Heidegger: His Life & His Philosophy

Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin’s Heidegger: His Life and His Philosophy began life as the introduction to the 2007 French edition of Martin Heidegger’s letters to his wife, Elfride, originally published in 2005 in German as Mein liebes Seelchen! Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride 1915–1970, and translated into French as Ma chère petite âme: Lettres de Martin Heidegger à sa femme Elfride 1915–1970. An English edition appeared in 2010 as Letters to His Wife: 1915–1970 (dropping the original’s “My Dear Little Soul,” Heidegger’s term of endearment for Elfride). After the Heidegger estate objected to Badiou and Cassin’s introduction and initiated legal action, the French publishers, Seuil, withdrew the volume. Badiou and Cassin decided to expand their introduction and publish it separately, and the result is this little book.

In its present form, separate from the volume of correspondence that it originally introduced, the book serves as Badiou and Cassin’s response to some key issues concerning Heidegger that emerge in and around the letters: Heidegger’s Nazism, his anti-Semitism, his relationships with women, and the relationship (or lack thereof) between philosophy and politics more generally. For the most part, the book is written in a single voice, but it is punctuated by “local disagreements,” where differences emerge between the two philosophers concerning Heidegger. Despite these disagreements, Badiou and Cassin agree about two basic questions: Heidegger was probably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century and he was a Nazi, although not an especially significant one. The issues on which they concur may not seem controversial, but in fact they define a careful middle path between the extreme positions held by a number of recent critics, especially in France, some who have denounced Heidegger’s philosophy as worthless, because saturated with his National Socialism, and others who minimize his involvement with the Nazi Party and refuse any connection between it and his philosophy. We might call such extreme positions synecdochal insofar as they isolate one aspect of Heidegger’s thought and take it to instantiate the whole, whether for better or worse. As Cassin puts it, Heidegger’s thinking, like that of all major philosophers, should be assumed to be “fractal”: every part is singular, infinitely nuanced, and solicits our always closer attention. We should neither reject Heidegger’s philosophy merely on account of his political activities nor refuse to take his politics into account when examining his philosophy

Neither Badiou nor Cassin can be called a Heideggerian, by any stretch of the imagination, but each has had a significant relationship with Heidegger’s work and, in Cassin’s case, with Heidegger himself. In 1969, when Cassin was in her early twenties, she was invited by François Fédier to participate in Heidegger’s small private seminar, hosted by the poet René Char in the town of Le Thor in the south of France. Describing her experience in the seminar in an interview with Nicolas Truong, Cassin remarks, “As Hannah Arendt said, before I was treated as a Jew, I didn’t know that I was one.”1 Cassin’s position in the seminar was no doubt complex: whereas her fellow seminarians may have assigned Cassin the rather familiar Arendtian role of the beautiful and brilliant Jewish philosopher, a local villager who saw her at breakfast with Heidegger spat at her for consorting with a notorious Nazi. For Cassin, the seminar’s dominant tension was a function of Char and Heidegger themselves: the effusive French poet and member of the Resistance, on the one hand, and the reserved German philosopher and member of the Nazi party, on the other. It was, we might say, the dialectic between them that provided the initial vector of Cassin’s later path through the history of philosophy by way of the poetic and rhetorical swerve of the Sophists, a path she calls, as distinct from ontology, logology.

