Cahier de l’Herne, 414.

130.The expression der kommende Gott is found at the end of the third strophe of Hölderlin’s hymn “Brot und Wein.”

131.See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Path, 10–14.

132.Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 255–382. The first part of this text appeared in the journal Macula, in a dossier entitled “Martin Heidegger et les souliers de Van Gogh.” The same issue of the journal also contained Schapiro’s critical essay on Heidegger: “La nature morte comme objet personnel” (see Derrida’s indications in The Truth in Painting, 257–259)

133.Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 276.

134.Ibid., 301.

135.Ibid., 311.

136.Ibid., 306.

137.Ibid., 309.

138.Ibid., 318.

139.Ibid., 306.

140.Ibid., 354.

141.Ibid., 381.

142.Ibid., 284.

9. The Letter and the Spirit

1.See the interview with Walter Biemel in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Walter Biemel was not included in the English edition.] According to Claude Troisfontaines, professor at the University of Leuven, the complete translation of Sein und Zeit was almost finished, but de Waehlens and Boehm were no longer on very good terms and not in agreement as far as the translational choices were concerned. Boehm was less and less interested in Heidegger and suggested terms that were too “sophisticated” for de Waehlens (personal conversation of the author with M. Troisfointaines, March 22, 2000).

2.It was indeed in January 1980 that the Gallimard contract with François Vezin was signed, according to the latter’s account in his lecture of November 1999, “Vingt ans après, philosophie et pédagogie de la traduction,” in a conference held at Jean Moulin University of Lyon. See also our interview with Jean-François Courtine in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Jean-François Courtine was not included in the English edition.]

3.These are the very terms he used in the note included with each copy, which are worth citing in full:

Dear readers,

After a 58 year delay, here is the book of the 20th Century, Sein und Zeit, 1927, in a new and complete translation.

I am happy to offer you a copy of this private publication (none are for sale nor will they be).

Because its limited print-run cannot satisfy the long frustrated demand, which you know to be growing, I would ask you to make its existence at least known to as many of our compatriots and Francophone friends as possible.

What is at stake is not just my personal honor, but also the honor of our country.

I continue to hope that the house of Gallimard, which owns the translation rights to the work, will one day publish it. I leave it up to you to determine if you can contribute to convincing them.

Friends of philosophy, help me!

4.Martin Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. Emmanuel Martineau (Paris: Authentica, 1985). The print run was completed on June 4, 1985.

5.Ibid., “Translator’s Preface,” 13.

6.“Before his death in 1982, Jean Beaufret asked his disciple François Vezin to translate the masterwork, which had remained inaccessible to those who could not read German. François Vezin, assisted by François Fédier, thus signed a contract with Gallimard in 1980, and was to submit his translation in 1984. The year 1984 came and went, and no manuscript was submitted to Gallimard. François Vezin obtained a four year extension, and that brought us more or less to Easter 1986” (Nicole Casanova, in Le Quotidien de Paris, June 10, 1986). Given the date referenced by the journalist, it seems that the extension was for two rather than four years.

7.Or also: “the chef-d’œuvre of the Century” (Heidegger, Être et Temps, “Translator’s Preface,” 7).

8.Ibid., 8.

9.Ibid.

10.See especially Being and Time, §15–18, and 22.

11.In his note to the French translation of Heidegger, Les problèmes fondamentaux de la phénoménologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 12–13.

12.Heidegger, Être et Temps, “Translator’s Preface,” 10.

13.This is the title of an article by Robert Maggiori in Libération, March 12, 1987, 30–31.

14.See Martin Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. François Vezin (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 509.

15.Ibid., 515.

16.Ibid. See Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 7. French translation by André Préau, Questions III, 21. “To head towards a star—this only.” In “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 4. Hereafter cited as PLT. See Georges Braque, Le jour et la nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 35. “To head towards a star: those who are ahead are the shepherds, those who march behind carry the whip. On the sides, the unfortunate rearguard.”

17.Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. Vezin, 579.

18.Ibid., 535. Vezin suggests that one must think here of Mallarmé writing to Eugène Lefébure on May 17, 1867: “Destruction was my Béatrice.” A very nice reference, but one that actually opposes désobstruction. It is indeed the French word destruction that preserves the magnificent Mallarmean sense. In a rich and precise text going beyond the questions of translation, “Remarques sur la destruction,” Gérard Guest credits Vezin with having tried to restore to Destruktion its expressive force and its reappropriation of the tradition. But in use, it seems to him that “an essential feature of Destruktion risks being erased: precisely the ‘destructive’ moment in ‘destruction’” (L’Enseignement par excellence, 106).

19.Incidentally, Vezin recognized that the translation of Destruktion by destruction “is not entirely impossible,” as in the case of Erschlossenheit rendered as ouverture [openness]. Also see François Vezin, “Ouverture, ouvertude,” Heidegger, Semaine de Chexbres, Genos, I, Lausanne, 1992, 58.

20.See BT, §6, 21–22.

21.Être et Temps, trans. Vezin, 89.

22.Ibid., 101.

23.Ibid., 98.

24.Ibid., 383.

25.Ibid., 118.

26.Ibid., 120.

27.Ibid., 141.

28.Ibid., 65. It is the only translator’s choice to which Vezin later dedicated a brief remark (“Ouverture, ouvertude,” 57–58). He maintained that the Heideggerian term (which one cannot find in any dictionary) does not designate an act but a “state”; it is above all not to be taken in the ontic sense, which is the risk with ouverture. Translating by ouvertude, a neologism (formed on the model of béatitude, désuétude, or plénitude) thus has the merit of being clear, in the case of a “technical term.” However, Vezin must concede at the beginning and at the end of his note that the choice of ouverture was also possible, but he withdrew this concession by concluding—with no further explanation—that it would have been a “far-fetched translation.” This is an odd statement, for it calls the most eloquent solution in French “far-fetched,” and leaves unsolved the question of whether it is desirable to multiply neologisms in an already difficult text.

29.Ibid., 223.

30.Ibid., 104.

31.Ibid., 169.

32.Ibid., 178.

33.Ibid., 363.

34.Maggiori, “La guéguerre Heidegger.” Roger-Pol Droit is no more favorable to the Vezin translation in his article in Le Monde of December 12, 1986: “Peut-on traduire Heidegger?”

35.Luc Ferry, “Ne laissons pas Heidegger aux heideggériens!” [Let’s not leave Heidegger to the Heideggerians!] in L’Événement du Jeudi (January 22–28, 1987): 81.

36.Alain Renaut, “Heidegger à la poursuite de l’être,” L’Express, January 16–22, 1987, 87.

37.Marc B. de Launay [“Note critique sur Être et Temps, trans. Vezin,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, no. 3 (July–September 1987): 428–430] does not undertake a detailed criticism but attacks the very project of a “bilingual reading” recommended by Vezin (page 515 of his translation). He finds Vezin’s justifications “unacceptable or false.” In a lecture given in Lyon (“Vingt ans après,” page 11 of the typewritten manuscript cited in note 2), a pleasant chat really in which he almost did not address the problems in his translation, Vezin took issue with de Launay, accusing him of “of not wanting to read,” and confusing “bilingual reading” with nontranslation. But this polemical reply, which is perhaps to be expected, remains very general.

38.Jean Lacoste is an exception: in an article that attempts to be balanced, he acknowledges that the Vezin translation is “complete, legal, and, given the difficulty of the task, more of a success than the preceding polemics and rumors would have allowed one to believe.” He does not criticize the project of a “bilingual reading,” because “the work of acclimatization begun by Beaufret is successfully continued by Vezin.” Nonetheless, he regrets the absence of a glossary, of an index, and of meaningful notes for the second part of the book [see “Sein und Zeit enfin au complet,” La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 476 (December 11–16, 1986): 9–11.]

39.See Libération, Thursday, March 12, 1987, 31.

40.“À propos de Heidegger,” Le Monde, January 16, 1987. The text is followed by this remark: “This letter was signed by Henri Birault, Lucien Braun, Jacques Colette, Marc Froment-Meurice, Dominique Janicaud, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Rivelaygue, Jacques Taminiaux, Pierre Trotignon, Francis Wybrans, all of whom are commentators and translators of Heidegger.”

41.See Martin Heidegger, De l’origine de l’œuvre d’art [The origin of the work of art], first version (Paris: Authentica, 1987). Martineau’s satirical text was published at the end of the preface, on pages 9–18, titled: “Post-scriptum (December 1986): D’une ‘traduction bilingue’ ou Heidegger chez les cinoques.”

42.This is Roger-Pol Droit’s expression, in “D’un temps pamphlétaire en philosophie,” Le Monde, Friday, March 20, 1987, 20.

43.“L’horizon de la traduction,” François Vezin interviewed by Frédéric de Towarnicki, Le Magazine Littéraire, no. 235 (November 1986): 30–33.

44.“Toujours à propos de Heidegger,” Le Monde, February 6, 1987.

45.Pascal David, “Toujours à propos de Heidegger,” Le Monde. The other defenders of Vezin’s translation were Dominique Fourcade, Henri Crétella, and Gérard Guest.

46.“Au sujet de la traduction,” in Être et Temps, trans. Vezin, 515–518.

47.Ibid., 517.

48.Ibid., 515.

49.“One receives a lot of practical advice” (ibid., 516).

50.Ibid., 515.

51.Ibid., 516.

52.Referring to page 192 of Sein und Zeit, Vezin writes: “Let us compare the existing translations. In de Waehlens and Boehm, we have: “L’être-déjà-au-monde-en-avant-de-soi-même implique essentiellement l’être en déchéance auprès de l’étant disponible, offert à la préoccupation intérieurement au monde.” [The being-already-in-the-world-ahead-of-itself implies essentially the fallen being alongside usable entities, offered to innerworldly concern.] In Martineau: “Dans l’être-déjà-en-avant-de-soi-dans-un-monde est essentiellement impliqué l’être échéant auprès de l’à-portée-de-la-main intra-mondain dans la préoccupation.” [In the being-already-ahead-of-oneself-in-a-world is essentially implied the fallen being alongside the intraworldly ready to hand in concern.] I, for my part, wrote: “Dans l’être-en avance-sur-soi-déjà-en-un-monde est essentiellement inclus aussi l’être en déval après l’utilisable intérieur au monde en préoccupation.” [In the being-in-advance-of-oneself-already-in-a-world is essentially included the declining being after the innerworldly usable in concern.] We can complete this little dossier with the original text: “Im Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in-einer-Welt liegt wesenhaft mitbeschlossen das verfallende Sein beim besorgten innerweltlichen Zuhandenen.”

53.“Toujours à propos de Heidegger,” Le Monde, February 6, 1987.

54.Mistaken or overly clever? The summary (on page 543 of Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. Vezin) that refers to the fourth and tenth sense of après in the Littré dictionary makes us lean toward the second hypothesis.

55.Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. Vezin, 538.

56.This citation was alluded to by Vezin, and drawn from the seminar given by Heidegger with Fink on Heraclitus. Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, trans. Charles H. Seibert (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 17. See François Vezin, “Ouverture, ouvertude,” in Genos, 57.

57.This corresponds literally to the following formulation: “Phänomenologische Wahrheit (Erschlossenheit von Sein) ist veritas transcendentalis.”

58.At issue is an “opening of being” in the subjective as well as the objective sense of the genitive. On this point, we are not in disagreement with François Vezin. “Explicative Note,” in Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. Vezin, 538.

59.Beaufret, De l’existentialisme à Heidegger, 21, quoted by Vezin, “Explicative Note,” in Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. Vezin, 539.

60.See the article on Ouverture, I and II. Le Petit Robert, Dictionnaire de Langue Française (Paris: Le Robert, 2014).

61.Heidegger, Être et Temps, trans. Vezin, 546–547.

62.Ibid., 546.

63.“It is rare to meet a student in Germany or in France who is particularly familiar with Heidegger. Eclipse or decline? Difficult to say” (Jean-Michel Palmier, “Heidegger en France,” Magazine Littéraire [November 1986]: 38).

64.Didier Franck, Heidegger et le problème de l’espace (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1986). Scrupulously rereading Being and Time, Franck notes an “overestimation of time” and an underestimation of space in its irreducible relation to the flesh. Through the themes of the hand, of touch, of embodied anxiety, the issue is one of showing that “the existential analytic presents a space constituted otherwise (than as res extensa)” (90) and of indicating (apparently in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty) the extent to which “the flesh is spatializing as intertwined with and by another flesh” (97). This careful and subtle reading of Heidegger belongs to a thoroughly “immanent” critique.

65.Held on March 12, 13, and 14, 1987 in Paris. The proceedings were published a year later: Heidegger: Questions ouvertes (Paris: Osiris, 1988).

66.Max Kommerell and Martin Heidegger, Correspondance, trans. Marc Crépon, Philosophie, no. 16 (Fall 1987): 3–16.

67.See Kommerell’s terms, ibid., 11.

68.Marc Crépon scrupulously notes: “Disaster [désastre] translates, somewhat excessively, but in conformity with the tone of the letter, the German term Unglück” (ibid., 14). Translating by “misfortune” would no doubt have been more literal. Furthermore, in a letter to Gadamer, Kommerell humorously described Heidegger’s essay as a “productive trainwreck” (ibid., 4).

69.Ibid., 16: “You are right. This text is a disaster. Sein und Zeit was also a disastrous accident. And any immediate presentation of my thinking today would be the greatest of disasters. Is there perhaps here a first indication that my attempts sometimes approach a true thinking?”

70.“The analogy with religious practices is all the more appropriate since one of the most widespread modes of Hölderlin’s reception in France was precisely that of veneration—not just among poets but also, and perhaps above all, among philosophers, who tended to assimilate, following Heidegger, Hölderlin’s ‘sacred word’ to a ‘revelation’” (Isabelle Kalinowski, “Une histoire de la réception de Hölderlin en France: 1925–1967,” Doctoral thesis defense, University of Paris XII, May 1999, 5). However, this judgment can be accepted only in the light of an inventory. For example, the Cahier de l’Herne on Hölderlin, published in 1989 under the direction of Jean-François Courtine, hardly allows this religiosity to appear. Heidegger’s influence is clearly present but within limits; and even the texts gathered under the title “Hölderlin et Heidegger” are mostly aporetical. Thus, in his contribution that precisely bears on “Heidegger and Hölderlin’s God” (503–511), Michel Haar did not fail to note Heidegger’s “hierocentrism” and his studious avoidance of the theme of the Hölderlinian Christ. Heidegger’s interpretation is in no way accepted and even less religiously reappropriated: “The intimate tension of the Hölderlinian hymn does not reside first between the immediate evidence of the Sacred and the melancholy of the ‘absence of God’ or nostalgia for the ‘vanished God,’ but rather between the joyful feelings of the continual return of the Celestials, between the undeniable overabundant presence of the supreme God and the extreme difficulty of celebrating them” (510).

71.Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

72.Michel Haar published two important books in the following years: Heidegger and the Essence of Man, trans. William McNeill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), in which he took issue with Heidegger’s antihumanism and Western anthropocentrism; and La fracture de l’histoire, (Grenoble: Millon, 1994), in which he reexamined the question of the “overcoming” of metaphysics in light of the Heidegger–Nietzsche debate and of the interpretation of contemporary nihilism.

73.In addition to the following: Gianni Vattimo, “Nietzsche, interprète de Heidegger” [Nietzsche, reader of Heidegger]; François Laruelle, “Sur la possibilité d’une déconstruction ‘non-heideggérienne’” [On the possibility of a ‘non-Heideggerian’ deconstruction]; Françoise Dastur, “La fin de la philosophie et l’autre commencement de la pensée” [The end of philosophy and the other beginning of thinking]; Jeffrey Barash, “L’image du monde à l’époque moderne” [The image of the world in the modern era].

74.Heidegger: Questions ouvertes, 7. According to Éliane Escoubas, it was Miguel Abensour who conceived of this conference and basically chose the speakers. In order to avoid any incident, this conference was carried out on the basis of invitations alone.

75.Not counting the “French dimension, the Franco-German chronicle in which we are situating Heidegger during this conference,” following Jacques Derrida’s remark. Derrida, Of Spirit, 4.

76.Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewiz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) was published in 1982 by Klostermann.

77.Heidegger, Parmenides, 63. “Wir denken das ‘Politische’ römisch, d.h. imperial.”

78.Marc Richir, “Ereignis, temps, phénomènes,” in Heidegger: Questions ouvertes, 13–36 (see above all 24–25).

79.Jacques Garelli, “Temporalité poétique: Topologie de l’être,” in Heidegger: Questions ouvertes, 37–62.

80.Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,” in Rethinking Facticity, ed. François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 89–112.

81.Guy Petitdemange, “Adorno-Heidegger: quelle més-entente?” in Heidegger: Questions ouvertes, 97–111.

