1 Victor Farias, Heidegger et le Nazisme, translated from the Spanish and German by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset, with a preface by Christian Jambet (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987). The revised and longer German edition appeared as Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), translated from the Spanish and French by Klaus Laermann, with an important preface by Jürgen Habermas, “Heidegger: Werk und Weltanschauung.” The English edition, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1989), edited, with a foreword, by Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, was translated from the French and the German editions, without, unfortunately, incorporating all the corrections made in the latter. Despite these late corrections, Farias’ book remains highly controversial. Amongst the many responses to and reviews of Farias’ book, I wish to point in particular to those provided by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe at the end of La fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987), pp. 175–88; by Pierre Aubenque, Gérard Granel and Michel Deguy in le débat, 48, January-February 1988; and by Thomas Sheehan in “Heidegger and the Nazis,” The New York Review of Books, June 16, 1988, pp. 38–47.
2 These are the works I would include in the first category: Reiner Schürmann, Les Principes de l’anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l’agir (Paris: Seuil, 1982). English translation by Christine-Marie Gros, in collaboration with the author, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La transcendence finie/t dans la politique” (1981) and “Poétique et politique” (1984) in L’imitation des Modernes (Typographies II) (Paris: Galilée, 1986); La fiction du politique, op. cit. I owe to Lacoue-Labarthe the necessity to take Heidegger’s own political dereliction absolutely seriously. It is also Lacoue-Labarthe who, almost despite himself, led me to expose the limitations of a purely immanent reading of Heidegger’s politics. In one way or another, Lacoue-Labarthe’s work is behind every chapter of this book. Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit — Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987). Dominique Janicaud, L’ombre de cette pensée — Heidegger et la question politique (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990). Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Pöggeler, eds, Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989).
3 There are, however, some notable exceptions: see, for example, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal (New School for Social Research), vol. 14, no. 2 and vol. 15, no. 1, edited by Marcus Brainard et al., published as a double volume in 1991). David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), particularly chapters 4–6. Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
1 Theodor W. Adorno, in an open letter to the Frankfurt student journal Diskus, January 1963. Reprinted in the editorial Afterword to volumes V and VI of Adorno’s Musikalische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 637–8.
2 US 37/159.
3 Chapter 2 of this book, “Archaic Politics,” does not consider archè in the sense that Heidegger identifies in Aristotle’s Physics (see Wm 244 ff.), not, in other words, in the metaphysical sense of a secure and unique origin and ground, but in the sense of a power of beginning, which he also and most of all sees at work in poetry.
1 Karl Löwith was the first to formulate his concerns in “Les implications politiques de la philosophie de l’existence chez Heidegger”, Les Temps Modernes, 14 (1946). English translation by R. Wolin in The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), ed. Richard Wolin, pp. 167–85. Theodor W. Adorno’s Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964) and Pierre Bourdieu’s L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Minuit, 1988), originally published in 1975 in Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, are two further significant examples of a “political” reading of Being and Time. More recently, although not in direct connection with Being and Time, but rather with the 1929/30 lecture course entitled The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30), see Winfried Franzen, “Die Sehnsucht nach Härte und Schwere,” in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), eds Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto Pöggeler, pp. 78–92.
2 This new wave of attack was triggered by the publication of Victor Farias’ Heidegger et le Nazisme (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1987), originally published in France, and much discussed there, but now enjoying a lively career in the United States.
3 SZ 18/40; my emphasis.
4 Aristotle, Politics, 1253 a 3.
5 This is an implicit reference to the beginning of the “Letter on Humanism,” where Heidegger expresses doubts as to the possibility of corresponding to the task of thinking when operating within the framework of traditional onto-theology. Even though there is no explicit reference to the concept of the political as being in need of its own deconstruction, I believe that the overall context of the Letter is political. Furthermore, as I shall attempt to show, such deconstruction is carried out in other texts written under the rule of National Socialism.
6 Cited by Heinrich W. Petzet in his preface to Martin Heidegger–Erhart Kästner, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1986), p. 10.
