Among the “affairs” that have cluttered our public scene for several years, there is one that is philosophical in nature. This is the famous “Heidegger affair” which it seems impossible seriously to clear away from the horizon or at least the backstage of the French intellectual scene. (For it must be noted that this is not always the case in other countries, far from it, a fact that also deserves to be analyzed.) Beyond the impressive collection of works that have been devoted to it, and that have also broadly exhibited and analyzed the items in the dossier, there still seems to be a necessity, recurrent and periodic, to set the defendants and accusers against each other once again in an unending trial in which there is, of course, no higher authority to which one might appeal.

What is difficult to unravel is whether this necessity is an emotional or a logical one. The tones are emotional, without a doubt, and the sources of these emotions ought to be interrogated. Both sides are far too emphatic for us not to inquire into the motives involved. But the basic theme is logical, since it involves nothing else, clearly, than legitimizing or delegitimizing a philosophy on the basis of the political commitment of its author. In any case, this is the underlying tendency of the debate—or of the confrontation, since the “affair” in question often appears as such.

This is only an underlying tendency, since most of the time both sides are ready to distinguish between levels and to introduce some reservations. But the global effect has nonetheless remained, for about twenty years now, the following: a major philosopher was a Nazi, and his philosophy is therefore virtually contaminated in every respect; or else it is necessary to claim that he was not a Nazi, or just barely, and only as a blunder, if we wish to maintain intact the image of a thought as pure as the Greek dawn whose brilliance it rediscovered.

It seems to me that the debate, in this state, itself harbors a philosophical and historical error, and that it is time to pull ourselves away from it, for the stakes are important.

But I am not going to dismiss the parties summarily without distinguishing between their arguments. Indeed, the defense shows quite clearly how a certain piety can blind one or push one into denial according to the Freudian formula, “Oh, I know, but still.” The accusers, by contrast, take up the issues—except in a few rather crude cases—in a more frank and careful manner. Moreover, remarkable and penetrating analyses have been produced on this side, precisely because here the analysis has not been avoided on principle. Having said that, I do not want to go further into distinguishing and differentiating their works. Irrespective of persons, I would like to express my astonishment at this: Why is the question detached, or why does it appear to be detached, if not completely separated, from the condition of possibility, theoretical or historical, for such a grave political mistake on the part of such a philosopher?

(I note in passing that the same question should be posed with regard to Carl Schmitt, concerning whom we have recently seen sketched out the preludes of an analogous affair. These are certainly different cases, but they resemble one another.)

To pose the question in this way, we must first admit the political fault and at the same time the decisive importance of the thinker. From now on, I will argue on the basis of this double preliminary admission. The political fault cannot be disputed, nor can the importance of a philosophy whose mark is indelible, to say the least, on and through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Granel, and many others.

How is it that this philosophy could set out, in 1933, down the path of the Third Reich? We can focus our analysis on one central problem, itself political or rather of direct political significance: a certain idea of the “people.” We see clearly in Being and Time how the people come to take over from a “being-with” lost in anonymity and equivalence, in the undifferentiated mass that David Reisman would later call the “lonely crowd.” The “people” could appear then as if they bore the possibility of recapturing a history, which is different from an entropic and melancholic scattering of “individuals,” these countless mutilated multitudes of the modern world. More than anything else, Heidegger was sensitive to the modern turn—or fracture—of history (what constitutes the “modern” as such): the fact that history encountered its own obscuring without being able to return to the ahistorical modes represented by the diverse forms of continuity or eternity. (Rimbaud, the modern, already articulated for his time the desire for eternity.)

It will be objected, and rightly so, that the fascisms did not reopen any history but captured the technical and socioeconomic development of the modern in the immobile display of a dramatic and millenarian apotheosis. Heidegger quickly realized this, just as the Nazis realized that his discourse was hardly utilizable. However, Heidegger never stopped thinking stubbornly in a direction that would continue this initial vein. Why? One cannot get rid of this question without serious cost. And certainly not without all of us paying out of our own pockets.

I mean to say that no thought of this time—from Heidegger to us—has been able to recapture this question of history, but that everywhere around us today we can see it resurfacing and insisting, as the question of “democracy” or of the “world,” as the question of the “event” or of what is left or not of “revolution,” as the question of “sense” or of the “political”—all great signifiers of our aporias and our exigencies.

The question therefore is: What happened to history in the time of the fascisms? The answer is simple: it passed into the various forms of Marxism. The latter are thus characterized by a double disposition: of justice on the one hand, of history on the other. Between the two, there was a fissure, and perhaps this was already there with Marx. We can say, roughly, that justice was Kantian and history was Hegelian. Not only was there no conjunction, but history had become even more mechanical and anonymous than in Hegel himself. The “cunning of reason” was being given free rein. This is indeed what made up the intimate drama of so many thinkers for whom Marxism took a turn of thwarted desire (Benjamin and Bataille represent this most clearly). One could sum up thus: the crushing of the Spartakists in 1919–20 had its double or its symptom in an impasse encountered by the philosophies of history.

This is also what weighed upon the thought of those who began to form the Frankfurt School, since the foundation of the Institute by Horkheimer in 1923 (which is also the year when Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness appeared). In those years, Marcuse, under the supervision of Heidegger, was writing his thesis, Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity. But Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia was already published in 1918, and it is possible to view the contrasts between these directions of thought as revealing the oppositions between an autonomous, mechanical or organic history, progressive without a subject, and the postulation of a subject who was not only the agent, but actually the effective term, here and now, of the march of history. History—history as actualization, as event, as what comes and arises [le venir et le survenir]—indeed no longer had any rightful heirs. Husserl, the least suspect of all the non-Marxists, still spoke in his lectures of 1935 of a “self-actualization” and a “self-illumination” of reason as the infinite movement of its progress. In 1935, Wittgenstein traveled in the Soviet Union and Freud was working on his Moses and Monotheism, which he called a “historical novel.” Civilization and Its Discontents appeared in 1930. This gives an emblematic picture of the situation.

Of course, I do not wish to deny that there were those who opted for immediate struggle, those who were sent into exile (but they did not return from it with another history), and those who implacably denounced the infamy. The question to which I would like to limit my conclusion is precisely that of denunciation.

Denunciation is necessary. But so is enunciation. Heidegger enunciated a problem, and all his thought—on “being,” “technics,” or the “poem”—was a struggle with this problem. The stubborn or even obtuse obstinacy of this visceral reactionary is only the most visible face of a tenacity of thought that did not want to give up on this knot that I have called “history.” The fact that he ended up evoking “a god,” as we know—even this cannot be denounced without remainder. It was the terse and sharp statement of another aporia—but what matters above all is that this aporia or this knot is ours. This splinter falls into our garden. Whether it pleases us or not, we are concerned by it, for here before us, with or without Heidegger, history both continues to break apart and is happening once again.

28 February 2003