There was one who was “the one,” his wife, Elfride. And then there were others, so many others. Still, it is surprising to learn that, right to the end, the thinker of Messkirch and of the mountain cabin had so many of them, and seduced them so quickly, as soon as he met them. From eksistence to epectasy.1 At eighty-one, “in Augsburg where he had a rendezvous” (315), he suffered a stroke, and Elfride would write on the back of his last letter to her: “His collapse there brought everything out into the open—afterward we were never separated again” (314). Is this ridiculous or tragic?
The two of them loved each other, at any rate, in the sense that Elfride was the home, the place where one is born to oneself, or, in other words, to one’s work, and where one dies. Work, family, home: Aufgabe, Leben, Heimat. Marriage, from engagement to death, was to be pursued as a “genuine, human” task (84), as far removed from the cliché of the happy marriage as it was from the abominable bourgeois marriage; it was a question of the Ur-, the primordial, the originary; it was—a metonymy, not a metaphor—a “home that was founded through our marriage,” which “remains the point to which everything is related for both good and ill” (230), with the unrelenting rhythm of birthdays (“One of the greatest gifts is that perhaps in the autumn I’ll be speaking in your homeland from the realm of my homeland” [273]). A home is something one goes away from and to which one returns, the old trope of nostos. Heidegger would be there very rarely. He was away giving courses and lectures; he was with other people, his brother Fritz, for example, cleaning up his texts for publication; he was, above all, away in one place of solitude or another, thinking. The only letter from Elfride, which she never sent him but wanted to be kept with Martin’s, is dated June 1956 and reflects the danger commensurate with the seriousness of an affair he was having (with young Marielene) that really disturbed her: “You look for ‘home’ in other women—oh Martin—what is happening to me?” (255). Home, the real danger, namely, the fact that what serves as the language of love for them, she says, are “empty words—hollow words” (255), to fend off guilt and contrition with an indestructible shield every time he was unfaithful.
Was she an ordinary woman, then, in an ordinary marriage, who gave up everything, abandoning her education, becoming a homemaker and having children, “a resting place [he wrote her] when I return tired from the distant land of the great questions” (14), with “a kind of womanly…participation” (83)? “I should like to thank you for your collaboration. After all—along with the phenomenological critique—this involves just what is hardest: renouncing and waiting & believing” (101). And so that’s that, with the self-same sexism, the Little and the Great.
But the Little, it would seem, wielded power over the Great. That is suggested by the extremely frequent use of the adjective little as soon as it comes to a woman, starting, of course, with the canonical expression used for Elfride, “my dear little soul,” “Mein liebes Seelchen!”2 in which the diminutive is already part of the German noun. The fact that women were ranked with the Little, at least as far as the force of adjectivized signifiers is concerned, seems, moreover, to be a typical feature of the time. One cannot fail to be struck by the constant use of that same diminutive in Sartre’s letters from the years 1926 to 1939, which were selected, of course, by his life partner Simone de Beauvoir.3 To Simone Jollivet he wrote: “My dear little girl”; to Louise Védrine, “My dear little Polack…” And even Simone de Beauvoir, usually honored with the rather odd “My darling Beaver,” had to put up with things like “My dear little morganatic wife” or “I kiss you again, my little one” or “this dear little person.” We’ll come back to this Franco-German comparison later. But it is certainly to Heidegger’s credit that nothing resembling this sort of flirtatious paternalism can be found in his letters to Hannah Arendt, even, or especially, when he describes her as “the young girl who, in a raincoat, her hat low over her…eyes,” her gaze (he emphasizes) supremely quiet, “entered my office for the first time…”4 Perhaps owing to the tension in that love affair and the surprising length of time it lasted, it was resistant to being understood in terms of the Little.
But such was not usually the case, and especially not in their marriage.
Except that there was another surprise—a real shocker, even—for anyone interested in this. The very brief afterword to the correspondence, written in 2005 by Hermann Heidegger, the younger son and executor of Heidegger’s work, “on the 112th anniversary of the birthday of our mother and grandmother” (317), was tantamount to a coming out: “Born in 1920 as the legitimate son of Martin and Elfride Heidegger, at the age of just 14 I was told by my mother that my natural father was a friend from her youth, my godfather, Dr. Friedel Caesar, who died in 1946” (317). Martin and Elfride were married in 1917, Jörg was born in January 1919 and Hermann in August 1920.
Elfride was no doubt already, as she would always be from then on, neither the same person nor an entirely different one; nor was Heidegger entirely the same. “That Friedel loves you I’ve known for a long time” (64), he replied to her in September 1919. “Let’s leave everything to the greater course of our marriage” (65), “I trust you & your love with the distinctive certainty that my own love for you has—even if I don’t understand everything—& cannot fathom the source from which your manifold love draws its sustenance” (65). The new baby was greeted lovingly, with a freedom of tone and a new kind of transparency enlivening the language in the letters as well. Here, too, in an extremely difficult situation, Heidegger should be given credit for the fact that the multipurpose emotionalism with which, unlike Sartre, he emphatically dignified her affair, rather than shamefully disparaging it, did not preclude a certain sober eloquence. Indeed, there is only one other reference, thirty-seven years later, to that open trust, to request the same from her: “Trust is strength in the affirmation of what is concealed…Thus was my yes back then when you told me about Hermann” (252). On this particular occasion, Heidegger was hoping to install himself in the unconcealment of his multifaceted emotional life.
