Heidegger: His Life & His Philosophy

2. Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy, La Décision du sens: Le livre Gamma de la Métaphysique d’Aristote, introduction, texte, traduction et commentaire (Paris: J. Vrin, 1989). Also see Cassin’s major work on sophistry, L’Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

3. Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1588.

4. Helpful accounts of the relationship of Badiou’s ideas to those of Heidegger can be found in Mark Hewson’s entry “Heidegger” in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, ed. A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens (Durham: Acumen, 2010). Also see Graham Harman’s essay “Badiou’s Relation to Heidegger in Theory of the Subject” in Badiou and Philosophy, ed. Sean Bowden and Simon Duffy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

5. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005), 1.

6. See Badiou’s distinction in Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009) between what he calls esplace (or the “space of placement” in a structured world) and horlieu, the “out-place” or “place as out-of-place” (15), whose topology compares with Lacan’s notion of extimité, or an intimate exteriority.

7. Badiou, Being and Event, 126.

8. In Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), Badiou elaborates his differences with Heidegger much more forcefully. Badiou describes Heidegger’s project as “sutured” to poetry, rather than maintaining the compossibility of all four of its conditions (art, politics, science, and love). Heidegger’s “stroke of genius” was to deconstruct the subject-object opposition, but he was only able to achieve this at the cost of “hand[ing] philosophy over to poetry.” Interestingly enough, for Badiou Heidegger’s suturing of philosophy to poetry comes from “following René Char,” whereas for Cassin Char serves as something of an antidote or counterweight to Heidegger (73–76). Comments on Heidegger and interesting parallels to Heidegger can be found throughout Badiou’s work (in particular, see Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology and Logics of Worlds), but more definitive work on this topic awaits the publication of Badiou’s 1986–1987 seminar, L’être 3. Figure du retrait: Heidegger (Paris: Fayard, forthcoming).

9. See chapter 1, note 5.

1. Hannah Arendt, text of a radio address (made on September 25, 1969) on Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, in Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters, 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz and trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 162. —Trans.

2. The word historial came into French as a translation for Heidegger’s term geschichtlich, from the noun Geschichte, which for Heidegger means roughly history as that which happens, in opposition to Historie as the study of past events. The term develops nuances over the course of Heidegger’s writing and their translations; for an account of these shifts, see Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, trans. Steven Rendell et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 391–94.

3. This phrase is from Hölderlin’s poem “Patmos”—“Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch”—quoted by Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 28. —Trans.

4. The defense of Heidegger can be found chiefly in François Fédier’s Heidegger: Anatomie d’un scandale (Paris: Laffont, 1988) and, more recently, in Heidegger, à plus forte raison (Paris: Fayard, 2007), a collection of essays edited by Fédier, who also wrote a foreword to the volume. For the opposite view, see, in particular, Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). —Trans.

5. Cassin is alluding here to Hegel’s comment in The Philosophy of History that the well-known proverb “No man is a hero to his valet “was true,” not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is a valet.” Similarly, she suggests that Heidegger is “fractal, and if we consider him to be bad through and through, it is perhaps because we are valets too.” He should instead be regarded as a text, “to which a principle of charity should be applied, as Arendt no doubt applied one to him, reading beneath the rector’s Nazism the complexity of philosophical notions that, however dubious, were still worthy of interest” (personal communication). —Trans.

6. Cassin here adds: “and by Cassin as well.” So with this agreement our local disagreement could end, but not the aspect of it that concerns the Platonic-Hei-deggerian position of dominance, and, literally, of the informing of the political by philosophy, as opposed to a position that she still calls Aristotelian-Arendtian.

7. The French title of the preface is “De la corrélation créatrice entre le Grand et le Petit” (my emphasis). I have for the most part rendered “petit(e)” as “little” throughout this translation, even when, as here, “small” might have sounded more natural. This was done in the interests of remaining consistent with the French text and particularly with the phrase that figures in the title of the book in French: ma chère petite âme (“my dear little soul”), Heidegger’s preferred form of address for his wife. As will become clear later on, the thrust of Badiou’s and Cassin’s argument depends on this as it were ur-“little” that I considered important to preserve in the English translation. See also chapter 5, note 2. —Trans.

1. Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, ed. Gertrud Heidegger, trans. R. D. V. Glasgow (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), xii. Page numbers from this edition will henceforth be given in parentheses. In a footnote, Badiou and Cassin say that the citations they use are from their own edition of the letters: Martin Heidegger, “Ma chère petite âme”. Lettres à sa femme Elfride, 1915–1970, trans. Marie-Ange Maillet (Paris: Seuil, 2007), which included the preface mentioned previously. —Trans.

2. The poet René Char (1907–1988), a member of the French Resistance in World War II, was greatly admired by Heidegger, who gave several seminars in the late 1960s in Le Thor, near Char’s home in the south of France. —Trans.

3. A specialist of Ancient Greece, the French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1932–2006) was a politically engaged intellectual who notably wrote about Holocaust denial, torture during the Algerian War, and the prospects for peace in the Middle East. —Trans.

4. When the poet Paul Celan (1920–1970), a Jew whose family had perished in the Holocaust, visited Heidegger at his mountain cabin in Todtnauberg in 1966, he signed the guest book there in a way that suggested he was hoping for a “word” from Heidegger, no doubt of explanation or apology for his Nazism, but no such word was forthcoming. —Trans.