82.Miguel Abensour (“Rencontre, silence,” in Heidegger: Questions ouvertes, 247–254) introduced Emmanuel Levinas’s lecture and emphasized Heidegger’s “unforgivable silence” on the Holocaust in front of Paul Celan, who had come to pay him a visit.

83.Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Blackwell, New York, 1990). We shall come back later to this remarkable text, actually published early 1988.

84.According to Éliane Escoubas, this was Levinas’s first public intervention about Heidegger since the end of the war.

85.This is a point on which Levinas never wavered, as many can attest. Thus, in his conversations with François Poirié [Emmanuel Lévinas: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987)], he noted the following: “Everything seemed unexpected with Heidegger, the wonders of his analyses of affectivity, the different modes of access to the everyday, the difference between being and beings, the well-known ontological difference. The rigor with which all that was thought in the spark of brilliant formulations was absolutely impressive. Until now, this was more important for me than the later speculative consequences of this project: the end of metaphysics, the themes of Ereignis, of the es gibt in its mysterious generosity” (75). Levinas emphasized that “one would have needed the gift of prophecy” to anticipate the Hitlerian involvement in Davos. However, he added, “I deeply regretted, during the Hitler years, having sided with Heidegger in Davos” (78). See also Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985).

86.Emmanuel Levinas, “Dying For . . . ,” in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 179.

87.Ibid., 181, translation modified.

88.Ibid., 186.

89.Ibid., 187.

90.Ibid., 188.

91.Derrida, Of Spirit.

92.Ibid., 1.

93.Ibid., 31.

94.Ibid., 40.

95.Ibid., 86.

96.Ibid., 97.

97.Ibid., 69.

98.Ibid., 69.

99.See, for these different descriptions, ibid., 11, 48, 70, 52.

100.Ibid., 101.

101.Ibid., 112.

102.Ibid., 107.

103.Jacques Derrida confirms this: he was not at all aware of the upcoming publication of the book by Farias. See our interview with Derrida in this volume.

10. The Return of the Repressed?

1.Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

2.In the cases of Staudinger and Baumgarten, see ibid., 110–111 and 119–121.

3.Victor Farias, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 1987), 8. [TN: This passage from the French preface was not translated and published in the English edition.]

4.Ibid., 13–14.

5.Le Monde, Wednesday, October 14, 1987, 2.

6.Libération, Wednesday, October 16, 1987, 40 and 41.

7.L’Événement du Jeudi, October 28 to November 4, 1987, 124–125.

8.La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 496 (November 1–15, 1987), 10.

9.Farias, Heidegger et le Nazisme, 9.

10.“Martin Heidegger: achèvement de la métaphysique et politique d’extermination” [The end of metaphysics and the politics of extermination], interview with Christian Jambet by Jacques Henric and Guy Scarpetta, Art Press, December 1987, 41–44.

11.Le Monde, Friday, October 30, 1987, 19.

12.Henri Crétella, professor at the Lycée of Montauban, found the anti-Semitism attributed to Heidegger slanderous, judging exorbitant the importance given by Farias to two secondary texts devoted to Abraham a Sancta Clara, which were written fifty years apart: because Heidegger “has twice celebrated the work of a preacher from the end of the 18th century without saying anything about Sancta Clara’s anti-Semitic diatribe, he would be himself, it is suggested to us, something like an advocate and herald of the Holocaust. One much pinch oneself to accept that Le Monde had published such an inept perfidy.” We note that the preacher in question was of from the seventeenth century and not the end of the eighteenth.

13.Testimony from Jacques Lacant, “curator of the University of Freiburg,” who was a member of that committee (Le Monde, Friday, October 30, 1987).

14.The testimony of Jean Lassner (ibid.) citing Mrs. Husserl, Christmas 1934: “Heidegger (Husserl’s assistant at that time) had been an intimate friend of the family, seeking care and staying with them when he was sick, etc., although he had removed Husserl’s portrait at the university, no longer greeted him and crossed the street in order to avoid him. Is it necessary to recall that the dedication to Husserl was removed from editions of Sein und Zeit published between 1933 and 1945?”

15.“Heidegger: le chaînon manquant” [Heidegger: The Missing Link], Libération, Wednesday, February 17, 1988, 41–42.

16.Ibid., 42.

17.“Heidegger, la piste italienne” [Heidegger, the Italian Trail], Ernest Grassi’s comment reported by Charles Alunni and Catherine Paoletti, Libération, Wednesday, March 2, 1988, 40–41.

18.Le Monde, Wednesday, May 6, 1988, 22. This testimony, published first in the journal Études, attests that Heidegger refused in April 1933 to oversee the promotion of a certain Ms. Minz, because she was Jewish, and that, as early as since the Spring of 1932, he allegedly made comments about the philosophy library: “It was the Jews Husserl and Kohn who made a mess there.”

19.Libération, Thursday, February 8, 1988, 35; “The Heidegger Affair (continued),” Le Monde, Friday, February 23, 1990, 27.

20.Further reinforced by the publication of Jean Beaufret’s letters to the revisionist historian Robert Faurisson: see Michel Kajman, “Heidegger et le fil invisible” [Heidegger and the invisible thread], Le Monde, Friday, January 22, 1988, 1 and 18.

21.Which included, of course, developments on television. The most notable was the broadcast of Océaniques, hosted by Michel Cazenave, December 7 and 14, 1987, on FR3 with the participation of George Steiner, Jean-Pierre Faye, François Fédier, and André Glucksmann. Here is the report on the first show in Libération, Monday, December 7, 1987, 43: Steiner paid homage to the greatness of the philosophical work while insisting on the infinitely troubling character of Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust. Fédier responded “a bit sheepishly”: “I have no information on this silence which has tormented me for a long time. Presumably he did not have anything adequate to say on the matter.” Glucksmann, transposing Heidegger’s famous sentence, “Science does not think,” turned the formulation against its author: “Heidegger denkt nicht” [Heidegger does not think] (with respect to the relation between Nazism and the Holocaust).

22.An interview with Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger, The Philosophers’ Hell,” reprinted in Points . . . Interviews 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 181, initially an interview with Didier Éribon, Le Nouvel Observateur, November 6–12, 1987, 170. This interview is reprinted in Points de Suspension (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 193–202, and followed (203–207) by a brief clarification titled, “How to Concede, with Reasons?” where Derrida rebels against “the gravest and most obscurantist confusions” arrived at on the basis of Farias’s book, while suggesting that the critical reading of Heidegger must meditate on the scope of the exchange between the philosopher and Max Kommerell in 1942 concerning Hölderlin: in particular on the shrewd manner in which Heidegger conceded a certain failure of his reading and claimed that “the experience of the disaster” is beyond any “immediate presentation” of his philosophy (see “Correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Max Kommerell,” trans. Marc Crépon, Philosophie, no. 16 [Fall 1987]).

23.Derrida, “Heidegger, the Philosophers’ Hell,” 183.

24.Ibid., 186.

25.Ibid., 189.

26.Published in January 1988 as “Heidegger: les textes en appel,” Le Journal littéraire, no. 2: 115–117.

27.Ibid., 116.

28.Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 288–89.

29.Le Débat, no. 48 (January–February 1988): 112.

30.“Martin Heidegger: textes politiques 1933–1934,” 176–192. The translation by Nicole Parfait was completed as early as 1984 and delayed at the request of François Fédier, who explained the reasons (ibid., 176). On this point, as well as on the consequences of this affair, I refer to Nicole Parfait’s account in her interview in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview was not included in the English edition.] She defended a very comprehensive thesis at the University of Paris I, June 6, 1986, on Heidegger and politics: “Théorie et pratique chez Heidegger: Histoire d’une erreur” [Theory and practice in the work of Martin Heidegger: History of an error]. Unfortunately, this thesis has not been published (see HF, 484n125 and 485n126). One can get a general sense of it in Nicole Parfait, “Heidegger and Politics: Hermeneutics and Revolution” [Heidegger et la politique: herméneutique et révolution], Le Cahier du Collège international de philosophie, no. 8 (1989): 105–108. Heidegger’s political error resulted from his teleological and even totalitarian thinking of history; certainly the philosopher seemed to distance himself from this thinking at the end of his work, but he abstained from any radical critique of his previous conception. “It is this abstention from thinking that constitutes the major failure, because with it the unthought becomes the unsaid” (154). The same issue of the journal also contained texts on Heidegger by John Sallis, Werner Marx, and Karl Löwith, edited by Miguel Abensour and Éliane Escoubas and titled “Heidegger: Questions ouvertes II,” which was not based on a conference as was the first Questions ouvertes.

31.Such is the title of an article by Henri Crétella, a professor of philosophy who is not unknown to readers of this chapter since we just saw him express strong support for Heidegger in the letters to the editors of Le Monde, October 30, 1987.

32.Michel Deguy, “Le sozi de Heidegger” [Heidegger’s Nazi double], Le Débat, no. 48 (January–February 1988): 132.

33.Ibid., 134.

34.Stéphane Mosès, “Radicalité philosophique et engagement politique” [Philosophical radicality and political engagement], Le Débat, no. 48 (January–February 1988): 169–171.

35.Alain Renaut, “The Heideggerian ‘deviation’?” [La déviation Heideggérienne?], Le Débat, no. 48 (January–February 1988): 172.

36.Gérard Granel, “La guerre de Sécession ou Tout ce que Farias ne vous a pas dit et que vous auriez préferé ne pas savoir” [The War of Secession, or Everything that Farias has not told you and that you would have preferred not to know], Le Débat, no. 48 (January–February 1988): 142–168.

37.Ibid., 168.

38.Granel also denounces the misuse of the abbreviation “Nazi” and the “short circuiting . . . at work in Abkürzung as an abbreviation” (ibid., 146n3).

39.Ibid., 143.

40.Ibid., 145.

41.Ibid., 147.

42.Ibid.

43.Ibid., 156.

44.The printed version does not bear the first name Ludwig because of a production error that was fortunately corrected on my personal copy.

45.“Encore Heidegger et le nazisme” [Again Heidegger and Nazism], Le Débat, no. 48 (January–February 1988): 113–123.

46.Farias places the most antinomical movements (traditionalist Catholicism, anticlericalism) in the same basket in order to foster the belief that the young Heidegger was in some way “predestined” to Nazism! See Aubenque, “Martin Heidegger,” 114.

47.Aubenque finds these texts insignificant and recalls that the Augustinian monk was a “Rabelais of the pulpit,” whose talents had been recognized by, among others, Goethe and Schiller. He did not appear to them as an “anti-Semitic” author, and his diatribes against the Jews (as well as against the Turks) need to be put in the religious and political context of the time. Similarly, the connection of Sachsenhausen, a suburb of Frankfurt, with the concentration camp of the same name, is either ignorance or dishonesty. See ibid., 115.

48.See ibid., 116. The first insinuation consists in attributing an intervention to Himmler that permitted the publication of “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in The Annual edited by Ernesto Grassi. (See Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 236.) The second, which can be attributed to Christian Jambet (page 10 of the preface in the French edition), referred to “murdered militants” in Freiburg during Heidegger’s rectorate, with Heidegger making no effort to respond to the complaint: hence the very serious accusation of “complicity in a crime” that Aubenque asked Jambet to retract in future editions.

49.Aubenque cites the accounts of Ochsner and Biemel, Heidegger’s students in Freiburg. The latter affirmed that “Heidegger’s entourage at the University was the only one in which open criticism of the regime was permitted” (Aubenque, “Martin Heidegger,” 117). Also see our interview with Walter Biemel in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Walter Biemel was not included in the English edition.]

50.On the one hand, Heidegger in no way aligned himself with the populist “old guard” of this movement; on the other hand, Krieck’s attacks against Heidegger began as early as February 1934, “and one finds nothing there that prefigured the specific condemnation of the revolutionary ‘adventurism’ of Röhm” (ibid., 118).

51.Ibid., 119.

52.In spite of “a few attempts by Heidegger in his 1933 speeches that attempted to establish a kind of correspondence, after the fact, between certain themes in Being and Time (for example, with respect to work) and his political ‘program’ at that time” (ibid., 119).

53.Ibid., 120.

54.Ibid., 123.

55.Apart from François Fédier’s article, which we prefer to examine at the same time as his book, published in the spring of 1988.

56.Alain Finkielkraut, “Heidegger: la question et le procès” [Heidegger: The question and the trial], Le Monde, Tuesday, January 5, 1988, 2.

57.Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, and Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007).

58.Roger-Pol Droit, “Jacques Derrida et les troubles du labyrinthe” [Jacques Derrida and the challenges of the labyrinth], Le Monde, Wednesday, December 4, 1987, 24.

59.Robert Maggiori, “Derrida tient Heidegger en respect” [Derrida keeps Heidegger at a distance], Libération, Wednesday, November 27, 1987, 40–42.

60.Ibid., 42.

61.“Written before the publication of Farias’s book, this text [Of Spirit] is in fact quite bold since it attempts to do what Farias announced but never accomplished. It engaged that which, in Heidegger’s writing, thinking, and his language itself, tended toward Nazism, went to its encounter and sustained it. It did not avoid it: it questioned the avoidance itself” [“Unthinkable thought” (Pensée impensable), letter of M. Moscovici, Libération, Tuesday, December 15, 1987, 45].

62.Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).

63.“Heidegger by Pierre Bourdieu: The Philosophical Genius” [Heidegger par Pierre Bourdieu: le krach de la philosophie], interview with Robert Maggiori, Libération, Thursday, March 10, 1988, vi–vii.

64.It so happens that Derrida already had to intervene a few days earlier concerning the case of Paul De Man, comparable in certain respects to the Heidegger affair [See “A Letter from Jacques Derrida” (Une lettre de Jacques Derrida), Libération, Thursday, March 3, vii.]

65.“Derrida-Bourdieu: débat,” Libération, Saturday and Sunday, March 19 and 20, 1988, 36.

66.Roger-Pol Droit, “Heidegger: la parole à la défense” [Heidegger: The defense has its day in court], Le Monde, Wednesday, May 27, 1988, 2.

67.François Fédier, Heidegger: anatomie d’un scandale (Paris: Laffont, 1988).

68.Ibid., 31.

69.Roger-Pol Droit even wrote that “this defense is marked by many weaknesses.” “Heidegger: la parole à la défense,” 2.

70.“Harmful intent” [L’intention de nuire], Le Débat, no. 48 (January–February 1988): 136–141.

71.Ibid., 138–139.

72.We point in particular to Hugo Ott’s article published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (November 28–29, 1987): 67. Gérard Guest circulated a French translation before its publication titled “Heidegger et le Nazisme: Chemins et fourvoiements” [Heidegger and Nazism: Paths and errancy], Le Débat (March–April 1988): 185–189.

73.Let us note in particular the point-by-point refutation of the so-called new character of the thirteen “discoveries” that Farias had claimed to make (in order to respond to Jacques Derrida’s critiques). See Fédier, Anatomie, 138–146.

74.Aubenque, “Martin Heidegger,” 116.

75.Published in January 1988 with Bourgois, this essay (with the subtitle: Heidegger, l’art, et la politique) was originally the written presentation of the thesis dossier Sur travaux by Lacoue-Labarthe. As he indicated in his foreword (11–12), a first version with limited print run was published by the Association des Publications près les Universités de Strasbourg. See also “La césure de la pensée,” Exercices de la patience, no. 8 (Fall 1987): 181–199. The article in Le Journal Littéraire critical of Farias mentioned above is reproduced as an appendix (123–137) in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics.

76.Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). A very tense dialogue indeed, through a reading of Celan, which is in no way resolved in the final pages, for the pain caused by Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust is evoked (“Heidegger’s irreparable offense,” 122).

77.Referred to as “incontestably the greatest thinker of the age” in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger Art and Politics, 9, Heidegger determines the horizon of the problematic: the completion (or closure) of metaphysics: “Philosophy is finished/finite (La philosophie est finie); its limit is uncrossable” (ibid., 4). Lacoue-Labarthe nonetheless protests that he is in no way a Heideggerian while accepting Heidegger’s claim that “there is no Heideggerian philosophy”! On nihilism, see ibid. 37; 52.

78.Once again, we find a twofold demand where one attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable: to think the abyssal severity of Heidegger’s “human failing,” not in terms of a constituted ethics (see 31), but on the basis of the historical and destinal “fault” of any ethics: “That is why this event—the Holocaust—is for the West the terrible revelation of its essence” (ibid., 37).

79.Ibid., 19.

80.Ibid., 35.

81.“That God died at Auschwitz is clearly what Heidegger never said. But everything suggests that he could have said it if he had wanted, that is if he had agreed to take a certain step which is, perhaps, that of courage” (ibid., 39n4).

82.Ibid., 45–46. This application is itself hyberbolic, since it is an event that is “beyond tragedy.”

83.Ibid., 66–67.

