Heidegger, especially in France, is the subject, or the stakes, of an ongoing debate. Its focus is clearly the presumable relationship between the philosophical works that made the name Heidegger a major reference point for the whole of twentieth-century thought and the ideological and institutional commitments that, at least in the early 1930s, or even until the end of World War II, coupled that name with National Socialist politics and/or the Nazi state, even though the philosopher never had the courage to explain himself, whatever his private conviction may have been, in the years that followed.
This debate would have remained at a basic level, as was long the case, if it had simply established that a philosopher, however great she or he may be, can be utterly wrong in areas whose reality we know full well cannot be reduced to the philosopher’s conception of it. It is not hard to come up with a sort of blooper collection of falsifiable convictions and questionable positions in the history of philosophy. When we recall what was said about women by Rousseau, Kant, or Comte; about Africans by Hegel and so many others; about the Germans by Leibniz or Fichte; about solid-state physics by Descartes or Malebranche; about slaves by Aristotle; about epic or lyric poetry by Plato; or about sexuality by Schopenhauer or Aquinas, we can no longer ask any philosopher to have a respectable position on every single subject. This just means that philosophy is a distinctive kind of activity whose unavoidable relationship with a sort of encyclopedic desire also happens to be the privileged site of errancy.
The debate might also have remained bounded, in a way, by metapolitical considerations, at the heart of which is the uneasy relationship between political action and the philosophical category of truth, or the Absolute. Constructing its concept of truth as antithetical to opinions, philosophy, in its main current, does not readily accept that politics seeks to operate with the total freedom of those opinions and thus purports to evade the authority of the True, hence the authority of philosophy. This leads to the well-known comment Hannah Arendt made in 1969, at the very same time as she publicly expressed her extreme admiration for Heidegger: “Theoretically, the tendency to the tyrannical can be detected in almost all great thinkers […].”1 This comment lumps Heidegger and Plato together, which is by no means a mere condemnation, even in Hannah Arendt’s eyes: “When they got involved in human affairs, both Plato and Heidegger resorted to tyrants and führers,” she further wrote, quite rightly condemning that course of action as “disgraceful” but seeing in it, by the same token, the confirmation-by-negation of the fact that Heidegger was indeed part of the chain of “great thinkers.” These great thinkers, Hannah Arendt essentially says—with the exception of the skeptics and Kant, that cleverly disguised skeptic—would be better off refraining from any involvement “in human affairs,” where it is not absolute truth that prevails but opinion, related as always to the diverse nature of being-together. In any case, it is not his withdrawal into thought and the major body of work that resulted from it, his “contemplative life,” of which Heidegger can be found guilty, but only of the fact that he felt he had to cloak in opaque phraseology, in which he compromised some of his concepts, his circumstantial fascination with action and power, when the occasion for that involvement was clearly criminal.
• Barbara Cassin questions whether “circumstantial” shouldn’t be replaced by “essential” here, given that no “great thinker” is willing to forgo the absurd phrase “political philosophy.” A distinction needs to be made between the idea that “great thinkers don’t have respectable positions on every single subject, which is only to be expected” and another idea, undoubtedly Hannah Arendt’s, which could be expressed as “no great thinker can be politically respectable,” precisely because the categories of “the contemplative life” are radically inadequate when it comes to political action. The exception for her would be Aristotle at least as much as Kant. But does that exception prove the rule? Or does it prove that there are great thinkers who are also great political thinkers because they possess judgment and taste? The division here is the same as that established by Aristotle in Thales’ case: he was sophos but not phronimos, wise and sage but not prudent, when he cornered the market on olive presses and instituted the first monopoly capitalism. Except that the fortune Thales then made only took on meaning in response to the laughter of the Thracian servant girl who made fun of the philosopher when he fell into a well as he was observing the stars to predict the weather. Thales wanted to prove to her (it was an epideixis, a performance, as much as a demonstration) that meteorology, a part of sophia, can enable you to make a bundle, provided you want to, something that the prudent, and thus truly wise, philosopher couldn’t care less about. For both Arendt and Aristotle, any man worthy of the name must be phronimos. And when the thinker gets involved in human affairs, his sophia, as such and alone, lacks prudence and practical wisdom.