5. In Being and Time Heidegger uses the example of an ordinary workman, a barrel maker (as his own father was), whose hammer suddenly breaks into pieces, jolting him out of his “everydayness” to experience “authentic” Being. —Trans.

6. See Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (London: Continuum, 2006). —Trans.

7. Hannah Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains,” interview with Günter Gaus in The Portable Hannah Arendt (London: Penguin, 2003), 13. —Trans.

8. A direct allusion to a famous line in Molière’s Tartuffe (“Cover that bosom which I cannot bear to see”) in which the imposter’s hypocrisy is comically glaring. —Trans.

9. This might be translated as “The German University in the Face of All Opposition.” Pierre Joris has condemned this French translation as “a transparent attempt to depoliticize and defuse the title of a text that poses major problems concerning its political intentions” (“Heidegger, France, Politics, the University,” http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/joris/heideggerfascism.html). “The Self-Affirmation of the German University,” as the speech is known in English, is a literal translation of the German title. —Trans.

10. Barbara Cassin can’t help but insist that authentic be underscored here.

11. The word hainamoration used in the French is a term of Lacan’s invention from his seminar Encore, rendered here in Bruce Fink’s translation. —Trans.

12. A German Jewish weekly newspaper that appeared from 1902 until 1938. —Trans.

13. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters, 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz and trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 52.

1. This is from the birthday letter from 1918, which was entitled “In the Thou to God” by Martin and donated to the German Literature Archive in Marbach by Elfride. On the back of it she wrote: “From a letter from Martin of 1918, the model for all his love letters to his many ‘loves.’”

2. See Étienne Gilson, Choir of Muses, trans. Maisie Ward (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953). —Trans.

3. “I often think about what I promised you early on: that the work in which I deal specifically with Plato’s thought is to be yours. If the world stays reasonably in order and I stay alive & keep my strength up, this work will one day be written” (212): letter of February 14, 1950 (one week after Hannah Arendt’s visit to Freiburg), the only one beginning Meine liebe Frau (My dear wife).

1. Epektasis, a term originally used by Gregory of Nyssa, describes “the soul’s eternal movement into God’s infinite being,” as J. Warren Smith explains in “John Wesley’s Growth in Grace and Gregory of Nyssa’s Epectasy: A Conversation in Dynamic Perfection,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 85, nos. 2–3 (2003): 348. —Trans.

2. While that phrase appears as “My dearest Soul” in the English edition of the letters, I have chosen to translate it as “My dear little soul,” which takes into account, as the French translation does, the diminutive included in the German noun Seelchen. —Trans.

3. The phrase femme légitime, used here to refer to Simone de Beauvoir, is less problematic in French, which makes no distinction between “woman” and “wife,” than in English. As Simone de Beauvoir was not Sartre’s lawful wife, she is frequently described in English as his “life partner,” with an implied sense of legitimacy. —Trans.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939, ed. Simone de Beauvoir and trans. L. Fahnestock and N. MacAfee (New York: Scribner, 1992).

5. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Letters, 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz and trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 9.

6. Saint is the predicate of the woman insofar as she gives herself, the correlate of the “yes,” or, at any rate, it was the predicate, during the same years, of both Elfride and the Hannah she knew nothing about: “And your great hour—when you become a saint—when you stand completely revealed […] but [you are a] saint—may you preserve this shyness—may his [God’s] “yes” preserve you” (ibid., 20–21).

8. Martin often signed his letters to Elfride “Your little Blackamoor,” a nickname she had given him in reference to his dark complexion. Here the abbreviation stands for “white Blackamoor,” meaning that his hair was by then white. —Trans.

9. Since the noun sainte and the adjective sainte are written identically in French, their use in a given sentence is sometimes equivocal. English, on the other hand, requires distinguishing between saint and saintly (or holy, as in “the Holy Virgin,” la Sainte Vierge, or even sacred). Thus what I have translated as “they are both ways of being a saint” could also have been rendered as “they are both ways of being holy/saintly” (d’être sainte). —Trans.

1. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters, 1925–1975, ed. Ursula Ludz and trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 6.

5. Ibid., 203. Particularly in classical French theater, flamme referred to a passionate love (cf. déclarer sa flamme, to declare one’s love). — Trans.

1. Beying, an antiquated spelling of being, has been used in some English translations of Heidegger to render Seyn, the old spelling of Sein in German. —Trans.

2. By placing in the mouth of his teenage protagonist Sortebeker such lines as “The rat withdraws itself by unconcealing itself into the ratty. So the rat errates the ratty, illuminating it with errancy. For the ratty has come-to-be in the errancy where the rat errs and so fosters error,” Gunter Grass wickedly parodied Heideggerese in his novel Dog Years, originally published in 1963, English translation by Ralph Mannheim (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965). In The Jargon of Authenticity, originally published in 1964, English translation by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Northwestern University Press, 1973), T. W. Adorno critiqued the language of Heidegger and other existentialists as “giv[ing] itself over to the market, to balderdash, or to the predominating vulgarity.” —Trans.

3. The phrase “seized by rectoral debauchery” is an allusion to the title of Jules Romains’s 1923 play Monsieur Le Trouhadec saisi par la débauche (Monsieur Le Trouhadec seized by debauchery). —Trans.

4. The console table figures in the last strophe of the sonnet “Tout Orgueil fume-t-il du soir,” in Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1945), 73. —Trans.