84.This play, written by Michel Deutsch in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, premiered April 20, 1988, in Grenoble and was published with Bourgois that same year. Under the name of Erwin Meister, it presents Heidegger confronted by his former assistant, who had become an officer in the American army, Wolfgang Lerner, during the “denazification” proceedings that took place during the winter of 1945–46. Apart from the change of names and the fiction of the imprisonment of the great thinker in a theater, the “content” refers to the Heidegger case: the philosopher, who only wants to think about ascending to summits or about trivial details, obstinately refuses to recognize a responsibility in his involvement with the Nazis and remains silent in relation to the essential issues. The title, which is quite intriguing and which literally signifies “pardon the expression!” seems to us to be an allusion to a passage from a special article by Éric Weil on “the Heidegger Case”: “It is Nazi language, Nazi morality, Nazi thinking (sit venia verbo), Nazi feeling, it is not Nazi philosophy” (ibid., 129).

85.Jean-Pierre Faye, “Heidegger, the ‘black hole’ and the future” [Heidegger, le ‘trou noir’ et le futur], Le Monde, Friday, March 25, 1988, 2.

86.In issue 4 of the Nazi journal Volk im Werden.

87.Jean-Pierre Faye, La raison narrative (Paris: Balland, 1990).

88.See HF, chapter 11, 259. See also “Entretiens with Jean-Pierre Faye” in Heidegger in France, vol. 2. [TN: This interview was not included in the English edition.]

89.Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 93.

90.“Freedom is owed not to the Law but to being. And by this error Heidegger’s thought reveals itself, quite despite itself, as, in its turn, the hostage to the Law. Such is its true ‘failing’” (ibid., 89, translation modified).

91.Discovered by Robert Maggiori, “Heidegger au nom de la Loi” [Heidegger in the name of the law], Libération, Thursday, April 28, 1988, xi.

92.Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, trans. Franklin Philip (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 2. We are following the chronological order, since the book was available for sale in April 1988, a month after Lyotard’s book.

93.Ibid., 21.

94.“The point is not to defend Farias’s book,” ibid., 22.

95.Ibid., 28 and 118n34.

96.Ibid., 65–66.

97.Ibid., 71.

98.Ibid., 79.

99.Ibid., 44.

100.Ibid., 53.

101.As well as Élisabeth de Fontenay (ibid., 115n16 and 120n29) as regards her text, “Fribourg-Prague-Paris. Comme l’être, la détresse se dit de manières multiples,” Le Messager Européen, POL, no. 1 (1987).

102.Ibid., 2–3.

103.Ibid., 108.

104.Ibid., 109.

105.Ibid., 95.

106.They would also be posed in Germany thanks to Habermas who, in his presentation of Farias’s book to the German public, attempted to adopt a balanced position, salvaging the autonomy of the work with respect to biographical data. The French translation of that work was published in September 1988 [Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger l’oeuvre et l’engagement, trans. Reiner Rochlitz (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1988)]. In fact, Habermas drew from the work of Pöggeler and Ott, much more than from Farias. Avoiding the temptation to discredit a work that he still considered to be deeply creative (especially through the deconstruction of subjectivity that took place in Being and Time), he concentrated his critique against the “essentializing abstraction” through which Heidegger separated the history of being from historical political events and dissolved his own responsibility (and his own disappointment toward the actual Nazism) in an idealizing and “fatalistic” historicism (see 53).

107.This does not exclude the pursuit of research and thereby the enrichment of the historical record: see Jacques Le Rider’s article in Le Monde, October 14, 1988, 18: “Le dossier d’un nazi ‘ordinaire’. Les archives du Quai d’Orsay s’entrouvent aux chercheurs. Jacques Le Rider y a consulté le ‘dossier Heidegger’.” [The case of an ‘ordinary’ Nazi. The Archives of the Quai d’Orsay are open to scholars. Jacques Le Rider consulted the ‘Heidegger File’]. This file shows that even in 1938 Heidegger was not considered to be politically suspect, even though he was attacked by some Nazis such as Rector Krieck.

108.In French in the German text.

109.In French in the German text.

110.Ott, “Heidegger et le Nazisme,” 185 (see HF, 481n72). We find a more ironically severe reaction to the French success of Farias’s book (qualified as a “pseudo-event”) in Die Welt (Thursday, October 29, 1987): “Things are seen quite differently in Paris.”

111.Which, in turn, have also had important repercussions abroad: see Robert Maggiori, “Heidegger mondial” [“Heidegger worldwide”], Libération, Monday, December 7, 1987, 42–44.

112.Ott, “Heidegger et le Nazisme,” 188.

113.According to Ott, Farias’s book, completed in 1985, does not take account of two essential publications from 1986: the Heidegger–Kästner correspondence and Karl Löwith’s book, Mein Leben in Deustchland. In English as My Life in Germany before and after 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (London: Athlone Press, 1994).

114.Ott, “Heidegger et le Nazisme,” 186.

115.Ferry and Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity, 15.

116.Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” 5.

117.In her account, “Les enjeux du débat autour de Heidegger,” published in Commentaire, no. 42 (Summer 1988): 474–480, Jeanne Hersch considered that the French debate has been “superficial.” Having lived through the summer semester in Freiburg in 1933, she appreciated, on this topic, “the accurate and cautious” accounts provided by Farias’s book. On the other hand, she admitted that the book in question was often more indicative of the circumstances than of Heidegger’s actual thinking. In this respect, she did not intend to incriminate the person of the philosopher (she did not accuse him of anti-Semitism) but characterized his philosophical approach as “contemptuous” of all that is not wonder before being and as “hugely ambitious” concerning the role of the philosopher. She denounces “a manner of philosophizing that is at once dictatorial and irresponsible” (479). Contrasting him to the great figure of Jaspers, she concluded implacably that Heidegger “is not a true philosopher.”

118.See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, ed. Masud R. Khan (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 411.

119.Finkielkraut, “Heidegger: la question et le procès.”

120.Jean Baudrillard, “Nécrospective autour de Heidegger,” Libération, Wednesday, January 27, 1988, 2.

121.This extreme ambiguity (affecting the intellectual fascinated by Heidegger) is also noted by Jean-Michel Besnier in Raison présente, no. 89 (1989): 126: “Toppling Heidegger’s statue no doubt paralyzes the intellectual critic, depriving him or her, with the question of being, of the ultimate transcendent point of view from which to denounce the modern world. But the figure of the pathetic intellectual, who used to think he or she could avoid the malaise by joining with the movement of his or her time, is also affected.”

122.“Heidegger, la pensée fascinée,” Libération, Tuesday, February 16, 1988, 7.

123.For example, one can refer to the publication of a large dossier by the Nouvel Observateur (January 22–28, 1988) on “Heidegger and Nazi thought” with this subtitle: “The facts are there. The Heidegger affair is a tragedy for thought, a tragedy one has only just begun to consider.” In this dossier prepared by Catherine David, we find contributions by Maurice Blanchot, François Fédier, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Lévinas. Let us consider the conclusion of the latter: “The diabolical is thought provoking,” as well these lines from Maurice Blanchot: “Heidegger’s silence on the Shoah is his irreparable failing. His silence or refusal, faced with Paul Celan, to ask forgiveness for the unforgivable, was a refusal that cast Celan into despair and made him ill. Celan knew that the Shoah was, for the West, the revelation of its essence, and that he had to preserve the shared memory, even if at a great cost, to safeguard the possibility of the relation to the other.”

124.See a text by Paul Veyne published a few months after Farias’s book: “Responsibilité politique ou hagiographie du philosophe?” Raison présente, no. 87 (1988): 27–38. Rising above the narrow polemics for or against Heidegger, Veyne deplores that the “current French debate” is a “false debate.” According to him, the political opinions of the man Heidegger, reactionary and petit bourgeois, must be completely separated from his philosophy, the greatness of which cannot be denied and which deserves to be discussed on its own terms, without however, avoiding the suspicion concerning “unrealistic aspects” that can be found therein (34).

125.See HF, 479n30. This thesis for a Doctorat d’État of close to one thousand pages directed by Jean-Toussaint Desanti has the following title: “Théorie et pratique chez Heidegger: Histoire d’une erreur” (the et is in fact crossed out to indicate the effort of overcoming the opposition of theory and practice). Showing the extent to which Heidegger’s thought belongs to the German tradition of Gründlichkeit, she gives a detailed account of the relation between the texts from 1933–34 and Sein und Zeit (especially the last paragraphs on historicity). She insists on the continuity of Heidegger’s thought despite the thematics of the turn that appeared after the war (in the “Letter on Humanism”). Heidegger’s thought is indeed at the heart of the 1933 involvement (the conception of the human being as Dasein, of history as destiny, of the situation as opening of authentic possibilities), but its core has nothing to do with the racism that is the heart of Nazi ideology (see “Théorie et pratique chez Heidegger,” 923–994).

126.Regarding the various interventions and events that led to this blocking of the publication of her thesis (and also regarding the translations of the “political texts” included in the fourth volume of the thesis), see vol. 2, Entretiens with Nicole Parfait. [TN: This interview was not included in the English edition.]

11. Between Erudite Scholarship and Techno-Science

1.A long and detailed study by Nicolas Tertulian on the Beiträge (“Histoire de l’être et révolution politique,” in Les Temps Modernes, no. 523 [February 1990]: 109–136) provoked a reply from Miguel de Beistegui, followed by a rejoinder from Tertulian. While conceding that Heidegger partially disassociated himself from the Nazi regime (in particular regarding the biological racism), Tertulian showed the close connections between Heideggerian thought and a certain idea of National Socialism: “If he never renounced his political views, it was because they were too intertwined with the foundations of his thought” (135). In the no. 529–530 from August–September 1990 (198–213) of the same journal, in an article titled “Qui craint Heidegger?” [Who is afraid of Heidegger?], Miguel de Beistegui accused Tertulian of a strictly reductive and tendentious interpretation of Heidegger’s more meditative writings: “Ladies and gentlemen, do not allow the Tertulians of the world to prevent you from reading Heidegger!” (213). Exercising his right to respond in a text titled “Qui a peur du débat?” [Who is afraid of the debate?] (ibid., 214–240), Tertulian justified himself by arguing that in the Beiträge, Heidegger continued to pursue the ideal of a radical revolution and maintained the illusion of “guiding the Guide,” following Jasper’s expression (see in particular, ibid., 229). We should note also in the February 1990 issue of Les Temps Modernes (89–108) the article by Myriam Revault d’Alonnes (“Lecteurs de la modernité: Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt”), who, while recognizing “the unavoidable character of Heidegger’s thought,” considered it to be too intimately linked to a deep historical amnesia by the philosophical tradition of the conditions of a refoundation of politics.

2.Ott, Martin Heidegger.

3.It is the case of Thomas Ferenczi in Le Monde, November 16, 1990: “Twelve years in Heidegger’s life. The German historian Hugo Ott confirms that from 1933 to 1945, the philosopher remained faithful to Hitler’s regime.” This opinion was challenged by Pascal David and Henri Crétella, in Le Monde, December 14, 1990 (“Réponse à Hugo Ott,” 24).

4.Jean-Michel Palmier, “Heidegger face à l’histoire,” in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Éléments pour une biographie (Paris: Payot, 1990), 396. Palmier’s postface is not included in the English edition.

5.Without completely disappearing of course. A proof of this is the translation of the book by the American scholar Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Presenting itself already as the final account of the impassioned discussions of the end of the ’80s, this book argues that the 1933 involvement is rooted in the deep tendencies of Heidegger’s work, without claiming, however, that there is a direct link between these works and Nazism. The thought of the second Heidegger is understood as a self-criticism, but one that was undermined by the denial of his personal responsibilities in favor of the “destiny of being.” Ultimately, Wolin turns out to be quite close to Habermas and to the works of Pöggeler and Ott, in relation to whom he does not add much. From the perspective of the French reception, let us note his rejection of the postmodern and deconstructionist readings of Heidegger; in fact he situates himself in the wake of Bourdieu’s work to which he explicitly intends to provide a “philosophical supplement” (ibid., 12).

6.Jacob Rogozinski shows in his essay “Dispelling the Hero from Our Soul,” Research in Phenomenology 21, no. 1 (1991): 73, that if the theme of the hero at the end of Sein und Zeit exposes Heidegger to the political adventure, it represents also for Dasein “an original, irredeemable alteration which breaks the circle of its solipsistic self-affection.” This meditation on the limits of the ontological formalism is taken up again in “Hier ist kein Warum: Heidegger and Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, ed. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 43–64.

7.Jean Quillien, “Philosophie et Politique: Heidegger, le nazisme et la pensée française,” in Germanica 8 (1990): 103–142.

8.Ibid., 103.

9.Éric Weil, cited by Quillien, ibid., 117.

10.Ibid.

11.Ibid., 127.

12.Ibid., 135.

13.One of the signs of this relatively new situation, characterized by a topology of the “distribution of influences,” can be seen in an issue of the journal Le Débat with the catchy title, “La philosophie qui vient,” no. 72 (November–December 1992). Among twenty-one contributions, only three (Brague, Courtine, and Marion) can be said to have been influenced by Heidegger. The others are silent on Heidegger. The remaining allusions are sarcastic (Vincent Descombes, 94), reserved (André Laks, 149), or openly critical (Marc Richir, 227).

14.A sign among others of the stabilization of this atmosphere can be found in the article “Heidegger (Case),” in Le Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, ed. Jacques Julliard and M. Winock (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996). After having summarized the main elements of the polemic by presenting the various points of view, and not without noting “errors and approximations” in Farias, Joël Roman raises the debate, “beyond the factual issues,” opening to broader and more fundamental questions concerning Nazism, modernity, and the “political responsibility proper to the thinker (of the writer).”

15.Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. The original edition was published in 1994 with Carl Hanser Verlag. Its title (Ein Meister aus Deutschland) is an allusion to a poignant poem by Paul Celan, “Todesfuge” [Death fugue].

16.Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

17.Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 429.

18.Ibid., 430.

19.An allusion from Safranski (ibid., 431) to Queequeg, the harpooner, who in Moby Dick has a coffin made for him with the inscriptions he bore on his body.

20.Marcel Conche, Heidegger résistant (Treffort: Éditions de Mégare, 1996); Heidegger inconsideré (Treffort: Éditions de Mégare, 1997).

21.See the conclusion of Heidegger inconsidéré, 34.

22.Conche, Heidegger résistant, 8.

23.Ibid., 13.

24.On all these points, see Conche, Heidegger résistant, 11–17.

25.Ibid., 24.

26.Conche, Heidegger inconsidéré, 23.

27.Ibid., 33.

28.Martin Heidegger, Écrits politiques 1933–1966, trans. and ed. François Fédier (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

29.Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität: Das Rektorat (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1983). Let us recall that “The Self-Assertion of the German University” was published in France and translated as early as 1982 by Gérard Granel with TER publishing house.

30.This is especially the case of the text “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” in Thomas Sheehan, ed., Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 27–30.

31.Heidegger, Écrits politiques 1933–1966, “Préface,” 69.

32.Ibid., 95.

33.Ibid., 90.

34.See the conclusion of “Préface,” 96.

35.An English language translation of this text can be found in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 47.

36.The bibliography of this voluminous dossier is systematically ignored. Very rare allusions to Ott and Pöggeler should not mislead us in this respect.

37.Heidegger, Écrits politiques 1933–1966, 165–192. The German publication of this reference is: “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft,” in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 1: Philosophie und Politik, ed. D. Papenfuss and O. Pöggeler (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991), 5–27.

38.“Die eigentliche Bedrohung der Wissenschaft kommt aus ihr selbst und geschieht durch sie selbst” (“Die Bedrohung,” 8); Heidegger, Écrits politiques 1933–1966, 169. Fédier translates as follows: “The true menace that weighs upon science comes from within itself and takes place through science itself,” which again changes the understanding of such menace in terms of a determined, present, and external event, while the paragraph in question bears on the radical transformation of modern science in relation to the science of the middle ages and antiquity.

39.See also the indefensible translation of Zwiespältigkeit by “incoherence” (ibid., 177); “Die Bedrohung” (ibid., 15). Heidegger does not state that the relation between National Socialism and science is “incoherent”; he describes it as split and contradictory (one could translate this as schizoid), as what follows confirms (on the one hand, the concern of being close to life, on the other hand, planning and social control). Additionally, Fédier does not give (not even in the notes) the German pagination. At times he forgets to mention his editing of the text (thus in the translation on pages 133 and 176; “Die Bedrohung,” pages 11 and 14). In 1996, answering without naming him someone who had referred to his “crestfallen appearance” during the revelation of Heidegger’s comportment in the Nazi years [see Philippe Batsale, “Le rêve de Bourdieu,” L’infini, no. 53 (Spring 1996): 112], Fédier preferred that one speak of his “profound consternation” by the extent to which Heidegger was misunderstood, and he presented his 1995 preface as the suggestion of another hypothesis than that of the definitive guilty involvement: that of a deliberately conditional engagement [“S’il s’agit de rendre justice à Heidegger,” L’Infini, no. 56 (Winter 1996): 36].

40.Chamfort, Maximes et pensées (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1960), 108.