• Alain Badiou agrees with Barbara Cassin that the phrase political philosophy is absurd, but for opposite reasons. Politics, provided it’s not reducible to the mere management of affairs, is a truth procedure in its own right, concerning the capacities for collective and organized action and, as such, has no need for philosophy (any more than nuclear physics, for example, or lyrical abstraction, or pre-Islamic love poetry do). The relationship between philosophy and politics in no way entails a “political philosophy” but rather a transformation—subject to the (always problematic and in any case rare) existence of political sequences—of certain philosophical concepts, in particular those associated with the relationship between “truth” and “multiplicity,” in the mediation of the existence of a collective Subject. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with “judgment” or “taste,” any more than it does, incidentally, in politics properly speaking, which involves protocols of decision and organization in which the leading role is played not by the spectator, of course, but by the militant. The fact that when philosophers “get involved in human affairs,” as Hannah Arendt puts it, they are just like everyone else, is self-evident. Do we require a philosopher who speaks about poetry to be a good poet or even to be a first-rate mathematician if she or he speaks about mathematics? Heidegger’s properly political commitment, if measured against his philosophy, was therefore “circumstantial.” For Hannah Arendt herself, we should note, this type of commitment is fundamentally different from the “withdrawal” in which philosophical concepts are reflected upon. As regards Heidegger, moreover, the components of his basic philosophy existed long before his Nazi political activism and therefore could not derive in any “essential” way from it. The way in which Kant and Aristotle deal with politics is much closer, unfortunately for them, to a “political philosophy”: pragmatic, expedient, indeed irrelevant, and helplessly reduced to mere “judgment” because it is focused on the narcissistic idea that “what’s good is the middle class,” a class that never has any autonomous political capacity. Utterly different from this is the (quite simply) philosophical vision governing the retroactive relationship with politics, of Plato, who is only concerned with perfecting his concept of the Idea; or of Hegel, seeking a dialectic of totality; or of Heidegger, who philosophically reconstructs History, including the history of political sequences, as the historiality of Being.2
• Barbara Cassin adamantly refuses to absolve Heidegger of his Nazism by way of a potentially ambiguous Arendtian kind of leniency, on account of philosophy understood as being inherently irrelevant to politics. But that philosophy should in one way or another constitute itself as the metalanguage of the political, that ontology (Being, Truth), like ethics (the Good), for that matter, should purport to define politics, in short, that politics should have to be considered from the perspective of truth—this is what seems dangerous to her, as it did to Arendt, dangerous, from Plato to Heidegger and Badiou. That is why Alain Badiou is clearly right to stress that, in the generic case of Heidegger, the derivation cannot start from the political and that it was there before any Nazism: Heidegger holds (and this applies to himself mutatis mutandis) that it is only because the Greeks were an essentially apolitical people, that is, a people linked to Being, that they ultimately could and had to found the polis. Yet, for one thing, that’s wrong—Homer, tragedy, sophism, and even the Aristotelian definition of man as an animal endowed with logos, each in its own way proves as much. And, for another, it’s dangerous, and Barbara Cassin has no desire to believe that “where danger is, grows the saving power also.”3 This is why she maintains that, in her eyes, the problem isn’t the militant but the militant philosopher.