Cassin describes the fundamental assumption of ontological philosophy in terms of what she calls the “decision on meaning,” in the expression that serves as a title for her translation of and commentary on Book Gamma (4) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.2 Aristotle establishes ontological reason or metaphysics there on the basis of the principle of noncontradiction, which in this context is the assertion that “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect,” which he calls “the most certain of all principles.”³ This principle cannot be demonstrated, Aristotle writes, but must be assumed. Those who believe there is some other more basic principle, however, can be refuted by negative demonstration, but only if they are willing to argue, that is, to speak; for the person who refuses to engage in reasonable discourse is, in a line that Cassin returns to frequently, “no better than a mere plant.” Thus the possibility of either accepting or rejecting this foundational metaphysical assertion depends on a theory of human communication; as Aristotle continues, “The starting-point for all such arguments…[is] that he shall say something which is significant both for himself and for another.” The principle of noncontradiction requires the assumption of linguistic stability, that a word means the same thing for two different people or for one person at two different times. Aristotle excludes speaking for other reasons—e.g., to persuade, to equivocate, or just for the pleasure of speaking—as mere sophistry; indeed to speak in such a way is to be not fully human, no better than a “plant.” What Cassin calls logology (a term she borrows from Novalis) begins with the assumption that language is not primarily an act of communication, but a performance: rather than describing something, language first of all does or makes something in a world. If Heidegger led Cassin to investigate the pre-Socratics, Char’s influence gave her some poetic distance from the ontology that Heidegger developed from them. It is the “subversive supplementation” of Heidegger with the Sophists—and their rhetorical excess of meaning—that allows Cassin to align herself with Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics without, for that, becoming a Heideggerian.

Whereas Heidegger serves as a point of departure for Cassin’s theory of logology (both a beginning and a mark of her difference from that beginning), for Badiou Heidegger is more like a fellow explorer through the realm of ontology, one, however, who blazes an entirely different trail.4 There are some clear points of agreement between them—for example, their hostility toward sophistry, their insistence on the distinction between truth and knowledge, and of course the primacy for each of the question of being—but finally Badiou’s understandings of ontology and truth have little in common with Heidegger’s. In the very first statement of Being and Event, Badiou grants that “Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher” today—but we may wonder if this is merely an acknowledgment of the undeniable status of Heidegger’s work or a more pointed comment about the Heideggerian limitations of contemporary philosophy.⁵ Badiou continues, “With Heidegger, I will claim that it is from the angle [du biais] of the ontological question that the re-qualification of philosophy as such can be sustained” (translation modified). For Heidegger, ontological difference is the essence of philosophy and must be retrieved from its metaphysical obfuscation. But Badiou’s account of the relationship of ontology and philosophy is crucially different: for Badiou, ontology is neither the foundation nor the essence of philosophy, but the angle or direction from which philosophy emerges and from which it must be approached in order to be “re-qualified” in its own distinctive terms. Badiou’s project receives its direction from ontology, but only on the way to philosophy itself. For Badiou, being is multiple (“there is no One”), a multiple of multiples whose substance is the void, hence ontology is entirely the work of mathematics. This leaves philosophy free to pursue its own work, which involves the elaboration in a particular historical situation or world of the compossibility of philosophy’s four conditions—science, art, politics, and love—and the four distinct types of truths they produce.

Early in Being and Event, Badiou expresses admiration for Heidegger as “the first to subtract [truth] from knowledge” (3), and, as we said, a distinction between knowledge and truth—albeit not the same distinction that Heidegger makes—is key for Badiou as well. Heidegger retrieves from the pre-Socratics a notion of truth as the self-“unconcealing” (aletheia) of beings or being as such, an unconcealing that always emerges in relation to its fundamental concealedness. For Heidegger, this pre-Socratic account of the truth of being was forgotten when Plato placed truth under the authority of the Idea and relegated appearing to the status of lack of being. According to Heidegger, Plato’s notion of “truth” is not concerned with the nature of beings themselves, but refers to a function of judgment involving the comparison between a representation and a thing by means of a concept. This “metaphysical” account of truth as conceptual mediation will finally become, according to Heidegger, knowledge as technicity in modern epistemology and science. For Badiou, however, truth is neither classical adequatio (which he insists is not to be associated with Plato) nor the Heideggerian account of the unconcealedness of being, but an activity or process of elaboration of the consequences of the interruption or decompletion of being by what he calls an event. And whereas for Heidegger mathematics is part of the metaphysical history of the forgetting of being, a scientistic mode of knowledge as “calculation,” with no access to truth, for Badiou mathematics models both the ontological unfolding of being and the opportunities for transformation that emerge from being’s evental suspension. Badiou’s project involves unbinding “the Heideggerian connection between being and truth” and instead demonstrating the connection between truth and the subject, which, he writes, is a “fragment of the process of a truth,” a local instantiation of a larger collective truth procedure (15). For Heidegger, human being or Dasein is distinctive in being localized “there,” in a world, as the site of the question of being; the subject, on the other hand, is a fundamentally metaphysical category, hypostasized by its relationship to objects in the world. Badiou’s subject is like Dasein insofar as it also implies a “localization,” but whereas, for Heidegger, Dasein is the localization of being (the being-there) in a world, for Badiou, the subject is the localization of a truth. If, for Badiou, truth constitutes a hole in knowledge, an indiscernible and generic set of elements that is inexistent as far as conventional knowledge is concerned, we might say that the subject is the localization of that hole. Unlike Dasein, the Badiouian subject is not merely “in” a world, but enacts the torsion through which one world transforms into another.6