41.Jean Grondin, Le Tournant dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger (Paris: PUF, 1987).

42.Cited in ibid., 7.

43.Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in PA, 250. The essential passage is retranslated correctly by Grondin: “Ici le tout se retourne” [Hier kehrt sich das Ganze um]. The failure of the turning from Being and Time to “On Time and Being” is in part avoided by the reversal found in “On the Essence of Truth.” What is henceforth at stake, according to Heidegger, is “the language of metaphysics.” These chiasmic reversals are not in themselves sufficient to cancel its destinal power. They are themselves part of the general movement of the “turning.”

44.Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, viii–xxiii: “Die Kehre spielt im Sachverhalt selbst” ([The reversal] is inherent in the very matter), xviii.

45.Richardson’s book, in and of itself, has a value that is more documentary in nature than properly philosophical. It was more the preface by Heidegger that has contributed to making the book known. Its own value has not seemed sufficient to warrant a translation.

46.Corresponding to the deepening of the problematic of temporality of being: see Jean Grondin, Le Tournant, 121.

47.“Not without some mannerisms,” as he himself recognized, Grondin described that phase as “aletheic-essentialist.” See ibid., 32.

48.This is one of Heidegger’s greatest conceits: to dare to believe that his 1927 work is so essential that it is itself a destinal sending, a transformation of the truth of being, and that it announces a shift in history itself (or even outside of it).

49.Ibid., 123.

50.See ibid., 14.

51.Ibid., 127.

52.Jean Greisch, Ontologie et Temporalité: Esquisse d’une interprétation intégrale de “Sein un Zeit” (Paris: PUF, 1994).

53.Ibid., v.

54.See ibid., 70.

55.For example, ibid., 77.

56.Ibid., 70.

57.According to an expression by Jean-François Courtine (ibid., 423), referring—in addition to the nonpublication of the third section of Being and Time—to the absence of the three great thematic deconstructions that were announced (Kant’s schematism, Descartes Cogito, Aristotle’s treatment of time).

58.Ibid., 1.

59.Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s “Being and Time” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

60.See Greisch, Ontologie et Temporalité, 473, regarding the moment of the appearance of the “ontological difference,” but without any specific reference to a text by Beaufret himself. Let us also note, despite an undeniable effort to be thorough, the absence of any allusion to the book that I co-edited with Jean-Pierre Cometti in 1989: “Être et Temps” de Martin Heidegger: Questions de méthode et voies de recherche (Marseille: SUD, 1989).

61.See in particular the proceedings of the conference organized at the University of Paris-Sorbonne by Jean-François Marquet in November 1994 and published by Jean-François Courtine as Heidegger 1919–1929. De l’herméneutique de la facticité à la métaphysique du Dasein (Paris: Vrin, 1996), with contributions—in addition to the two authors already cited—by Franco Volpi, Michel Haar, I. Schüssler, Françoise Dastur, Jean Greisch, M. Rudgenini, Jean Grondin, Theodore Kisiel, C. Jamme. One must also mention the solid work of Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, trans. and ed. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), which shows, always precisely on the basis of the texts of the existential analytic, how Heidegger reads and reappropriates Husserl, Kant, Aristotle, Hegel, Descartes, and Nietzsche. This very careful and critical reading is not a polemic, although it refuses to compromise with respect to the political allusions in the 1934–35 courses on Hölderlin (ibid., 275–278). From the same perspective, Taminiaux accentuates his critical distance from Heidegger in The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, trans. and ed. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), the guiding thread of which is the recourse to Arendt’s work (and in particular to The Human Condition) as a response to the Heideggerian neglect of the phenomenological articulation of the vita activa.

62.Martin Heidegger, Séjours-Aufenthalte, ed. François Vezin (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 1992). Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece, trans. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

63.Apart from the translation of das Gewesene by être été [TN: Literally: “being been”], which Vezin attempts to justify on pages 101–102: while recognizing the “unusual” character of the expression, he argues that it allows one to distinguish das Gewesene from the simply bygone past. The problem is that “l’être été,” strictly speaking, means nothing in French.

64.As François Vezin indicates on page 89.

65.See, on this point, our interview with Kostas Axelos in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview Kostas Axelos was not included in the English edition.]

66.Heidegger, Sojourns, 19.

67.Ibid., 22–23.

68.The main publications in French of this great Hellenist, who was greatly admired by Heidegger, include: Les Dieux de la Grèce (Paris: Payot, 1981); Dionysos (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969); Essais sur les mythes (Mauvezin: TER, 1987).

69.Heidegger, Sojourns, 36.

70.Ibid., 48.

71.Ibid., 37.

72.It was to Heidegger’s credit that he recognized this, in the explicit terms of a self-criticism. Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979), 78. On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71.

73.Martin Heidegger, Sojourns, 1–3, 5–6, 9–10, 17–18, 26, 34–36, 38–39, 43–44, 53–56.

74.Jacques Derrida, Athens: Still Remains, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham, 2010), 11. Cited in Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 2004), 126.

75.Counterpath, 130.

76.We are thinking here, among other texts, not only of “The Question Concerning Technology” but also of a much neglected text, “Science and Reflection” (see Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3–35 and 155–182.

77.Heidegger, Sojourns, 56.

78.See Catherine Chevalley, “La physique de Heidegger,” in Les Études philosophiques (July–September 1990): 299. This remarkably precise and pertinent contribution shows how (in a 1935 course, assembled in the text What Is a Thing?) Heidegger took the modification of objectivity in contemporary nuclear physics into account. This theoretical perspective is nevertheless in contradiction with what Heidegger wrote in 1938 about modernity in “The Age of the World Picture.” Why did Heidegger seem to ignore his earlier findings? Even if object and subject disappear to the benefit of their relation, what does remain as the most decisive is the “calculative project concerning things.” Despite the shattering of its classical concept, contemporary physics continues to “seek” the unity of a picture of the physical world: there is a break between its explicit discourse and its fundamental project. It is the latter that Heidegger wants to rethink beyond any epistemology, with the expression the “essence of technology.”

79.René Thom, “La Science en crise?,” Le Débat, no. 18 (January 1982): 39.

80.The passage that most directly announces the expression from 1951–52 is as follows: “For this reason no amount of scientific rigor attains to the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the standards of the idea of science.” “What Is Metaphysics?,” in PA, 96. “Daher erreicht keine Strenge einer Wissenschaft den Ernst der Metaphyik. Die Philosophie kann nie am Masstab der Idee der Wissenschaft gemessen warden.”

81.Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 8.

82.Ibid., 5. “It is no evidence of any readiness to think that people show an interest in philosophy.”

83.Ibid., 3.

84.See G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, ed. Ernst Behler (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1991).

85.Thom, “La science en crise?,” 35.

86.Ibid., 40.

87.A sign of his interest for natural philosophy is Thom’s participation at the conference on “Aristotle’s Physics,” held from June 27 to 29, 1986, in Nice, as part of the Séminaire d’épistemologie et d’histoire des sciences.

88.Heidegger “What Is Metaphysics,” in PA, 83.

89.Ibid., 95.

90.See René Thom, Paraboles et catastrophes (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 56–58.

91.At the end of his article, “Halte au hazard, silence au bruit,” Le Débat, no. 3 (July–August 1980): 119–132, René Thom wonders whether the “vagueness” that often prevails within French philosophy with respect to the sciences should be imputed to the “fundamentally subjectivistic and a-scientific character of academic tradition issued from Husserl and Heidegger” (132).

92.Dominique Lecourt, “De l’antiscientisme à l’antiscience,” Alliage, no. 10 (Winter 1991): 6–7.

93.Also concerning the connection with Spengler, see Jacques Bouveresse, “Les philosophes et la technique,” Zouila (Winter 1998): 21–22.

94.As Jacques Bouveresse notes, ibid., 22.

95.Jean-Michel Salanskis, “Die Wissenschaft Denkt Nicht,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, no. 2 (1991): 207–231.

96.Ibid, 215.

97.See Jean-Michel Salanskis, Le Temps du sens (Orléans: HYX, 1997).

98.See Salanskis, “Die Wissenschaft Denkt Nicht,” 227–231. One should note that the interest of Salanskis’s article is somewhat diminished by a certain generality in his approach: I am thinking less about the final allusion to Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust than about the fact that the sentence “Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht” is examined outside of the context in which it appeared in “What Is Called Thinking?” (8), a work that Salanskis mentions only in passing.

99.“Promesses et menaces de la science” (France Culture, Répliques, February 17, 1996, with François Lurçat), transcript published in Alliage, no. 27 (Summer 1996): 3–12.

100.Ibid., 9.

101.As for his “positions with respect to the Jews,” one needs to ask: where are they developed in Heidegger’s philosophical work? One would like to have a more precise idea than the vague memory of accusations or insinuations read one day in Libération.

102.France Culture, Répliques, February 17, 1996.

103.Thus, for example, echoing earlier works, Jean-Paul Dollé, “La haine de la pensée,” L’Observatoire de la télévision, no. 14 (October 1999): 24, takes “without acrimony or obscurantist fervor” Heidegger’s famous statement as its point of departure, in order to denounce the censors Sokal and Bricmont. These physicists, according to him, were trying to impose a “correct” thinking (“korrekt as Hitler’s followers used to say”), patterned after a scientific model uniquely concerned with exactitude and efficiency, by attacking creative thinking, especially that of Deleuze, without understanding it.

104.Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 38. [TN: This passage was omitted in the English edition, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam New Age Books, 1984)].

105.Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, 225. From the same authors, see Entre le temps et l’éternité (Paris: Payard, 1988).

106.Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, Aux contraires: L’exercice de la pensée et la pratique de la science (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 16.

107.Ibid., 21.

108.In addition, Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond and I organized a seminar on the theme of “Does Science Think?” together at the University of Nice, 1989–90. It was focused not on Heidegger’s thought but on the opening of new perspectives or new intersections along the “common border” between science and philosophy. The participants included Henri Atlan, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Jean-Yves Girard, Marc Richir, Clément Rosset and Isabelle Stengers.

109.Gilbert Hottois, Le Signe et la Technique (Paris: Aubier, 1984), seemed to be the principal promoter of the expression.

110.As Alain Boutot showed in L’Invention des formes (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1993), 108–111.

111.Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 4; Vorträge und Aufsätze, 13: “So ist denn auch des Wesen der Technik ganz und gar nichts Technisches.”

112.Jean-Pierre Séris, La Technique (Paris: PUF, 1994).

113.Dominique Lecourt, Contre la peur (Paris: Hachette, 1990), 144.

114.Chapter 7, “Métaphysique et essence de la technique: Heidegger,” in Séris, La Technique, 288–305.

115.“The many citations that we had to use, in order to preserve the evocative power of Heidegger’s language, despite translations that rarely correspond to the genius of our language, at least allowed one to dismiss the baseless criticisms that one hears too often” (ibid., 299–300).

116.Concerning the intertwining of these two motifs, a critique of instrumentalism and a critique of discontinuism, see ibid., 287–291.

117.Ibid., 302.

118.Concerning these criticisms, see ibid., 303–305.

119.Despite the interest and the quality of his book, Pour la connaissance philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacobs, 1988), Gilles-Gaston Granger devotes only two brief pages to Heidegger (192–193), where he denounces, with respect to the “The Question Concerning Technology,” “the arbitrary nature” of Heidegger’s “approach to language.” These two pages are in their own way more a “denunciation” that a refutation, reducing Heidegger’s thought to a series of “myths.” “Thus anything is permitted,” he even writes (193).

120.Bouveresse, “Les philosophes et la technique.”

121.Ibid., 14.

122.See Séris, La Technique, 285–287.

123.Since Bouveresse insisted, even claiming to correct Séris on something he did not exactly say (“Séris is perhaps not entirely correct when he claims that Heidegger’s diagnosis is in no way original,” in “Les philosophes et la technique,” 17), it may not be unhelpful to recall the very terms used by Séris: “The true originality does not lie in this diagnosis. . . . Heidegger is not the only one who is saddened by the metamorphoses of nature . . . his originality lies elsewhere.” This originality is clearly indicated further on: La technique, 302–3. (“The idea that modern technology is the ultimate closure of metaphysics.”)

124.Bouveresse, Les Philosophe et la technique, 19.

125.“Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of Hydrogen bombs”: Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 27 (cited in Bouveresse, Les Philosophe et la technique, 23, following Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, 34). Since Bouveresse raised the question, “but what does ‘the same thing’ exactly mean?” (ibid., 23), it is not unhelpful to clarify that upon scrutiny of the original text nothing permits the justification of the translation by “the same thing” for Das Selbe, which Heidegger always distinguished from the identical Das Gleiche. “Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blokade und Aushungerung von Ländern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben” (GA, 79, 27).

126.In the preface to the second edition to his thesis, La Mythe de l’intériorité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1987), Bouveresse describes (11) the “insurmountable apprehension that continues to provoke” in him “the idea of risking any affirmation whatsoever with respect to this author” (Heidegger).

127.See ibid., 18, where Bouveresse agrees with Heidegger that positivism à la Carnap cultivated a naïve idea of the opposition between science and metaphysics; he also mentions that it is necessary according to Heidegger to understand the problem of technology on the basis of the history of metaphysics. Further, he considers that it is necessary to recognize that Heidegger “did not make the mistake of explicitly reducing science to technology” (ibid., 20).

128.This is the interview with Richard Wisser on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (the translation of which can be found in the Martin Heidegger: Cahier de l’Herne, 93–97). Let us grant to Bouveresse that the “pedagogical” formulation that Heidegger himself gives of the sentence “science does not think” is not the best one: he wanted to show that this expression is not a “reproach” against science but a statement regarding its “internal structure”: “science does not operate in the dimension of philosophy.” Conceding to Heidegger that it is not possible to say what physics is through the method of physics (which is not an insignificant concession), Bouveresse nonetheless gets on his high horse, as it were, by advancing two arguments (“Les Philosophe et la technique,” 22): a neo-positivist like Schlick was quite capable “of admitting that science is philosophical”; further, the theory of relativity has been “a conceptual and philosophical revolution.” Schlick’s counterexample (Schlick was in no way a representative of science as such!) simply proves that he was not an “ordinary” positivist! The second argument is much more interesting, to the extent that it leads one to wonder what was “thought” or “not thought” (and in what sense) in general or special relativity, as well as in the other conceptual revolutions brought about by the science of the twentieth century. It is clear that one cannot be satisfied with the “trivialized” formulation of Heidegger’s statement, itself modeled by the author himself on a classical philosophical position (expressed for instance by Hegel in the letter to Goethe from February 24, 1821: “It is true that Newton expressly warned physics to beware of metaphysics.” Hegel, the Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christian Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 700. If, however, Bouveresse had referred to “What Is Called Thinking?” in order to situate the statement in question in its context and put it in relation to the whole range of implications that Heidegger gives it, he could have engaged the discussion in a much for rigorous manner.

129.Bouveresse, Preface to the second edition, La Mythe de l’intériorité, 17.

130.See Séris, La Technique, 302.

131.Lecourt, Contre la peur, 139.

132.See ibid., 142. In addition, Lecourt notes that the connection with Spengler encounters a major objection: Heidegger does not share the “philosophy of life” of the author The Decline of the West (ibid., 144). Another crucial difference that must be taken into account: there is no cyclical conception of history in Heidegger. Consequently, the connection itself seems quite tenuous, and Lecourt went too far when he wrote that “Heidegger borrows most of his conception of technology” from Spengler (ibid., 143).

133.Ibid., 144.

134.See ibid., 145.

135.Among which one must also include François Guéry. In Heidegger rediscuté: Nature, technique et philosophie (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1995), he first attempts to avoid any “demonization” concerning Heidegger by admitting that “the Heidegger lesson is useful both for knowledge and for experience” (79), especially in the domain of ecology. But the “provincial” attachment to nature seems to him completely conservative (to the Heideggerian attitude he opposes [30] “republican France!”), as is Heidegger’s lack of understanding of the industrial world (“Heidegger is like the prophet Philippulus!” 125). Reproaching Heidegger for his “hysterical style” (99), Guéry even seems to have a hard time remaining calm and moderating his discourse when discussing an author he describes as follows: “Despite his contortions designed to go against current opinion, in the end he can only paint with a deceptive coating all the platitudes and bad ideas of the century, under the excuses of medieval ontology and the theology of faith: long ways long lies!” (102).

136.Hottois, Le Signe et la Technique, 11 and 114

137.This ambiguity is also perceptible, though in a more complex way, in the work of Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, vol. 1: The Faculty of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), and Technics and Time, vol. 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), who refers almost constantly to Heideggerian schemes while reworking them in terms of both Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology and Derrida’s deconstruction.

138.This journal, published in German, English, and French by Dunker and Humboldt in Berlin, was organized by François Fédier and François Vezin.

139.Jean-François Courtine, Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990).

140.“Donner/prendre: la main” (ibid., 283–304).