In France in particular, the controversy surrounding Heidegger couldn’t be contained within the kind of reasonable confines that this type of debate, which is ultimately regulated by an assumed distinction between philosophy and politics, involves. We can’t go into all the reasons here for this (as usual dubious) “French exception.” One thing, however, is very clear: the whole of French philosophical production between the 1930s and the 1970s, which it would not be an exaggeration to say was world renowned and at times dominant, had a fundamental, even if critical, relationship with Heidegger’s project. Suffice it to mention, to confine ourselves to those who are no longer alive, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lautman, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Lacoue-Labarthe (with Deleuze being the exception, something that actually provides food for thought) to understand what this means. To attack Heidegger with the utmost ferocity was also, and even above all, to settle scores with that glorious period of philosophy, a time when there was a strong relationship between intellectual work and revolutionary politics in all its forms. There was a petty, vindictive aspect, combined, as is often the case, with a reactionary impulse, to the delight that some critics took in ferreting out the thinker’s worst faults. The fact remains that, here in France, it was the extreme positions of the debate that gradually crystallized into the only relevant ones. On one side were the thinker’s devotees, who categorically denied that anything in his life any more than in his philosophy was in any way connected with Nazism. On the other side were those who held that Heidegger was a thoroughgoing ideologue of Nazism or even the overt and covert inspirer of its worst aspects. In their opinion, as a result, he is completely discredited as a philosopher and should be removed from the academic curriculum in every democratic country. To make clear what was involved, let us just mention the diehard defense counsel François Fédier and the ruthless prosecutor Emmanuel Faye.4
Once can note here the traditional point in common, which the laws of the dialectic always require us to discern between two extreme positions, namely, the characterization of the object of the controversy as indivisible. For one group of people, it is necessarily in his totality that the thinker dominated his century, and he therefore cannot have been involved in either the abjection or the crimes of his times. For the other group, it is also in his totality that the Nazi thoroughly destroyed his claim to philosophy. Doesn’t Emmanuel Faye think that Heidegger’s project can be defined as “the introduction of Nazism into philosophy?” That’s a bit like defining Plato as the introduction into philosophy of a Sicilian type of fascism—which, by the way, is pretty much Karl Popper’s position.
• Barbara Cassin then raises the question: Sicilian fascism or the philosopher-king? Nazism or the history of the meaning of being (hence Gelassenheit, the pervasive serenity of the existential shepherd, and Selbstbehauptung, the self-assertion of the German university). Which is Arendt’s real accusation? We shouldn’t end up in the position of the valet de chambre.5 The truth of the matter is that we should consider each philosopher or thinker as uniquely fractal. But if we subsume him or her under the One, then he or she should be regarded in terms of his or her greatest One, and the critics should be granted the possibility that this indeed is the way he or she is.
• Alain Badiou points out that Hannah Arendt herself speaks about Plato’s (and Heidegger’s) involvement in “human affairs” and therefore refers to precise circumstances, the nature of which, in her own opinion, is heterogeneous to everything called for by the philosopher’s “withdrawal.” She maintains that everything Heidegger (or Plato) was able to achieve in the context of such a withdrawal was crucial for the history of thought. In her opinion, Heidegger was the key philosopher of the twentieth century. It would thus be incompatible with Arendt’s view to look for traces, or even proofs or reflections, of his empirical commitment to Nazism in all his concepts. Likewise, there is no valid deduction or natural transition between the education of Plato’s guardians—the figure of the communism of the Idea or the figure of philosophy as the subjective form befitting a community worthy of the name (i.e., freed from the principle of self-interest)—on the one hand, and the attempt to become the intellectual adviser to the man he hoped might become an enlightened despot in Sicily on the other. It is as if one were to seek in Diderot’s concepts a way of (re)thinking his flirtation with Catherine the Great and were to end up concluding that he was a philosopher of serfdom. If active politics is intrinsically different from conceptual philosophy, an axiom ostensibly shared by Arendt and Badiou,6 then judgments along the lines of “great thinkers are not politically respectable” are a matter of “political philosophy” since they purport to describe a political behavior on the basis of the being-philosopher.
This principle of indivisibility is always characteristic of extremism because it merges the One and the Whole: the unity of Heidegger’s thought has to be identical to the whole of his writings, thoughts, passing whims, acts, and statements. All you have to do, then, is isolate one point of the Whole to stand for this unity, since it is ubiquitous. Consequently, for one side in the debate, the manifest importance and grandeur of one text or another of Heidegger’s makes it impossible for some stupid or horrible things he said or did to be given any consideration, while, for the other side, his having been a candidate for the rectorship under the Nazis and having made some crude anti-Semitic remarks make it impossible for the novelty and force of the fundamental themes of his philosophical oeuvre to be appreciated.
It is true that philosophers, carried away by a legitimate, and even necessary, speculative enthusiasm, often need to be reminded that the One of their thinking is not the same as the Whole of possible truths. All the more reason not to judge their work on the basis of the equation One = Whole, which is responsible for the devastating, hopeless conflict between two forms of extremism: devotion and destruction.
Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou, for their part, have always thought that this clash of titans was off the mark. The reader should bear in mind that their respective positions in the field of philosophy lend weight to the fact that, on this particular issue, they are in agreement. It is actually difficult to imagine positions that could be further apart, at least apparently, than that of a man who is a system builder envisaging a sort of contemporary Platonism and that of a woman inspired by the most subtle forms of linguistic pragmatism, who has restored to the Greek Sophists all their importance in the origins of our modernity. Add to this the fact that the man is firmly rooted in the tradition of the classics of Communist revolution, while the woman is exploring the new possibilities of a democracy of the multiple. Even as regards Heidegger’s status they don’t see eye to eye: one of them (Cassin), having attended Heidegger’s final seminars, accepts certain themes of the deconstruction of metaphysics and is basically geared toward a subversive supplementation, via the tradition of Gorgias, i.e., Heidegger grafted onto Parmenides; the other, having always remained aloof, convinced as he is that metaphysics can and must go on, nevertheless also regards Heidegger as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and shares both his concern for a thinking of being and his hostility toward the Sophists.
In a nutshell, you could say that Badiou is for ontology, or the thinking of being, while Cassin is for what she has termed logology, or the thinking of speech acts and performances.
Well, in these unlikely circumstances, Badiou and Cassin happen to think the same way about the Heidegger “affair.”
• Barbara Cassin then reflects: Only you (Alain) can refer to us as “Badiou and Cassin”; I can’t, of course, since I write as a woman and am unable, as a rule, to use a master’s discourse. Maybe that deserves a note or an introductory comment about our respective parts in this duet for four hands?
• Alain Badiou: Let’s grant Lacan that in the typology of the discourses the discourse of the hysteric (who demands knowledge and simultaneously rejects its authority in order to push it further) seems to coincide more readily with a female position than does the discourse of the master, who on his own authority establishes a fundamental signifier and seeks to ensure his control over all its consequences. As a result, speculative “masculinity” is vulnerable to dogmatism, while “femininity,” which is critical and performative, is vulnerable to the swirl of unfounded opinions. I naturally contend that, under the present circumstances, we have to hold fast to truths, their existence, and their effects, given that the circulation and communication of opinions are turning the most important of our intellectual fetishes, “freedom of opinion,” into the epitome of meaninglessness. Saying “Cassin and Badiou contend that” does in fact contrast, owing to a certain high-handedness, with the friendly, congenial, humble “Barbara Cassin and her friend and colleague Alain Badiou would be quite happy to maintain, along with other people, and easily imagining that the opposite could just as well be maintained, the point of view that…”
Their ultimately very simple position is that the following paradox must be accepted: yes, Heidegger was a Nazi, not a very important Nazi, just an ordinary one, a provincial petit-bourgeois Nazi, and yes, Heidegger is unquestionably one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.
It was with this view of things that, in 2007, Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou brought out, in the Éditions du Seuil’s series L’Ordre philosophique, of which they were the editors at the time, Heidegger’s letters to his wife, or at least the ones that had been published by their granddaughter Gertrud Heidegger, from an initial cut that was probably made by the Heidegger couple.
At the time, they wrote a preface for the book, entitled “On the Creative Correlation Between the Great and the Little,”7 in which they dealt not only with the paradox of the great philosopher who had gone astray in Nazism but also with one very striking aspect of the correspondence, namely, the great philosopher’s relationship with women—with his wife Elfride, naturally, but also with many other women whose lover he had been over the course of his long life. Here was the figure of a tormented yet indestructible couple, a provincial and German response, as it were, to the French and Parisian Sartre-Beauvoir couple.
After a number of legal battles, the preface was suppressed at the request of the executors of Heidegger’s estate, and the copies containing it that were still in circulation were pulped.
The preface, unlike the correspondence, belongs to us. We have decided to reissue it in an expanded and revised form because our position—still quite a minority one—on the “Heidegger affair” and, more generally, on the relationship between the finite life of philosophers and the latent infinity of their thought will not tolerate that kind of censorship, regardless of whether it issues from one or the other of the established positions or from the old alliance between family and property.
What follows, then, is the expanded version of our original preface.