Badiou’s most sustained account of his difference with Heidegger in Being and Event comes in Meditation 11, “Nature: Poem or Matheme?,” where he discusses Heidegger’s claim that the metaphysical forgetting of being begins with Plato’s repudiation of poetry in favor of mathematical and dialectical reason. Badiou agrees with Heidegger that the poem is an absolutely originary thought, the letting be of appearing; but he insists that it is certainly not unique to Greece (occurring also in China, India, and elsewhere) and that it does not constitute the essence of the Greek philosophical event. As Badiou writes, “The Greeks did not invent the poem. Rather, they interrupted the poem with the matheme.”7 And this is the crucial difference: for Heidegger, being is originally unconcealed by poetry and then forgotten by the metaphysical tradition established by Plato on the model of mathematical reason; for Badiou, ontology is determined as mathematics in the same gesture whereby Plato relegates poetry to the status of a (problematic) condition of, and rival to, philosophy. In the very last passages of Being and Event, Badiou suggests that this reassignment of the work of ontology to mathematics leads to a completely new account of the history of philosophy, one undetermined by the horizon of metaphysics or its deconstruction: “It is possible to reinterrogate the entire history of philosophy, from its Greek origins on, according to the hypothesis of a mathematical regulation of the ontological question. One would then see a continuity and a periodicity unfold quite different to that deployed by Heidegger” (435). This new history of philosophy would retrieve fragments of the truths that emerge in the decompletion of being in the wake of events, and elaborate the infinite possibilities of their localization in new subjectivities.⁸ Such a history would emerge from the “angles,” so to speak, of Euclid, Archimedes, Brahmagupta, Fermat, Euler, Riemann, Cantor, Gödel, Cohen, and many others, but it would not be a history of mathematics.

The primary point of “controversy” between Cassin and Badiou concerns Heidegger’s relationship with politics and, more generally, the relationship between politics and philosophy. In their joint text, Cassin and Badiou describe Heidegger’s “fascination with [political] action and power” as “circumstantial”—but Cassin immediately demurs, wondering whether in fact Heidegger’s investment in political power and its disjunction from his philosophical thinking was actually “essential.” Cassin refers to a position she attributes to Hannah Arendt (who will remain a central point of reference throughout for both Cassin and Badiou) that, as a rule, great thinkers are not politically respectable: in Aristotle’s distinction, they may possess sophia, wisdom, but lack phronesis, political savvy or prudence. And Badiou, for his part, agrees with Cassin that “political philosophy” is a “meaningless category,” although for quite different reasons: for Badiou, it is not that politics and philosophy involve incommensurable modes of knowledge (phronesis and sophia), but that only politics is a “truth procedure,” the investigation and elaboration of the consequences of an evental rupture of being. Philosophy assists politics, by describing and evaluating the truths it produces, but it produces no truths of its own, whether as sophia or phronesis. Politics has no need of philosophy, since it is completely absorbed in the protocols of decision, organization, and activism through which it constitutes political truths. So for Badiou there is no essential connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his political activities, it is indeed only “circumstantial.” And Cassin, for her part, insists that Badiou’s account of politics as a truth procedure is precisely the problem in Plato and Heidegger as well; she agrees that Heidegger’s philosophy does not “derive” from his politics, but warns of the danger that arises when the philosopher engages in political speculation and brings with him the self-righteous conviction of truth. Nevertheless, for Cassin what she calls “the informing of the political by philosophy” remains problematic and must be distinguished from political phronesis.

Another distinction between Badiou and Cassin’s approaches to Heidegger involves sexual difference and discourse. Badiou and Cassin write from their positions as “a man who is a system builder” and “a woman who is inspired by the most subtle forms of linguistic pragmatism”—but these characterizations, even if presented in a collective voice, sound, to my ear, more like Badiou than Cassin: the “we” remains a heterogeneous mixture of two subjects. Moreover sexual difference is, of course, not symmetrical; Cassin suggests that, writing as a woman, she cannot easily assume a “master’s discourse” that would speak as if from outside their respective positions. And Badiou grants that they may indeed speak (or write), to use Lacan’s typology of discourses, as “master” on the one hand and “hysteric” on the other: the master speaks with authority, but risks dogmatism; the hysteric criticizes authority, but risks “the swirl of unfounded opinions.” Badiou continues by pointing out that this raises once again the question of truths, which must be supported, against the rising tide of “opinion.” So the difference between their positions can be understood equally as the ostensibly ungendered difference between ontology and logology or as the explicitly gendered difference between master and hysteric. Can we say, then, that from the perspective of the man the primary difference must (naturally) appear to be that between ontology and logology, whereas for the woman the primary difference is (obviously) that between man and woman? But perhaps this would already be to grant the sexual-discursive difference priority; wouldn’t it make just as much sense from the other perspective, insofar as the ontologist of the multiple would appear to be aligned with feminine multiplicity, and the logologist would seem to require supreme confidence in the authority of the master’s signifier?

Badiou and Cassin are well aware of the complex dynamics of sexual difference that informs Heidegger’s letters to his wife, which their own discourse cannot evade, and perhaps reflects in the distinction between ontology and logology. But finally these differences can be subsumed as variations on a yet more fundamental difference, which we find in the title of Badiou and Cassin’s original introduction to the French translation of the letters, “On the Creative Correlation Between the Great and the Little.”9 The asymmetry of the “Great” and the “Little” appears first of all in the original German title of the correspondence, in Heidegger’s term of endearment for Elfride, Seelchen, “little soul.” It appears throughout the letters in the flux between Heidegger’s sense of his “great” philosophical work and the innumerable “little” (even petty) academic struggles and quotidian obstacles that threaten to interfere with it. This is what is most fascinating about the correspondence, according to Badiou and Cassin: “it extends this matrix (the Little as the existential basis of the Great) to many other aspects of the thinker’s life,” allowing him to sustain contradictions between the work of philosophy and the facts of managing a Nazi university, between what he saw as the singular sanctity of his marriage with Elfride and his myriad affairs with increasingly younger women. This is, moreover, a question of critical perspective: how do we judge the relative magnitudes of Heidegger’s Nazism, his anti-Semitism, his sexism and sexual voracity, his philosophy? Does the “great” simply outweigh the “little”—render it negligible—or is the “little” itself the condition of the “great”—whether as the “existential basis” for conceptual sublimation or as the repressed, even the repudiated, that returns in distorted, distended forms? Finally Cassin and Badiou propose approaching these contradictions as “the relative yet all-important autonomy of separate categories, which allows for the universal power of a work to exist alongside the mediocrity of entire swaths of a life, without either of these categories being able to claim it is the truth of the other.” This is the most difficult task of acknowledging the contradiction as such, without trying to synthesize a perspective that accommodates or reduces it for the sake of a tenable position, “for” or “against” Heidegger. What’s more, the “autonomy” of these categories does not imply their unity; in separating the “great” philosopher from the “little” man, we should not attempt to see each category as itself simple or consistent, for each is riddled by its own series of scissions between the “great” and the “little,” blindness and insight, the extravagant and the parsimonious, the creative and the restrictive. Perhaps this is what it means to read as both a man and a woman, an ontologist and a logologist.