141.“La voix (étrangère) de l’ami. Appel et/ou dialogue” (ibid., 327–354).

142.See, in particular, ibid., 328, 332–333. See Franco Volpi, Heidegger e Aristotele (Padua: Daphne, 1984).

143.See “Le platonisme de Heidegger,” in Courtine, Heidegger et la phénoménologie, 129–160.

144.Ibid., 338–339.

145.Ibid., 353.

146.Ibid., 405.

147.A proximity that was recognized (concerning the role of the hand): ibid., 292.

148.See ibid., 328.

149.See Alain Renaut, Sartre, le dernier philosophe (Paris: Livres de Poche, 2000).

150.One expected such an assessment from a mathematician who had proposed a somewhat Heideggerian reading of the formal sciences in his book, Herméneutique formelle (Paris: Éditions du C.R.N.S., 1991) and who proposed, as we saw earlier, an interesting interpretation of the memorable statement, “science does not think.” Unfortunately, Jean-Michel Salanskis disappoints our expectations in his Heidegger (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997), which for that reason we cannot recommend to students as a reliable study. Certainly, this is only an introduction on the basis of the two themes of existence and ontological difference. But the didactic character of the work does not justify serious mistakes that escaped the author (thus for instance the translation of Being and Time by Vezin is attributed on pages 14 and 153 to François Fédier; we read on page 8 that Heidegger left the Nazi party in 1934 when he resigned from the rectorate, when recent research has shown the contrary). But these are details when compared with the liberties the author takes by his own admission (12) in relation to the thought to which he is supposed to introduce the reader (for instance Being and Time is presented on page 32 as “the novel of existence,” and the existential category of the understanding is evoked on page 24 in reference to the cartoons Rahan and Pif). But the most problematic was to have adopted in the end a reading that is resolutely external of Heidegger’s four “themes” (technophobic, hermeneutic, historical, and Nazi). To strangely conclude with this last motif could lead one to believe that it is still present and even that it represents the truth of Heidegger’s thought. Salanskis denies this in two ways: first by refusing to minimize Heidegger’s philosophical importance (150) and also by explaining his engagement in terms of his “avoidance” of the primacy of ethics (144). However, in the final analysis, this kind of engagement would in part “belong to that of philosophy in general” (145). This is to say too much or not enough . . .

151.Thus the complete title of La Raison Narrative: Langages Totalitaires: Critique de l’économie narrative.

152.The key sentence of Krieck’s attack against Heidegger in Volk im Werden in 1934 is as follows: “The meaning of this philosophy is an explicit atheism and a metaphysical nihilism, as has been represented previously in our country by Jewish authors, that is to say, a mixture of disintegration and dissolution for the German people” (see Jean-Pierre Faye, Le piège: La philosophie heideggérienne et le nazisme [Paris: Balland, 1994], 101). See our interview with Jean-Pierre Faye in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Jean-Pierre Faye was not included in the English edition.]

153.Faye even produces a text by Nietzsche where nihilism is clearly distinguished from metaphysics: “Morality protected from nihilism those who turned out badly by granting everyone an infinite value, a metaphysical value, and placing them in an order which did not correspond to that of worldly power and hierarchy: it taught submissiveness, humility, etc.” “European Nihilism,” June 10, 1887, in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 387–388. See Faye, Le piège, 124–125.

154.Jean-Pierre Faye, Le Vrai Nietzsche (Paris: Hermann, 1998).

155.Faye, Le piège, 155.

156.Ibid., 20.

157.Henri Meschonnic, Le Langage Heidegger (Paris: PUF, 1990), 5. I have devoted a critical review to this book from which I borrow a few elements: See “Heidegger entre polémique et philosophie,” Les Études philosophiques, no. 2 (1991): 229–234.

158.Meschonnic, Le Langage Heidegger, 8.

159.See ibid., 385.

160.See Jean-Pierre Lefebvre, “Auch die stege sind Holzwege,” in Hölderlin vu de France, ed. Bernhard Böschenstein and Jacques Le Rider (Tübingen: Günter Narr, 1987), 53–76. Contrary to Heidegger, who developed a reading oriented toward Greece and India of the hymn Andenken (“Remembrance”), Lefebvre presents very convincing arguments to interpret it as a poem of a voyage to the West. He summarizes (ibid., 60) the spirit of his “counter reading” in the following way: “I do not want to defend this maritime hypothesis in a unilateral way: I even remain convinced that it plays a part in the poem in a tension with the other voyage, the one that Heidegger suggests and that I would call here the voyage of the intertext.”

161.Dionys Mascolo, Haine de la philosophie: Heidegger pour modèle (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1993).

162.Ibid., 131.

163.See ibid., 91.

164.See ibid., 121.

165.See ibid., 112.

166.Ibid., chapter 5 (“Éléments pour un sottisier heideggèrien”).

167.We will limit ourselves to two examples. In the commentary proposed by Heidegger in The Principle of Reason on Angelus Silesius’s saying (“The rose is without why”), Mascolo sees only a “scandalous stupidity” (Haine de la philosophie, 121): skimming over the details of the analyses, paying no attention to the subtle displacement of the “all-powerful principle,” he believes (or pretends to believe) that Heidegger only wanted to say that the rose is different from the human being. One of Heidegger’s most subtle meditations is thereby reduced to a trivial banality. The second example is no less significant: to claim that Heidegger betrayed Nietzsche’s originality is neither original nor scandalous (Faye showed that in a better-argued passage), but Mascolo merely claims that Heidegger rejects Nietzsche with “contempt” and judges his thought as “the perfect symptom of the general decadence” (127). These allegations are false and even caricatural: Heidegger always put Nietzsche on a pedestal; the metaphysical character of his thought corresponds, according to Heidegger, to the deepest destinal necessities.

168.Ibid., 149.

169.Ibid., 155.

170.Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Heidegger et son siècle: Temps de l’être et temps de l’histoire (Paris: PUF, 1992).

171.Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht-Boston: Nijhoff, 1998).

172.See Barash, Heidegger et son siècle, 13. One finds the same conviction in the very well documented study by Domenico Losurdo, Heidegger et l’idéologie de la guerre, trans. J.-M. Burée (Paris: PUF 1998), which in no way aims to reduce Heidegger’s thought to that ideology, but which shows the extent to which the shock of WWI was determinant for an entire generation that shared with Heidegger, mutatis mutandis, the theme of heroic community, sacrifice before death, the spiritual vocation of the German people, and the radical critique of modernity.

173.Barash, Heidegger et son siècle, 184.

174.Chapter 8, “La Deuxième Guerre mondiale dans le mouvement de l’histoire de l’être,” ibid., 168–179.

175.We should also note an interesting position against the translation (although largely or broadly accepted) of geschichtlich by historial. Barash argues that with this neologism one makes Heidegger speak “—in French only—a language that distances him from his predecessors.” This is a perfectly justified remark that should be taken into account by the translators. However, Barash himself is not immune from criticism when he, on several occasions, translates Heidegger’s Verborgenheit with the factual brutality of the word opacité.

176.This conclusion seems to be a case of “wishful thinking” [TN: In English in the original]. It should not obscure the fact that the “Heidegger case” continues to inspire virulent reactions that are moral rather than hermeneutical. Thus, while denying (112) that he is “judging Heidegger” and conceding that he is “one of the greatest philosophers of our century,” Christian Delacampagne devotes an entire chapter (with the significant title “Papon, lecteur de Heidegger”) of his book De l’indifférence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998) to very severe attacks on Heidegger’s explicit or implicit political behavior across different phases. The fact that Foucault is also condemned for having argued that a certain racism is an unavoidable component of biopower in no way diminishes the emblematic importance given from the outset to Heidegger as a “moral pariah.” Even if we cannot blame Delacampagne for having emphasized, as others, the grave nature of Heidegger’s silence (or quasi-silence) concerning the Holocaust, it remains that the case is presented in a one-sided manner.

12. At the Crossroads

1.Reported by Jean Beaufret, Dialogue with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy, trans. Mark Sinclair (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), xxv.

2.Heidegger, “My Way into Phenomenology,” in On Time and Being, 74–82.

3.Heidegger makes this clarification in the supplement from 1969, ibid., 82.

4.Ibid., 79.

5.Such is the attitude adopted by François Fédier in his book Regarder voir (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995)..

6.These two questions are asked by Jean-François Courtine at the end of his text, “Phénoménologie et/ou tautologie,” in Heidegger et la phénoménologie, 399, 405.

7.FS, 32.

8.FS, 36.

9.Rémi Brague, “La phénoménologie comme voie d’accès au monde grec,” in Phénoménologie et métaphysique, ed. Jean-Luc Marion and Guy Planty-Bonjour (Paris: PUF, 1984), 249.

10.Ibid.

11.Ibid., 250.

12.Levinas, Totality and infinity, 298.

13.Michel Henry, Phénoménologie matérielle (Paris: PUF, 1990), 112.

14.Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 35–132, especially paragraph 4.

15.Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 197–202.

16.Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward A Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 37.

17.Max Loreau, La Genèse du phénomène (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1989). With respect to Max Loreau, see our interview with Éliane Escoubas.

18.Ibid., part 4, 243–410.

19.Ibid., 374.

20.Ibid., 528.

21.Marc Richir, Méditations phénoménologiques (Grenoble: Millon, 1992), 42–51.

22.Marc Richir, L’Expérience du penser (Grenoble: Millon, 1996), and more particularly the critique of Heidegger, 469–470.

23.Jocelyn Benoist, Phénoménologie, sémantique, ontologie: Husserl et la tradition logique autrichienne (Paris: PUF, 1997).

24.See the “Prière d’insérer” by Renaud Barbaras, in De l’être du phénomène: Sur l’ontologie de Merleau-Ponty (Grenoble: Millon, 1991).

25.From Jacques Garelli, a poet and a phenomenologist who was very much influenced by the later Merleau-Ponty, see Rythmes et mondes (Grenoble: Millon, 1991). His critiques toward Heidegger (183–208, 267–310) essentially concern the unity of Ereignis in relation to the play of the world and the selfhood of Dasein.

26.Renaud Barbaras, Le désir et la distance: Introduction à une phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: PUF, 1999).

27.Claude Romano, Event and World, trans. Shane Mackinlay (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), in particular, §3, and L’Evénement et le temps (Paris: PUF, 1999).

28.Henri Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie: À la lumière de l’analyse existentielle et de l’analyse du destin (Grenoble: Millon, 1991).

29.Let us mention the existence of a French Society of Daseinsanalyse, directed by Françoise Dastur. See our interview with Françoise Dastur.

30.Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie, 419.

31.Ibid., 421.

32.See Marlène Zarader, Heidegger et les paroles de l’origine (Paris: Vrin, 1986).

33.Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press: 2006).

34.Paul Ricoeur’s introductory remarks to Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen O’Leary, eds., Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: PUF, 2009), cited by Zarader, The Unthought Debt, 7: “What has often astonished me about Heidegger is that he would have systematically eluded, it seems, the confrontation with the block [bloc] of Hebraic thought. He sometimes reflected on the basis of the Gospels and of Christian theology, but always avoided the Hebraic cluster [massif], which is the absolute stranger to the Greek discourse.”

35.Ibid., 106.

36.Ibid., 45.

37.Ibid., 56: “In the first place, the majority of traits that characterize the poet in Heidegger’s approach are found in the biblical prophet, and vice versa.”

38.Deuteronomy 6:4.

39.See The Unthought Debt, 67–68.

40.See ibid., 96.

41.Concerning the “nothing that is not nothing” and the analogies with the abyss of the Midrash and of the Kabbalah, see ibid., 130. On the parallel between the hidden God and the withdrawal of being, see ibid., 133–135. Is it necessary to evoke, in this respect, the Kabbalist Louria’s thought on the doctrine of the Tsim-Tsoum, since “there is no other God in the Bible but the hidden God” (ibid., 134)? Verse 45:15 of Isaiah (“Truly you are a hidden God”) is thus translated in Luther’s Bible: “Führwahr, Du bist ein verborgner Gott.” We know that, with Heidegger, the key word referring to the withdrawal of being is precisely Verborgenheit.

42.Concerning the ambivalence of the Heideggerian treatment of logos, the questioning was relaunched in a different, though comparable, way by Denise Souche-Dagues: “The ambivalence of Heideggerian thought consists in that it avoids, but without actually betraying it, the Judeo-Christian ground on which it actually rests” (Du “Logos” chez Heidegger [Grenoble: Millon, 1999]), 122.

43.Zarader does not ignore this, since she devotes interesting pages to the early courses in which Heidegger interprets the New Testament and Paulinian texts. The Unthought Debt, 152–159.

44.One can even push her “arguments” further. For example, in his Philosophie et théologie dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1988), 238, Philippe Capelle is surprised that Zarader does not mention L’âme de la vie (1824) by Rabbi Hayyim de Voloshym, the Jewish Schekinah, and even some mystical Islamic schools.

45.If one takes this declaration seriously in the dialogue with the Japanese: “Without this theological background I should never have come upon the path of thinking. But origin always comes to meet us from the future” (On the Way to Language, 10). This theological origin implies, among other things, the reading of Luther’s Bible, which, for Heidegger, as he confided to Jean Beaufret, is the book that establishes modern German.

46.Marlène Zarader already mentioned this in the foreword to the French edition: Zarader, La Dette impensée, 11. See also 202 of the English edition.

47.Zarader, The Unthought Debt, 142.

48.This example is given by Zarader, ibid., 235n129.

49.Ibid., 143.

50.This is a formulation that we borrow from Zarader, ibid., 144.

51.See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in PA, 268, “The desire for an ethics presses ever more ardently for fulfillment as the obvious no less than the hidden perplexity of human beings soars to immeasurable heights.”

52.See ibid., 271: “Then that thinking which thinks the truth of Being as the primordial element of the human being, as one who eksists, is in itself originary ethics.”

53.See Zarader, The Unthought Debt, 145.

54.Ibid., 146.

55.This is what Jean-Luc Nancy has also emphasized in a very convincing way: see Jean-Luc Nancy, “Heidegger’s ‘Originary Ethics,’” in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, ed. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

56.This is the position I argued for in my book: The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics, trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

57.Ludwig Wittgenstein, “On Heidegger on Being and Dread,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy. Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 80. Wittgenstein’s citation ends as follows: “This running-up against the limits of language is Ethics. I hold that it is truly important that one put an end to all the idle talk about ethics—whether there be knowledge, whether there values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In Ethics one is always making the attempt to say something that does not concern the essence of the matter and never can concern it” (ibid, 80–81).

58.See Jacques Derrida, Given Time, vol. 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Regarding Heidegger, see 18–24 and 80–81.

59.To follow the list of the possible translations of this key word, provided by Jacques Derrida himself, in “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 401n1.

60.Ibid., 380–402.

61.A silence that Derrida judges, rightly or wrongly, to be of “great importance” (ibid., 382).

62.Ibid., 388.

63.“Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 161–196.

64.Ibid., 161.

65.Ibid., 173.

66.Ibid., 189.

67.Ibid., 193.

68.Ibid., 174.

69.Ibid., 174n69

70.Ibid., 194.

71.See ibid., 167.

72.Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutunglos: literally “we are a sign deprived of meaning.”

73.For example, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” ibid., 168. This “overtranslation” is due to Aloys Becker and Gérard Granel (see Heidegger, Qu’appelle-t-on penser? (Paris: PUF, 1959), 90), who sometimes put monstre in quotation marks (92).

74.In German, a monster is Missgeburt or Monstrum.

75.Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 163–218.

76.From the Greek otos, “ear.”

77.Derrida, in Reading Heidegger, 215.

78.“Hören der Stimme des Freundes, den jedes Dasein bei sich trägt” [In hearing the voice of the friend whom every Dasein carries with it (SZ, 163/BT, 158)]. Cited by Derrida in Reading Heidegger, 164. One should almost translate bei sich by “right against oneself” [tout contre soi] to echo the ambivalence of the Heideggerian “philopolemology.”

79.I attended the conference at Loyola University in September 1989, and saw that the lecturer made no accommodation for the general—and quite large—audience. However, the consequence of this “performance,” which lasted for almost two hours and a half, was the obvious difficulty (for an increasingly diminishing public) of following a very difficult talk, which was punctuated by German passages.

80.This is the way he himself names him (see Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004], 54). [TN: Translation modified.]

81.On the theme of “surveillance,” see our interview with Jacques Derrida.

82.Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 2, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 295–296. The pages that follow, concerning Ricoeur’s relationship to Heidegger, were sketched out in a lecture on “Freedom and Praxis” given at the University Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3 (Professor Quillien’s seminar) on February 15, 1996.

83.In particular §32 of Sein und Zeit, “Understanding and Interpretation” [“Verstehen und Auslegung”]. On the relations between phenomenology and hermeneutics in relation to Ricoeur’s dialogue with Heidegger’s thought, see Françoise Dastur’s contribution, “De la phénoménologie transcendantale à la phénoménologie herméneutique,” in the proceedings of the 1988 Cerisy symposium, which testified to the importance of Ricoeur’s thought: Jean Greisch and Richard Kearney, eds., Les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991), 37–50. See in the same volume (381–403) Ricoeur’s text, “L’attestation,” which addresses the Heideggerian Selbst (397).

