“I find this book exceptional and unique in the way it poses and develops its topic within the ‘setting’ of Heidegger’s thought. de Beistegui shows on the one hand that many efforts to derive Heidegger’s nationalistic politics from his philosophical ‘position’ have been truncated and ill-conceived with regard to his philosophy and his problematic of the political. On the other hand, he shows the way in which Heidegger’s thought fails from within in confrontation with fascism and the Holocaust. It is a subtle and finely conceived study. Most of the work on Heidegger and political questions remains on the outside of his thought and lacks both the understanding and nuance one finds in this book.”
Charles Scott, Pennsylvania State University
Recent studies of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism have often presented Heidegger’s philosophy as a forerunner to his political involvement, his thought being read in search of pro-Nazi sentiment in order to explain his personal political involvement. This has occurred often to the detriment of the highly complex nature of Heidegger’s relation to the political. Heidegger & the Political redresses this imbalance and is one of the first books to assess critically Heidegger’s relation to politics and his conception of the political.
Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often displaced in Heidegger’s writings rather than read the political into Heidegger. Exploring Heidegger’s ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics, Heidegger & the Political considers what some of Heidegger’s key motifs — his emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Hölderlin’s poetry, his writing on technology and the ancient Greek polis — may tell us about Heidegger’s relation to the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in Heidegger’s denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk of thinking itself.
Heidegger & the Political is essential reading for students of philosophy and politics and all those interested in the question of the political today.
Miguel de Beistegui is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick.