There will come a day, perhaps, when philosophers will no longer feel the need to write about Heidegger’s politics. There will come a day when, everything said and done, every single aspect of Heidegger’s life, every single detail of his work having come under the inquisitive and scrupulous gaze of those doctors with an eye for Heidegger-the-Nazi, the age of a freer and more fruitful relation to the Heideggerian heritage will finally emerge. In the meantime, everything happens as if the deluge of monographs devoted to a (more or less sincere) understanding of Heidegger’s relation to Nazism and to politics were not about to come to an end. Given the popularity of the topic in academia, one might even wonder whether there is a better way of securing for oneself access to the temple of academic respectability than through writing a book with “Heidegger” and “politics” on the cover. This inflation is certainly largely due to the fact that, for too long, and under the influence of many “Heideggerians,” most commentators remained remarkably silent on this issue. After this all too suspicious silence came the no less suspicious cacophony which today surrounds us, and in the midst of which the average reader finds himself or herself utterly bewildered, wanting to flee the Heideggerian premises at once, if not to sacrifice the Gesamtausgabe to the altar of Western good conscience.
Why, then, a further book on Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism?
Is it to throw yet another stone at his corpus, another way to make sure that he will remain forever buried? Or is it to keep his memory alive, to bring yet another stone, yet another inscription to his mausoleum? Or is it a matter of yet a third? A matter of keeping the matter of thinking alive, simply by reading Heidegger? And why read, if not because Heidegger’s text calls for thinking, provokes thinking, begs and cries out for thinking? So, in a way, yes, it will be a matter of salvaging Heidegger, his texts, that is, a matter of not letting the closure of thinking silently take place. Salvaging from what? From that simple equation which, willy-nilly, is slowly being accepted, an equation so simple and so convenient that it has become almost irresistible: Heidegger was a Nazi, Nazi from the start, Nazi till the end. To this equation, it is not a question of opposing a counter-proposition, the revisionist version of the first equation: Heidegger was not a Nazi, he never was. This, too, is impossible: the evidence is too massive, too brutal: devastating. Heidegger’s involvement was, at least for a few months, total and unconditional.
Given the inflation in publications devoted to the question of Heidegger’s politics, the reader will possibly wonder how this book differs from all the other books on that question and what, if any, original insights it might contain. As for the latter, only the reading of the analyses will tell. As for the former, that is for the specific approach that is privileged in this book, I have tried to outline it in the Introduction. When, as a doctoral student, I embarked on a project aimed at retrieving the political dimension and implications of Heidegger’s thought in 1988, in the first after-shock of “l’affaire Heidegger” (which, at the time, was restricted to the French intellectual scene, Victor Farias’ Heidegger et le Nazisme 1 having been accepted for publication only in France), I had little awareness of how central to the academic debate the topic would become. I was then convinced — as I am now — that the proper response to this question is not scandal-mongering, but philosophical. In that respect, my own research was inspired more by the work of those readers of the Heideggerian text who had always been attentive to its highly complex political dimension than by those who, for reasons that may vary, wished to categorize Heidegger as a Nazi thinker. 2
Is it a coincidence if, in disappointing contradistinction to the philosophical nature of some of the work that originated in France and Germany, the majority of the Anglo-American response concerning Heidegger’s relation to politics has kept itself safe from the questioning dimension of Heidegger’s own thought? 3 The arguments and the stakes behind the idiosyncratic reception of the Heidegger affair in the United States would itself require a lengthy study, one that I am neither willing nor capable of carrying out here. Suffice it to say that this reception is largely dependent, amongst many other conditions, upon the place of the university in American intellectual life, the place of so-called Continental Philosophy within the discipline as a whole, the political situation (and its ethical and often religious overdetermination) of the United States, and the country’s relation to the history of the twentieth century. In the end, the reception of the Heidegger “scandal” in the United States often reveals more about the situation of the country and of its intellectuals than it does about Heidegger’s thought. Such is the reason why, ultimately, the overwhelming production that continues to come from the United States has only had a limited impact on the elaboration of this book.
The first element that convinced me to undertake this project, then, was the lack of personal satisfaction with respect to the literature produced in North America. To this purely personal impression was added the fact that, thanks to the generosity of its editors, this book is published in a series devoted to political philosophy: it therefore suggests that Heidegger’s own thought, no matter how problematic, or even perhaps because of its very problematicity, deserves a place in a series that attempts to think and problematize the fate of the political in the twentieth century. The very series of which this book is only a moment should indicate that Heidegger’s own thought and texts will be given the utmost seriousness. Finally, this book is the first of its kind to be published in the United Kingdom, often renowned for its hostility toward Contemporary European Philosophy, to say nothing of its opinion regarding thinkers who once held a card of the Nazi Party. To be the first of its kind does not make this book necessarily good. It only makes it overdue.