84.BT, §17.

85.Ibid., §18.

86.Ibid., §33.

87.Hildegard Feick, Index zur Heideggers “Sein und Zeit” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961).

88.BT, 59. One can find a serious mistake in Martineau’s French translation in which one reads “theoretical” instead of “practical” on page 65 of his edition.

89.Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in PA.

90.PA, 239.

91.Ibid., 240.

92.Ibid., 239.

93.Ibid., 240. “Deshalb ist das Denken, wenn es für sich genommen wird, nicht ‘praktish.’”

94.Ibid., 272. In the German text: “Die Antwort lautet: dieses Denken ist weder theoretisch noch praktisch. Es ereignet sich vor dieser Unterscheidung.”

95.We will see that this fundamental disagreement concerning metaphysics renders this claim problematic.

96.Olivier Mongin, Paul Ricœur (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994).

97.Christian Bouchindhomme and Rainer Rochlitz, “Temps et récit” de Paul Ricœur en débat (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1990), 22.

98.This entire discussion is reexamined in the light of a critique of the circularity of Heideggerian hermeneutics in Christian Ferrié, Heidegger et le problème de l’interprétation (Paris: Kimé, 1999).

99.This is the case, for Ricoeur, as early as the Philosophy of Will.

100.Being itself is referred to A-letheia as un-concealment. Let us recall that Heidegger finally crossed out being and rethought its truth more originally from Ereignis.

101.Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1992), 314–315.

102.Ibid., 19, 312–313.

103.Ricoeur himself speaks of a “meta function.” We will return to this.

104.See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 67. Analogon means here a referential as a “family resemblance” in Wittgenstein’s sense.

105.This is an attitude inherited from Emmanuel Mounier: see his book L’affrontement chrétien (Paris: Seuil, 1951).

106.See Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology, and The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger.

107.We saw how at Cerisy Ricoeur was annoyed by Heidegger’s “schoolmaster” manner; but this did not prevent him from recognizing that the Heideggerian readings of the poets were “magnificent,” that he had been impressed by Heidegger’s genius and “caught up in the Heidegger wave” (see Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, trans. Kathleen Blamey [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998], 21–22).

108.Paul Ricœur, Réflexion faite (Paris: Éditions Esprit, 1995), 100.

109.See Dominique Janicaud, Chronos: Pour l’intelligence du partage temporel (Paris: Grasset, 1997).

110.Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998). On the notion of horizon, see 58–59.

111.We also have to draw attention to a previous work that, while scrupulously respecting the letter of Heidegger’s text, is clearly oriented toward the quest for a convergence between Heideggerian eschatology and Christian soteriology: Ysabel De Andia, Présence et eschatologie dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Éditions universitaires-université de Lille III, 1975).

112.Jean-Yves Lacoste, ed., Dictionnaire critique de théologie (Paris: PUF, 1998). The following citations are from the article “Heidegger” (522–523) written by Lacoste himself.

113.One can of course analyze these characterizations in terms of compromise or division. Indeed, as Lacoste recalls, the philosopher’s funeral in Messkirch only partially observed the Catholic ritual. We saw that this symbolic division represented by the person of Welte (both priest and philosopher) and appeared in the choice of texts read at the burial: the Lord’s Prayer and excerpts from Hölderlin. As for the gravestone, it does not bear a cross, but a little star, whereas the neighboring gravestones of Mrs. Heidegger and of his brother do have crosses (we learned this from Didier Franck; see also Béatrice Commengé, “Le tombeau de Heidegger: De Messkirch à Todnauberg,” L’Infini, no. 53 [Spring 1996]: 51: “Only Martin had a star”). This neighboring of crosses and a star constitutes one final difference (in contiguity).

114.Martin Heidegger, The Zollikon Seminars, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001).

115.See our Interviews with Jean Greisch, Jean-Luc Marion and Claude Geffré. [TN: Geffré’s interview was not included in the English edition.]

116.Roger Munier’s introduction to Heidegger’s “Le retour au fondement de la métaphysique,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 43, no. 3 (July 1959): 401–405.

117.See HF, chapter 8, 180.

118.“Foreword” to Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 9–10.

119.Jean-Luc Marion, “Double Idolatry,” in God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 25–52.

120.Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in PA, 267. “Only from the essence of the holy is the essence of divinity to be thought. Only in the light of the essence of divinity can it be thought or said what the word ‘God’ is to signify” (ibid., 267).

121.Marion, “Double Idolatry,” 41.

122.Maria Villela-Petit, “Heidegger est-il idolâtre?,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 82.

123.Ibid., 87–89. The rest of this very rich text also shows that Heidegger did not subordinate the approach to the Divine to Dasein and that it is by no way certain that the “inscription of God (or of the god) as a being” would be “necessarily idolatry” (92).

124.Jean Beaufret, “Heidegger et la théologie,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 30; reprinted in Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. 4, 46.

125.Jean-Luc Marion, “Note on the Divine and Related Subjects,” in God without Being, 52.

126.A clarification offered by Françoise Dastur in her excellent article, “Heidegger et la théologie,” Revue philosophique de Louvain (May–August 1994): 242–243. See also “Dialogue avec Martin Heidegger” (notes from a session of the Evangelical Academy that took place in early December 1953 in Hofgeismar), trans. Jean Greisch, in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 336. One can wonder, however, whether the clarification in Hofgeismar put an end to any question, in the light of the “confession” made to Roger Munier on August 14, 1949: “Die Grundfrage der Theologie muss rein aus dem Wesen des Seins neu gefragt werden. / Die erste und letzte Frage hat den Charakter der Antwort gegenüber ‘dem Wort’” (The fundamental question of theology should be raised anew strictly on the basis of the essence of being. The first and last question has the character of an answer given in response to “the Word.”) Roger Munier, Stèle pour Heidegger (Paris: Arfuyen, 1992), 13–14.

127.Jean de La Fontaine, “The Fox and the Stork,” in The Complete Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 22.

128.“We start from a fact: Heidegger has no faith” (François Fédier, “Heidegger et Dieu,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 37).

129.See our interview with Jean-Luc Marion.

130.Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).

131.Ibid., 247.

132.God without Being.

133.See the following text by Heidegger: “For the god also is—when he is—a being and stands as a being within Being and its coming to presence, which brings itself disclosingly to pass out of the worlding of world” (Heidegger, “The Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 47; “denn auch der Gott ist, wenn er ist, ein Seiender . . . ,” Die Technik und die Kehre [Pfullingen: Neske, 1962], 45).

134.Next to the expected reference to the Pascalian order of charity, one find this Heideggerian passage: “If I were to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word Being would not occur in it. Faith does not need the thought of Being” (Marion, God without Being, vi).

135.Ibid., 47.

136.This development of the field of reflection is illustrated by the translation of the book by Johannes B. Lotz, Martin Heidegger et Thomas d’Aquin, trans. Philibert Secretan (Paris: PUF, 1988).

137.Jean Greisch, “La contrée de la sérénité et l’horizon de l’espérance,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 170.

138.One can find some of Welte’s texts in French (they show an immense respect toward Heidegger and a great interpretative prudence in the connections he makes with Christian thought).

139.For this entire paragraph, see our interview with Claude Jeffré in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: The interview with Claude Jeffré was not included in the English edition.]

140.See our interviews with Jean Greisch and Jean-Luc Marion.

141.Hans Jonas invites Christian theologians to a comparable catharsis by insisting on Heidegger’s “immanentism” and neo-paganism in a beautiful text: see Hans Jonas, “Heidegger et la théologie,” trans. Louis Evrad, Esprit (July–August 1988): 172–195. Let us note that although Jonas knew the work of the early Heidegger quite well, as he was his student, he was not attuned to themes after the “turn” and, in particular, to the step back from metaphysics as ontotheology (see my essay “En guise d’introduction,” ibid., 169–171).

142.See Capelle, Philosophie et théologie dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger, 241. The three issues corresponds to the three moments of Heidegger’s thought, although they do coexist to a large extent in the second Heidegger. In the end Capelle emphasizes an essential lesson drawn from Heidegger: it is on the basis of the “thinking from the step back” that the irreducible tension between philosophy and theology can be articulated.

143.The convergences between Capelle and Brito, particularly as regards the critiques of the relationship between the philosophical and the theological in Heidegger, have been identified by Emmanuel Tourpe, in “L’esprit pontife,” Revue philosophique de Louvain (February 2000): 123n10.

144.Emilio Brito, Heidegger et l’hymne du sacré (Louvain: Peeters, 1999).

145.Jean Greisch, “La contrée de la sérénité et l’horizon de l’espérance,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 170.

146.In this field, as in others, however, unanimity was not reached: thus Michel Henry declared that Heidegger’s conception of the history of metaphysics “does not hold up” (during the debate organized by the Collège international de philosophie for Didier Franck’s book, Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu, December 4, 1999). Henry did not limit his remarks to such declarations since he argued in a very detailed manner against Heidegger: see in particular his refutation of the Heideggerian understanding of the Cartesian cogito in chapter 3 of his Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993): “If we return to Descartes’s text, however, we find no allusion whatsoever to any problematic like the one developed in Nietzsche in which ipseity is tributary to and comprehensible through the structure of representation” (75–76). Another example: one discovers in the foreword of the thesis of the sorely missed Gérard Lebrun a critique of a “resolutely dogmatic history of being.” Kant et la fin de la métaphysique (Paris: Colin, 1970), 9.

147.Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 43.

148.Louis Althusser, Sur la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 116. While he remained silent about Heidegger in For Marx and in the noted militant theoretical writings from the 1960s and the 1970s, Althusser was far from having a negative attitude toward Heidegger: “Nietzsche and now Heidegger have become established figures,” he wrote in The Future Lasts Forever (181), where one finds other rather favorable allusions to Heidegger (107, 172, 178), despite an obvious allergy to his tendencies as a “negative theologian” (171) or even a “priest” (Sur la philosophie, 123). According to other texts from the end of his life, Althusser read Nietzsche and Heidegger fairly closely, though with more difficulties for the latter than for the former, to the point that he confessed on August 6th 1984: “I am tired of Nietzsche and I am afraid of Heidegger” (ibid., 111). However, he went as far as to see in Heidegger (ibid., 42) the last inspiration of a “materialism of the encounter, of contingency, that is, of unpredictability,” even more authentic than the materialisms of the rationalist tradition, including those that have commonly been attributed to Marx, Engels, and Lenin!

149.See Pascal Engel, La Dispute (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1997).

150.Paul Ricoeur, whose opposition to Heidegger concerning the philosophy of action was discussed early, also expressed strong reservations toward the category of “metaphysics,” qualified as an “after-the-fact construction of Heideggerian thought, intended to vindicate his own labor of thinking and to justify the renunciation of any kind of thinking that is not a genuine overcoming of metaphysics.” Ricoeur added, almost reactively: “It seems to me time to avoid the convenience, which has become a laziness in thinking, of lumping the whole of Western thought together under a single word, metaphysics.” See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (New York: Routledge, 2003), 368.

151.Jules Vuillemin, L’Héritage kantien et la révolution copernicienne, Fichte-Cohen-Heidegger (Paris: PUF, 1954). In this book, the “existentialist” interpretation of Heidegger is presented as a “displacement” of Kantian concepts (§23) in terms of a finite ontology of temporality. Consequently, “the whole of the Transcendental Logic, Dialectic and Analytic is but the wormy bark of Kantianism” (14). However, in order to reach and understand the “fruit,” namely the transcendental Aesthetic, one has to reinterpret the theory of intuition in terms of a metaphysics of finitude. The existentialist intuition, or originary understanding, plays the role of intellectual intuition in Fichte. This is an unacceptable compromise for Vuillemin: “A new formal ontology appears where the reduction to time is perpetually compensated for by the contrary reduction of time to eternal temporalization” (295). If this clever critique can be questioned, what is certain is that Vuillemin saw the change in Heidegger’s position between Sein und Zeit and the Kantbuch: Kant is no longer referred back to Descartes nor to “the metaphysics of the infinite in general” (289).

152.See Mikel Dufrenne, “Heidegger et Kant,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (January 1949): 1–28; “La mentalité primitive et Heidegger,” Les Études philosophiques (July–September 1954): 284–306. In both of these articles, Dufrenne presented Heidegger’s thought without espousing it. With respect to Kant, he suggested that Heidegger had ignored the practical scope of the doctrine of autonomy. But his reservations were even stronger at the end of the second text, in which he rejected any return to primitive thought and affirmed his attachment to rationalism.

153.In her foreword to the texts edited by Jean Hyppolite, Figures de la pensée philosophique, 2 vols., (Paris: PUF, 1971), Dina Dreyfus mentioned that a course on Heidegger was given by Hyppolite at the Sorbonne in 1953–54. Also see in the second volume of this book, “Note en matière d’introduction à Que signifie penser?” (607), “Ontologie et phénoménologie chez Martin Heidegger” (615), and “Étude du commentaire de l’introduction à la Phénoménologie de Hegel” (625).

154.However, without explicitly criticizing Heidegger, Kostas Axelos, in his 1959 complementary thesis published in 1962 by the Éditions de Minuit with the title Héraclite et la philosophie, presents an open, ironical Heraclitus, with a “fragmented and fragmentary totality.” The opposition to Heidegger’s reading (that tends to unify on the basis of an origin) becomes explicit and more philologically argued in Jean Bollack and Heinz Wismann, Héraclite ou la séparation (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 28–32 and 405: “Following Reinhardt, he [Heidegger] confines Heraclitus to the language of a nascent ontology.” This argumentation is used by Bollack and Wismann under the form of a critical analysis of the Heideggerian “strategy” of a dismemberment of syntax in “Heidegger l’incontournable,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no. 5/6 (1975): 157–161.

155.Hegel’s case would deserve a specific and complex study insofar as Heidegger did not immediately develop a thematic interpretation of this author. As Denise Souche-Dague wrote about the first Heidegger (“Une exégèse heideggérienne: le temps chez Hegel d’après le §82 of Sein und Zeit,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (January–March 1979): “The brief and summary nature not only of his reading of Hegel’s texts, but of the judgment he makes about them, contrasts with the care that, at that time, he applied to Kantian thought” (119). Concerning the Heidegger-Hegel “gigantomachia,” see my essay “Heidegger-Hegel: un ‘dialogue’ impossible?,” in À nouveau la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991), 151–174.

156.The study of the relations between Heidegger and Husserl did not, at first, escape the reductive clichés, as shown in a study by Rev. Fr. Przywara, “Husserl et Heidegger,” in Les Études philosophiques (January–March 1961): 55–62, according to which Husserl remains “idealistic” while Heidegger is “romantic,” both announcing the “last hour” of philosophy.

157.Jean Beaufret recognized it after the fact. See the critique by Barbara Cassin in Parmenides, Sur la nature ou sur l’étant (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 19: “The dokounta bathe in the love of this world: Beaufret went so far as to interpret insolently the dokounta, in the most anti-Platonic manner, as ‘the things themselves’” (33). More generally, Barbara Cassin distanced herself from the Heideggerian reading of Parmenides and from his “ontological nationalism”: see ibid., 14–19; 66–67.

158.See Franco Volpi, “Wittgenstein et Heidegger,” in La métaphysique, ed. J.-M. Narbonne and L. Langlois (Paris-Québec: Vrin-PUL, 1999), 71.

159.Pierre Aubenque, Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1962).

160.Ibid., 112.

161.Ibid., 167.

162.Ibid., 417n.

163.Ibid., 441.

164.See Pierre Aubenque, “Plotin et le dépassement de l’ontologie grecque classique,” in Le Néoplatonisme (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1971), 101–108.

165.See Jean-François Courtine, “Phénoménologie et métaphysique,” in Le Débat, no. 72, 88–89. See also our interview with Jean-François Courtine in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN. This interview with Jean-François Courtine was not included in the English edition.]

166.See HF, chapter 8 (172–175), the section “Between Critique and Hermeneutics,” where we noted that the technique of “double-reading” enabled Birault to expose the confrontation between Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s thoughts. In general, Birault’s style is the opposite of an erudite critique. Even if he did not always follow Heidegger with the faithfulness of a Jean Beaufret, Birault promoted and practiced lofty thinking, more faithful than simple allegiances. He preferred meditative thinking to pedantic critique. Hence his penchant for textual commentaries, which almost become philosophical prayers in Nietzsche’s “grand style.” See the foreword of his Heidegger et l’expérience de la pensée, 621–623, which ends with a magnificent retranslation of paragraph 296 of Beyond Good and Evil.

167.Besides the four volumes of the Dialogue avec Heidegger that we already have mentioned, one can find another example of it in the publication by Philippe Fouillaron of two posthumous volumes by Jean Beaufret, Leçons de Philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1998) in which the thematic exposé of Heidegger’s thought is almost entirely sacrificed to the benefit of the careful explanations of the great classical works from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche and Husserl.

168.Gérard Granel, Le sens du temps et la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), and L’Équivoque ontologique de la pensée kantienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). In both cases, an ontological reading (not dictated in detail, but profoundly inspired by Heidegger) wants to be the battering ram that would shake and deconstruct the citadel of traditional readings (enclosure of phenomenology within the horizon of perception in Husserl, reduction of Kantian philosophy to a theory of the possibility of representation) to the benefit of a questioning of phenomenality as such. With his vigorous and personal style, never that of an epigone, Granel characterized his project as follows: “What we have to do is thus clear, we for whom Heidegger’s work has precisely opened the greatest understanding of the question of the meaning of being: we must attempt to ‘repeat’ the interpretation, which should remain as close as possible to its own possibility and thus reveals the texts more manifestly and more completely to themselves and themselves alone” (L’équivoque ontologique, 26). This is indeed a new application of the Heideggerian method of “hermeneutical violence” that reveals both what Kant and Husserl “meant to say,” and also what they could not have said, and kept concealed.

169.Rémi Brague, Aristote et la question du monde (Paris: PUF, 1988), 54–55.

170.See ibid., 110, 194, 271, 391, 513–515.

171.Ibid., 150.

172.Jean-François Courtine, Suarez et le système de la métaphysique (Paris: PUF, 1990).

173.Ibid., 406. “Suarez’s greatness, which in one way justifies his outstanding reputation, is to have been able to face, in his own way, the basic problematic in which Aristotle’s Metaphysics unfolds, and to have inaugurated a new concept of metaphysics, and re-founded it while giving it a new form that had remained unknown until then.”

174.See ibid., 536.

175.Ibid., 534–535.

176.One finds hardly more than ten references to Heidegger in the entirety of this 550-page single-spaced volume. However, and this is not to diminish the immense importance of this work, the decisive motivation for the volume does indeed seem to come from Heidegger and even more precisely from the allusion to Suarez’s Disputationes metaphysicae on page 22 of Sein und Zeit, where Heidegger mentions the work of great importance that remains to be accomplished in order to understand the metamorphoses of metaphysics between its Greek advent and its transcendental refoundation.

177.See our interview with Jean-Luc Marion.

178.A confrontation that was set into motion in Marion’s first book, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1975).

179.Ibid. Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

180.See ibid., §6, 73.

181.An allusion to Jean-Luc Marion’s thesis, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1981).

182.See Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, §10, 118, and the schema, on 121.

183.Ibid., 121.

184.To which one should add the following works, until a full inventory can be completed: Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1992); Jean-Christophe Bardout, Malebranche et la métaphysique (Paris: PUF, 1999); Olivier Boulnois, Être et representation: Une généalogie de la métaphysique moderne à l’époque de Duns Scot (Paris: PUF, 1999).

185.One can also find signs of this in other readings. Thus for example the personal reflections in Jean-François Marquet’s Singularité et événement (Grenoble: Millon, 1995) contain quite a number of allusions to Heidegger, either finding inspiration in them (for instance, 82, 103 with respect to Ereignis and the unique character of being), or differentiating himself from them (“metaphysics” as “Heideggerian myth”: 101).

186.One could object that the themes that have been singled out in this chapter do not represent an exhaustive list and that we should have made room for other themes, in particular for deconstruction. We had to choose: we did so with the awareness of the unavoidable limits of a subjective perspective, given that the chronological distance does not exist anymore. As for deconstruction, it is in no way missing from our reflection in other parts of this book. We wanted to exclude it here as a theme because of a scope that appears to have much more support in the United States than in France. In France, deconstruction as such did not enjoy outside of the philosophical field a fortune comparable to that which it has known in the United States, especially in literary criticism and in comparative literature. It did not become a movement independent of the person and work of Jacques Derrida. The deconstructionist “network” (in the American sense) has very little relation to its Heideggerian origins. Therefore one had to limit oneself to a narrow dialogue with Derrida (and with some of his associates), which we believe we have done in the body of the present work.

Concerning the enrichment of the aesthetic field by Heidegger’s thought, one should read our dialogue with Éliane Escoubas in our interviews. As for literary criticism, it seems to have received Heideggerian inspiration only indirectly or episodically. Let us single out, however, as an exception to confirm the rule, the little book written by Alfred Bonzon, Racine et Heidegger (Paris: Nizet, 1995), in which some connections are attempted, though rapidly and not in a convincing way, on the basis of themes such as truth, the simplicity of language, and the temporal meaning of “anticipatory resoluteness” (see, concerning this last point, 77, where the unity of time in Andromaque is interpreted in terms of the “fourth dimension” of temporal givenness according to Heidegger).

Conclusion

1.“Martin Heidegger et le problème de la vérité,” Fontaine (November 1947): 758.

2.Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. 4, 86.

3.In the lineage and the tradition of Jean Beaufret, let us mention his former students or disciples: Serge Boucheron, François Fédier, Gérard Guest, Pierre Jacerme, and François Vezin.

4.This is a point that Jean-Luc Marion understandably emphasizes in his interview. Since the 1950s the situation has evolved considerably in this regard, and even if the French university is quite far from being won over by some Heideggerian “cause,” one finds nothing like the exclusion experienced by Jean Beaufret in the 1950s and ’60s (about which Louis Althusser had been aware).

5.It would also be necessary to mention other names, in particular those of Françoise Dastur, Michel Haar, and Jacques Rivelaygue.

6.Among these, we note the cases of Alain Boutot and Didier Franck. The first told me that he discovered Heidegger “almost by chance” through his readings. The second defined himself, in response to our questions, as an autodidact in Heideggerian studies: he discovered Heidegger’s thought in his last class in high school through a reading of Kojève, but it was more by virtue of his readings than the classes he took at Nanterre that he began to assimilate Heideggerian themes, before following the seminar of Jacques Derrida.

7.Françoise Dastur, Heidegger et la question du temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 126. [TN. Françoise Dastur’s statement is in a bibliographic note in the French edition that was not included in the English edition.] Dastur then refers principally to the works of Biemel, Pöggeler, Walter, and von Herrmann (especially to the latter’s Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers [Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1964]).

8.See Régis Debray, Contretemps: Éloges des idéaux perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 70, where he pays homage to his former professor Muglioni: “Snobism distinguishes the leaders from the peons. I like ‘leaders’ in literature but in philosophy I firmly remain on the side of the ‘peons.’ Those who advance step by step in the limpidity of the day and of the words are more illuminating to me than those who fulgurate in the night. . . . And since, like Jean-Jacques, I prefer to be a man of paradox than a man of prejudices, let me thank Muglioni for having kept me away me from Heidegger.” See also from Debray, in a similar vein, “Un maître à l’ancienne,” in Par amour de l’art: Une éducation intellectuelle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 13–86.

9.In Atlas (Paris: Julliard, 1984), does Serres criticize Heidegger’s ontology, “existence conceived as Dasein”? See Pierre Lévy’s suggestion in Qu’est-ce que le virtuel? (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), 150. If such was the case, this criticism would arise from a misunderstanding regarding Dasein, radically different from any other entity and essentially “ecstatic,” and therefore “outside.” In fact, the only explicit allusion to Heidegger in Atlas (70) refers to a “blunder” that Heidegger would have shared with Bergson: having connected geometry with measure and overlooking topology; now, the argumentation that follows addresses only Bergson, and cites no precise reference in Heideggerian matters.

10.It is above all with respect to global technology as a form of “thoughtlessness” that Finkielkraut makes reference to Heidegger: see La Défaite de la pensée (Paris, Gallimard, 1987), 146. We note that the journal Le Messager Européen, edited by Finkielkraut, has been judged “militantly Heideggerian” by Alain Renaut in Jean Quillien, ed., La Réception de la philosophie allemande en France aux XIXe et XXe siecles (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1994), 243.

11.Thus, in 1972, Sollers congratulated Denis Roche for freeing Hölderlin “from the sinister Zimmer and his cousin Heidegger,” cited by Jean-Claude Pinson, Habiter en poète (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1995), 33.

12.Philippe Sollers, Studio (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 154. See also pages 152, 153, 183.

13.See ibid. “Heidegger en passant,” remarks gathered by Yannick Haenel and François Meyronnis, in L’Infini (Fall 1999): 17–23. This interview was significantly followed by a brief article by François Fédier, “Hannah Arendt à propos de Heidegger,” ibid., 25–28.

14.It is particularly difficult to give a “final account” of the French discussions of Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin. The Germanist Jean-Pierre Lefebvre attempted to do so in these terms: Hölderlin, after the war, finally found in France “the philosophical dignity that he had been denied.” “Hölderlin was finally recognized as a thinker, an intellectual engaged at least in thinking. This was Heidegger’s contribution, which was not negligible. However, this philosophical dignity does not abolish the myth, quite to the contrary. Maurice Blanchot thus writes of ‘the sacred speech of Hölderlin.’ The entire ontological pathos of French Heideggerianism crystallizes around the myth of Hölderlin: Heidegger’s discourse itself contaminates the translation and confirms Walter Benjamin’s remarks on translation. The poetical is supposed to surge from the uncanny. It is paradoxically that uncanny that must be saved in the translation, following the model of what Hölderlin attempted in translating Sophocles and Pindar. The Hölderlin of the Pléiade, for example (edited by Philippe Jacottet), has very few notes and privileges the translators-poets like Gustave Roud. François Fédier, a translator of Heidegger, pushes the principle of literality to the extreme, going as far as reproducing in French the disjunction of verb and particle proper to German. Thus ‘to descend’ [herunter gehen] becomes ‘aller en bas,’ etc. There is in this approach a neo-religious dimension: the sacred is celebrated.” I thank Jean-Pierre Lefebvre for having permitted me to cite this excerpt from his habilitation thesis (47–48).

15.See the citation by Heidegger of a passage from Illuminations on page 39 of On Time and Being.

16.Thus Heidegger cites a passage from “La crise de l’esprit,” in Paul Valéry, Œuvres, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 995), in “Hölderlins Erde und Himmel,” Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 11 (1958–60): 35.

17.See Jean Guitton’s testimony, “Visite à Heidegger,” La Table Ronde 123 (March 1958): 145, 154.

18.See HF, chapter 7, 145–146.

19.Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871,” in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans., intro. and notes Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 309.

20.René Char, Œuvres complètes, Bibliotèque de la Pléiade 308 (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 734–736.

21.Ibid., 735.

22.See ibid., in 1965: “A plaque: La Provence point oméga (Imprimerie Union, Paris) testifies to the protest campaign that was organized following the installation of an atomic missile base in Haute-Provence. A sketch was drawn by Pablo Picasso.”

23.René Char, Pour nous, Rimbaud (Paris: GLM, 1956). See “Arthur Rimbaud,” in Char, Œuvres Complètes, 727–734. Char’s text also serves as preface to Rimbaud, Poésies (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

24.Archives des lettres modernes, no. 60 (1976): 12–17. This text is reprinted under the title “Rimbaud vivant” in GA 13, 225–227.

25.Heidegger, GA 13, 225.

26.Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871,” in Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, 303.

27.GA 13, 226: “Dürfen wir, Rimbaud’s Wort bedenkend, vielleicht sagen: Die Nähe des Unzugangbaren bleibt die Gegend, dahin die selten gewordenen Dichter einkehren, dahin sie nur erst weisen?”

28.GA 13, 227: “Wird das Sagen des kommenden Dichters am Gefüge dieses Verhältnisses bauen und so dem Menschen den neuen Aufenthalt auf der Erde bereiten?”

29.“Wege zur Ausprache” (GA 13, 15–21).

30.“Die Grundform der Auseinandersetzung ist das wirkliche Wechselgespräch der Schaffenden selbst in einer nachbarlichen Begegnung” (GA 13, 20).

31.Daniel Payot, La Statue de Heidegger (Belfort: Circé, 1998). In this very careful study of key texts by Heidegger, from the commentary of the chorus in Antigone to later contributions on art, space, and technology, Payot shows both that Heidegger magnifies the work as a revelation of the truth of Being (and of the world) and that he also gestures toward a dimension that lets “sovereignty occur with figure” (111). Hence, on the basis of the observation that Heidegger never could (or wanted to) emancipate the work of art from its “sacralizing reappropriation,” the following question is posed: “But why should the thinking of the open necessarily be a thinking of foundation”? (116).

32.Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, 303.

33.Ibid., 309.

34.Ibid., 303.

35.Ibid.

36.Char, Œuvres Complètes, 268.

37.Ibid., 732. Even if Heidegger never conceived of the return to the Greeks in a literal sense or in a mechanically mimetic way, it is undeniable that the theme of the Wieder runs through his work, from the “repetition” of the question of being (Wiederholung) in Being and Time to this exclamation from his poem Language (1972): “When will words / Again be word?” See “Language,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Philosophy Today 20, no. 4 (1976): 291.

38.If the attention of the public mostly focused on the short poems by Char that were dedicated to Heidegger, as testimonies to their friendship, one should not neglect, inversely, the seven “thinking poems” by Heidegger in homage to Char: see “Temps,” “Chemins,” “Signes,” “Site,” “Cézanne,” “Prélude,” and “Reconnaissance,” in René Char: Cahier de l’Herne (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1971), German text with French translation by Jean Beaufret and François Fédier, 169–187. Two translations seem problematic to us: on pages 182–183, “ein Zusammengehören des Dichtens und des Denkens” is translated as “une commune presence du poème et de la pensée” [a common presence of the poem and the thought]. (The translators wanted to pay homage to Char’s title but in this way they erased the difference included in the co-belonging of Zusammengehören.) Of greater concern, on pages 186–187, the translation of “die Entbergung der sich entziehenden Befugnis” by “déclore permis de s’échapper” seems to us very far from the German and literally incomprehensible in French.

39.This is the title of Jean Beaufret’s article in L’Arc already cited about Char’s and Heidegger’s first meeting in Paris. See HF, 88–90.

40.Char, Œuvres complètes, 742–744. The dedication on page 742 confirms the admiration and friendship that Char held for Heidegger.

41.From September 5, 1984, reported by Paul Veyne, René Char en ses poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 310.

42.Cited by Paul Veyne, “René Char et l’expérience de l’extase,” La Nouvelle Revue française (November–December 1985): 16.

43.“We encounter once again the deep opposition between Char and Heidegger.” Veyne, René Char en ses poèmes, 521. However, the antithesis should not be taken too far either, for paradoxically it supposes the possibility of a comparison of the “worldviews” that both Char and Heidegger would have rejected.

44.See Char, “Page d’ascendants pour l’an 1964,” in Œuvres complètes, 711–712.

45.Paul Veyne, “Char et Sade,” La Nouvelle Revue française (March 1984): 18.

46.With respect to Jacottet, Jean-Claude Pinson, Habiter en poète, 172, writes, “To the poetics of height, which, influenced by the ‘Heidegger-effect,’ claim to directly convey the oracles of Being, he opposes the way of an indirect poetic ontology, aware that the light of Being only shines in order to withdraw in the beings that diffract it.”

47.His Heideggerian inspiration is made explicit in “La pensée du Même” and “L’eau d’oubli.” Roger Munier, Stèle pour Heidegger (Paris: Arfuyen, 1992), 25.

48.See our interview with Michel Deguy in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN. This interview with Michel Deguy was not included in the English edition.]

49.Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). See a fuller elaboration in Badiou’s Being and Event, trans. Oliver Felpham (London: Continuum, 2005). In particular, see chapter 3 (“Being: Nature and Infinity. Heidegger/Galileo”).

50.Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press), 74.

51.This expression corresponds to the vulgate that Badiou hastily designates as the “current Heidegger” in chapter four (“Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace”) of the Manifesto for Philosophy, 47.

52.Particularly when it comes to the texts on technology, which are said to be pompous and spun from “reactionary nostalgia” (ibid., 53). His irritation is clear with respect to the relation between Heidegger and Char (ibid., 76): Heidegger “exceeded the poetic jurisdiction” and Char takes “the pose.”

53.Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, trans. Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996).

54.With respect to his interpretation of the nothing (Nichts), Heidegger himself opposes the availability of a Far Eastern approach to its nihilistic interpretation in the West. See his letter to Roger Munier, in Le Nouveau Commerce, cahier 14 (Summer–Fall 1969): 55.

55.Catherine Clément, Martin et Hannah (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1998). Claude Roëls also told me about the thriller by Gérald Messadié, Ma vie amoureuse et criminelle avec Martin Heidegger (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994).

56.Heidegger indeed figures in Les Philosophes, a Jean Tinguely exhibition, at the Jean Tinguely Museum of Bâle (July 10 through October 24, 1999, in Fort Carré, Antibes).

57.Claire Brétecher, Agrippine (Paris: Éditions France Loisirs, 1987).