But this wasn’t the rule. It wasn’t really a question of telling her everything about the women he met, even if secrecy was undignified, because “the question of truth & lies isn’t that simple” (254). What we who read these letters that weren’t addressed to us chiefly see is the other women’s complementary function vis-à-vis “the one.” It would probably not be all that hard to establish a typology of these women: they were either students or princesses, exceedingly young ones as he got older. Sometimes they were both student and princess at once, as was Margot von Sachsen-Meiningen, who took his courses in 1942 and was his fixed point of happiness during the war, the woman about whom he would say, albeit only later on and in connection with another woman—Sophie Dorothée von Podewils—that she had been able to make him forget about Elfride. The other women, like “the one,” were first and foremost able to be related to his task: complementarity, complicity, and revival of the spiritual through the carnal, which was the sign of progress in his thinking. God and the female saint, on the one hand; the gods, the demons, the Devil—in short, Eros, the oldest of the gods—on the other: “The beat of that god’s wings moves me every time I take a substantial step in my thinking and venture onto untrodden paths” (1950, 213). With the exception being Arendt, since it was with reference to her that he spoke about Eros that way, although she, too, was a saint.5 This exception can be heard at the time of their reunion in the 1950s, when, for example, the sixty-one-year-old Heidegger wrote to the woman who was his essential lover: “But I often wish I could run the five-fingered comb through your frizzy hair, especially when your loving picture looks straight into my heart.”6 The sheer spontaneity in evidence here is something to marvel at.
The unbearable moment is obviously when the only thing that can be heard is instrumentality, as in this strange letter from 1958 in which “your w. Bl.7—white but not yet wise” (267) thanks Elfride on behalf of Dory Vietta and Hildegard Feick (yes, each of them has a name) and uses the “neutrality” of these two women who work with and for him to converse with himself.
One has to wonder here what the word saint, in contrast to that instrumentality, means in the speech or writing of Martin Heidegger, when he uses it about the woman he has just slept with, be it Elfride or Hannah.
Several interpretations. For example:
1. She gives herself, and the free gift is akin to charity.
2. But why on earth would it be free? She closes her eyes like Bernini’s Saint Teresa; she is beautiful and innocent in jouissance like the Holy Virgin; she is a virgin in her jouissance. Woman’s jouissance is holy. Regardless of whether she comes or not, they are both ways of being a saint.8
3. You make her your ally, you implore her, in order to use her with impunity, and, to your surprise, you realize that she’s even more of a virgin? She accepts for her body to be used and emerges from the experience immaculate?
4. She blesses you? You make her your ally and place yourself under her protection in a quasi-magical or superstitious way? You’re little and she’s great?
5. She is your tabernacle and through her you are good like God? Great like God.
6. That’s called immediate sublimation.
At a time when Heidegger and Elfride were apprehensive about the churches and the union of a Catholic man and a Protestant woman, which went against the societal-family order, the sanctity [sainteté] of the rite proved this fear to be groundless. It had to be sacred in order for it to be acceptable and justifiable outside the order.
But then why did Hannah also have to be a saint? The order at that time was marriage and the Elfridic home. Did she have to be a saint to justify the irruption of another, no less passionate, love: how can you say no to sacred enthusiasm?
But of what societal and libidinal fears, of what narcissistic sadomasochism is the adjective saintly the name? Of what is saint the name? Of a beyond of instrumentality as a possible category of the female body? Or of the impossibility of facing up even just a little to the fact that there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship, even with/for a philosopher?
Barbara Cassin’s hypotheses all seem legitimate and feasible. One can perhaps say, and this merely sums them up, that saint is a translation, fitting to the place and period, of the fact that the female body—as it gives itself over in the sex act and assuming that there is a touch of love in all Heidegger’s affairs (and Alain Badiou trusts him on this)—can only appear as a miracle, as the incredible real of a glorious body. And it is all the more glorious in that its uncovering is more hidden, more unexpected, in the ordinary sphere of the visible. Now, in the world of religious tradition, the essential attribute of male and female saints is the performance of miracles; it is even on this, as it were, material, basis, requiring investigations and witnesses, that for a very long time men and women were canonized. Any woman can be declared a saint insofar as any woman is capable of at least one miracle, her amorous nudity. Psychoanalysis has established that this miracle occurs when the female body constitutes the entire real of the Phallus, the key to the symbolic order. Women’s unconcealment “real-izes”—let me venture that term—the symbolic order as a whole. So let’s conclude that the use of religious vocabulary is only a proleptic transcription of the well-known statement “Girl is Phallus,” which means that you ultimately get the formula: “Female Saint = Phallus,” a formula that is not applicable to the male saint.