58.Raymond Klibansky, “L’Université allemande dans les années trente (notes autobiographiques),” Philosophiques: Revue de la Société de philosophie du Québec 18, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 153–154.

59.A particular example of such a reaction is the effect produced by the “pirate” publication by Gerard Granel of a bilingual edition of the “Rectoral Address” in October 1982 (ibid.). At first threatened with a lawsuit by the publisher Klostermann, Granel was de facto “absolved” by Hermann Heidegger, who then considered that the time had come for a German re-edition in the spring of 1983 (the first edition of 1933 had been out of print for some time). An even more eloquent and significant example is the German publication of Vier Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1977), a text that was translated by Curd Ochwadt from the French transcripts of the seminars held by Heidegger in Provence and in Zähringen: this was an unprecedented case in which the German philosopher—who as we know was extremely attached to his own language—saw, postmortem, his thinking translated from the French, with the original forever lost.

60.From 1971 on, the date of the publication of the Klossowski translation of the two volumes of Nietzsche.

61.See Marc Richir, “La république des philosophes,” Le Débat, no. 72 (November–December 1992): 222.

62.Respectively, 55,321 copies of Chemins and 385,000 of La Généalogie de la morale. See Jacques Le Rider, Nietzsche en France: De la fin du XIXe siècle au temps présent (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 242.

63.Although Gallimard reproduced most of Heidegger’s works in its paperback edition “Tel.”

64.Both were published in La Bibliotèque de Philosophie, and had a print run of 4,000 and 3,000, respectively. The first was published in September 1995, the second in January 1997. As of November 30, 1999, they were still not sold out. For this information provided by Gallimard concerning these figures, we thank Eric Vigne and Marie-Paule Llorens.

65.An expression from Jacques Derrida in Malabou and Derrida, Counterpath, 54. [TN: translation modified.]

66.In his already mentioned 1937 text, Wege zur Aussprache.

67.Which is judged, incidentally, to be “inconsistent,” at least with respect to the question of humanism, which is the guiding thread of Thomas Rockmore’s Heidegger and French Philosophy, 181.

68.If his main target was Sartre’s existentialism, Heidegger also targeted the other contemporary forms of humanism (Marxism in particular), which he knew full well were flourishing in France.

69.See On Time and Being, 48, where Heidegger takes issue with “some of the grossest misunderstandings which [his] thinking encountered in France.”

70.François Vezin, “Philosophie française et philosophie allemande,” in L’Enseignement par excellence: hommage à François Vezin, ed. Pascal David (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 370.

71.Le Rider, Nietzsche en France, 252.

72.Ibid., 255.

73.Jacques Poulin’s presentation at the conference titled Penser après Heidegger (held September 25–27, 1989). [TN. This was later published as Jacques Poulain and Wolfgang Schirmacher, eds, Penser après Heidegger (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), 6.]

74.Wolfgang Schirmacher, ibid., 10.

75.Alain Badiou, “Le statut philosophique du poème après Heidegger,” ibid., 263–268. Badiou credits Heidegger with having delimited historically the respective functions of the poem and of thinking, but he criticizes the “historical construction” that made him miss the scope of the Platonic gesture and fail to reactivate the poetic Sacred.

76.Gérard Granel, “Que l’on peut, que l’on doit penser après Heidegger—et comment,” ibid., 89–121. Gérard Granel sketches the contours of a thinking “epistemology” that could articulate a phenomenology of originary forms along with a reflection on the actual presuppositions of each determined science. This text was reprinted as “Après Heidegger,” in Gérard Granel, Écrits logiques et politiques (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 85–125.

77.Reiner Schürmann, Broken Hegemonies, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 25–39. Schürmann distinguishes (613–614) three senses of transgression (“fiat,” “trans-” and “co-normativity”). It is this last “double bind” that Heidegger brought to its paroxysm in the Beiträge. We recognize here the thematic of Schürmann’s great work, Broken Hegemonies, the last part of which, “The Diremption: On Double Binds without a Common Noun (Heidegger),” 511–620, is a critical commentary on the Beiträge.

78.See our interview with Jean-François Courtine in Heidegger en France, vol.2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Jean-François Courtine was not included in the English edition.]

79.Regarding the publication of the translation of volume 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, see the clarifications provided by Jean Greisch in his interview. The translation of volume 19 (Platon: Le Sophiste, ed. Jean-François Courtine and Pascal David) appeared in 2001. More generally, the situation in January 2000 reveals the small number of the published volumes of the Gesamtausgabe that have been translated by Gallimard. Without including already translated works, whether partially or in their entirely, in different forms (for example the courses of Nietzsche), the number of volumes still to be published in French was then thirty-two! This number provides a good idea of the extent of the “reception” still to come for an indeterminate length of time, but which, at this current rate, could take several decades.

80.François Fédier, “Traduire les Beiträge,” in Regarder voir (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), 83.

81.Ibid., 97.

82.Heidegger, Beiträge §§238–242, trans. François Fédier, Po&sie, no. 81 (October 1997): 9–21. The extreme difficulty of translating the Beiträge being well-known, it is interesting to compare the spirit of Fédier’s translation with another version by Jean Greisch offered earlier (translation of §267 in Rue Descartes, no. 1 [April 1991]: 213–224).

83.An example was provided with the translation of Nichts by néent and Ereignis by amêmement: see Fédier’s translation of Heidegger’s text “Die ‘Differenz’ und das Nichts” (not yet published at the time), in L’Enseignement par excellence: Hommage à François Vezin, ed. Pascal David (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 10–13. Let us analyze, with these two examples, the basis of an interpretation that claims, with the best intentions, to “shed light” on a brief text by Heidegger to justify the spelling of néent (or ce qui néentit for das Nichtende). Fédier argues that it directly reveals “what is not an entity” (ens), making the negation more dynamic. One could object that this graphic artifice reveals nothing directly, since it supposes an intellectual detour toward the ens, and that in addition it corresponds to nothing in the original German (Nichts, the usual word)—unlike the case where it is a matter of indicating the passage from Sein (être) to Seyn (estre). Furthermore, Sartre had already used and abused the verb néantir to avoid understanding the nothing in an abstract or static sense. The new spelling of néent thus has the appearance of a sheer mimesis of certain Heideggerian gestures, themselves mimetically displaced by a French philosopher (différance with Derrida and the crossed-out God with Marion). It is even more difficult to justify the neologism amêmement to render Ereignis, for not only is the bizarre noun not French (when it is a question of translating an ordinary German word) but what it evokes (“the coming to oneself that leads to the same”) certainly relates to the Heidegger theme of the Selbst, but completely misses the innovative thinking that Heidegger develops on the basis of the root eigen and the play between Ereignis and Eraugnis. François Fédier, so preoccupied with the Heideggerian letter, must have thought of the following passage from “On Time and Being”: “What remains to be said? Only this: Appropriation appropriates. Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same” (ibid., 24). Now, this sentence, which invites the reader to conceive of Ereignis from itself, in no way establishes its equivalence with the Same. As Rémi Brague had noted once while discussing a choice of the same translator, it is not a question of contesting his competence, quite the contrary. What is contestable is over-translating. See Rémi Brague, “Heideggers Einfluß auf das französische Geistesleben. Elemente eines Rückblicks auf die bisherige Rezeptionsgeschichte,” Theologie und Philosophie 57 (1982): 35.

84.In the play written in collaboration with Michel Deutsch, Sit venia verbo (Paris: Bourgois, 1988), 17.

85.This account of published translations (excluding reprints) is as follows: the 1930s: 1; the 1940s: 1; the 1950s: 6; the 1960s: 7; the 1970s: 5; the 1980s: 10; the 1990s: 8.

86.About which one will have noted that we did not attribute its “paternity” to Heidegger, unlike a few authors who dilute the influence of Heidegger to the point of discerning it in the work of Lévi-Strauss. The only perceptible convergence between Heidegger, on the one hand, and Foucault and Althusser, on the other (and not “structuralism” as a whole), concerns the critique of humanism: and it operates on the basis of a displacement of the assumption and modes of application of this critique.

87.Of the seven volumes announced in 1982 by François Fédier in Le Débat (ibid., 40), two had still not appeared at the time of this writing: volume 21 (Françoise Dastur) and volume 26 (Gérard Guest). Let us also recall that the translation of volume 60, submitted by Jean Greisch in March 1999, is still not out at the time of this writing. [TN: The volume came out in 2012.] See the interview with Jean Greisch. However, the year 2001 marked a new beginning of the publications of translations of Heidegger’s work.

88.As an example, and without claiming to be absolutely exhaustive (excluding the case of the volumes such as Wegmarken whose texts were published in parts), the list of the Gesamtausgabe volumes still not published in France at the time of this writing are: 1, 13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 38, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 75, 77, 85. [TN: GA 17, 20, 22, 38, 50, 54, 59, 60, 63, 65, and 68 have since appeared in French.]

89.“Wege der Ausprache,” already cited in chapter 1, HF, 30–31.

90.Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. 1, 16–17.

91.See ibid. Also see “L’énormité de Heidegger,” interview with Roger-Pol Droit, Le Monde, September 27, 1974, 18.

92.See Marc Richir (“La république des philosophes,” Le Débat, no. 72 [November–December 1992: 227]), who adds: “Heidegger is indeed the one who, in our century, covered this drift with his authority by manipulating, in turn, great categories such as ‘metaphysics,’ ‘science,’ ‘technology,’ etc. One would need, one day, to investigate Heidegger’s work as a symptom of the discontent of our civilization.” In an unexpected manner, this violent condemnation in terms of “pathology” converges with similar criticisms, although coming from different horizons: Richir is no doubt the most anti-Heideggerian among the phenomenologists.

93.Thus the reference to Heidegger still paradoxically unifies, in a completely negative mode, philosophical orientations whose unity was still problematic. See this remark by Régis Debray in Introduction à la médiologie (Paris, PUF, 2000), 178: “We shall say that there is no mediological School (in the sense of a collective allegiance to a common doctrine), but a network of connected bodies of knowledge, perhaps even of strong disagreements, which implicitly draws the contours of an archipelago or scholars having a common goal: to understand technology otherwise than Heidegger.” One can wonder whether, mutatis mutandis, this contrarian position does not also apply to the “analytic school” in France today.

94.See Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, La Traversée des fleuves (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999).

95.“Donner la parole aux silences,” an interview by Pierre Deshusses with Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Le Monde des Livres, Friday, October 29, 1999, v. In Le Monde, January 6, 2001, 15 (“Un scandale intellectuel français”), Goldschmidt relaunched his attack blatantly by treating Heidegger as an emblematic figure of French “Germanomania.”

96.See Alain Renaut, ed. Histoire de la philosophie politique, 5 vols. (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999).

97.“Les ressources du libéralisme politique,” an interview by Nicolas Weill with Alain Renaut, in Le Monde des Livres, Friday, October 29, 1999, ix.

98.Further, the violence of many of the critiques we have cited prior to the “condemnation” formulated by Richir shows indeed the extent to which Heidegger’s thought remains an intense, often emotional question, in relation to which calm must be progressively restored, a task to which our whole effort is devoted.

99.Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). [TN: A subsequent translation has also appeared: Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).]

100.Gathering an international audience, mostly American, this session of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum took place from July 7 to 27, 2000, in Città di Castello, Italy, under the direction of John Sallis and Charles Scott.

101.According to Graham Parkes, preface to R. May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, ix.

102.See an important publication on the Italian reception edited by Marco Olivetti, La recezione italiana di Heidegger (Padoue: Cedam, 1989). This substantial volume of 600 pages includes the most prestigious names (from Ernesto Grassi to Gianni Vattimo and Massimo Cacciari) and testifies to the richness and diversity of thought that touched three generations. The range of the themes addressed is quite wide (the existential analytic, the ontological difference, the phenomenological method, the question of language, nihilism, the sacred, the reading of Nietzsche, the confrontation of Heidegger with Gentile, Pareyson, etc.), but the general orientation of this volume is mostly historiographic (in the best sense of the word). The critical intelligence and the objective distance prevail throughout. One hardly perceives the conflictual positions and the creative displacements that specifically characterize the French reception.

103.See our interview with Kostas Axelos in Heidegger en France, vol. 2: Entretiens. [TN: This interview with Kostas Axelos was not included in the English edition.] It is moreover not certain that Heidegger truly wanted this monumental edition. It rather seems that old age and illness deprived him of the ability to oppose it forcefully. This hypothesis seems confirmed in our Entretiens with Biemel. [TN: The interview with Walter Biemel was not included in the English edition.]

104.Kostas Axelos, Métamorphoses (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1991), 16–17: “Heidegger’s case is extremely complex and contradictory. There are even uncertainties, ambiguities and ambivalences . . . further, Heidegger, the thinker of the truth of being, often lies . . . He follows various paths, almost simultaneously. . . . Does Heidegger play a double game? Yes and no. He remains in the between, in the split, which is not only metaphysical. Being and beings keep referring to one another. Beings often contaminate the saying of being. Heidegger is altogether—the whole being fractured—a great thinker and a petit-bourgeois. There is no impermeable separation between the text and the context. Both are to be questioned, as well as their relation.”

105.The most stupefying denial was formulated at the time of a plebiscite organized by Hitler, November 11, 1933, to gain support for his spectacular break with the League of Nations: “The German people has been summoned by the Führer to vote; the Führer, however, is asking nothing from the people. Rather, he is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether the entire people wants its own existence [Dasein] or whether it does not want it.” See “Address presented by Heidegger at an election rally held by German university professors in Leipzig in support of the upcoming plebiscite,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1933), 49. The confrontation of this lofty speech with the facts is cruel: “Speeches abound, the radio, the press, and the cinema have been unleashed. On November 12, the answer is given in a peremptory way. Those who voted: 96%, the ‘Yes votes’: 95%; Forty million six hundred thousand votes for the government, 661 seats for the Nazis, but the vote is secret in theory only.” Pierre Gaxotte, Histoire de l’Allemagne (Paris: Flammarion, 1963), 2:494. One should nonetheless add, in order to allow for a balanced judgment on this matter, that the citation in question does not belong strictly speaking to Heidegger’s philosophical corpus: it is an excerpt of a speech given in Leipzig on November 11, 1933. In the interview with Der Spiegel that appeared posthumously, Heidegger would clarify with respect to another declaration of allegiance to Hitler: “Today, I would no longer write these cited sentences. Even by 1934 I no longer said such things.” “Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Reader, 317. Even if one accepts these statements, what remains to be questioned is the form of the “denying schema” applied in other cases and other contexts in the face of common sense, or of the theses that Heidegger seeks to refute.

106.Let us recall the dates that will mark the pursuit of Heidegger’s reception in the twenty-first century: in 2026, the Heidegger Archives will be opened in Marbach; in 2046, the entirety of Heidegger’s work will be in the public domain. We are grateful to Marc de Launay for this information.

107.According to Jean Beaufret, it is on the question of the relation to science that Heidegger’s “enormity” is the most noticeable (see the interview with this title in Le Monde, September 27, 1974, 18): “For him, what is important in the course of history is much more the effect of philosophy on science that the alleged influence of science on philosophy.”

108.“Letter on Humanism,” in PA, 276: “die Strenge Besinnung, die Sorgfalt des Sagens, die Sparsamkeit des Wortes.” Jean Beaufret liked to refer to these qualities: see his Introduction aux philosophies de l’existence, de Kierkegaard à Heidegger (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, Bibliothèque Médiations, 1971), 112.

109.There is, however, one condition for any qualitative philosophical listening (this is obvious but one must state it in our times, where almost everything is given to us visually and immediately): work, considerable work.

Françoise Dastur

1.TN: Françoise Dastur’s statement is in a bibliographic note in the French edition that was not included in the English edition. In her note, Dastur writes that “contrary to a widely accepted opinion, it is still in Germany, and not in France, the United States, or elsewhere, that Heidegger is better read and understood.” Françoise Dastur, Heidegger et la question du temps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 126.

Jacques Derrida

1.TN: Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

2.TN: A caïman is a slang expression that is used at the École Normale Supérieure to designate any teacher who prepares students for the Agrégation exam.

3.TN: The course to which Derrida is referring, titled, “Heidegger: La question de l’être et l’histoire,” has since been published by Editions Galilée in 2013. The English language translation is forthcoming as Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

4.Derrida, Of Spirit, 129–130n5.

Éliane Escoubas

1.Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 225.

Jean Greisch

1.Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Continuum, 1994).

2.Jean Greisch, Paul Ricœur: l’itinérance du sens (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2001).

3.[TN: Jean Greisch, Le Buisson Ardent et les lumières de la raison, tome 1: Héritages et héritiers du XIXe siècle (Paris: Le Cerf, 2002).]

4.[TN: The translation appeared in January 2012.]

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

1.Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 215.

Jean-Luc Marion

1.Marion, Jean-Luc, “The Breakthrough and the Broadening,” in Reduction and Givenness, Translated by Thomas A Carlson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998).