7 The question of whether Being and Time opened the way to Heidegger’s support of Nazism in 1933 out of of a lack of definite political orientations and fundamental guidelines, or of whether Heidegger’s magnum opus already provided its author with a vocabulary and a construal of collective life that was compatible with the Nazi ideology, is obviously crucial. For Janicaud, it is the absence of the political in Being and Time that was at the origin of Heidegger’s political misadventure. For us, and in a way that owes nothing to the analyses of Adorno, Löwith, Habermas, Bourdieu or Farias, the clues to Heidegger’s political support for Nazism can only be found in positive elements contained in the “early” Heidegger.
8 Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), p. 57.
9 In a terse statement, Lacoue-Labarthe declares: “And as for politics in general, that is to say, as for History, most of what is proclaimed in 1933 was already stated in Sein und Zeit, if only one refers to Division Two, Chapter V” (La fiction du politique [Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987], p. 35). While fully subscribing to Lacoue-Labarthe’s declaration, I would argue that what needs to be thought is precisely the connection between the concepts of history (as determined by Heidegger) and politics. In others words, we need to know what is meant by “politics in general, that is to say … History.”
10 Let us simply note, at this point, and in a way which is reminiscent of the Heidegger of the late 1910s and the early 1920s, that it is the question of life which forces the analysis of temporality into a discussion of historicity. Dilthey and his Lebensphilosophie are already in the background of the discussion. For a detailed and illuminating discussion of the question of factical life in the early Heidegger, see David Farrell Krell’s remarkable Daimon Life. Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), especially Chapters 1 and 2.
11 SZ 374/427.
12 How are we to translate the German Geschehen? The connection drawn here between Geschehen and Geschichte is fairly traditional and can be traced back to Herder. Literally, geschehen means to happen, to take place, to occur. In that respect, history is a happening, a taking place, an event: ein Geschehen. Hence our “historical happening,” which serves to designate Dasein as an event that unfolds historically. Yet it must immediately be made clear that the event that is spoken of here is not a point in time, and that the unfolding of Dasein is not linear. Rather, the event is ekstatic and the unfolding is a stretching.
13 In order to maintain a graphic difference between history as Geschehen and history as historiography, we shall translate Geschichte by History and Historie by history.
14 SZ 382/434.
15 Das Leichte is one of the four categories of factical life in motion identified in the 1921/2 lecture course on Aristotle (GA 61, 108–10). Factical life seeks to make things easy for itself (and even its worldly difficulties — How hard is my life! — are Erleichterungen) and craves for security: it reassures itself by falling away from itself, by turning a blind eye to itself, by masking itself and fooling itself. It flees itself by drawing the Difficult (the unifold) aside and by avoiding primal decision. For a further discussion of this motif and its resonance within the economy of the Heideggerian text, see Krell’s remarks on “The Facts of Life” (especially, pp. 45–9), “The University of Life” (pp. 147–57) and “Shattering” (pp. 177–9) in Daimon Life, op. cit.
16 SZ 384/435.
17 This difficulty concerning the passage from singular destiny to communal fate has already been stressed by P. Ricœur in Temps et récit (Paris: Seuil, 1985), vol. III, p. 112.
18 Soon after Being and Time, Heidegger will start evoking the historical Dasein, and then the German Dasein. One can understand the use of such formulations only in the wake of the analyses developed in Being and Time. The sections on Dasein’s history are precisely the turning point, where Heidegger moves from the exhibition of Dasein’s structures as a singular existing being to the expositon of Dasein’s commonality. And because the analyses of commonality were so negative to begin with, Heidegger has no choice but to forge the possibility of an authentic common existence on the basis of an exceptional — indeed heroic-tragic — vision of existence. This clearly comes through in the 1933 speech commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the Freiburg student Albert Leo Schlageter, who was shot for acts of sabotage against the French occupation army, and whom Heidegger refers to as “a young German hero who a decade ago died the most difficult and greatest death of all” (Der Alemanne, 27 May 1933, p. 6; “Schlageter,” trans. William S. Lewis in The Heidegger Controversy [Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1993], ed. Richard Wolin, pp. 40–2).
19 In a passage from his 1934 lecture course on Hölderlin, Heidegger, commenting on the experience of the soldiers at the front (an experience which he himself never underwent), writes the following: “It is precisely the death which every man must die for himself and which completely isolates every individual, it is this death, and the acceptance of the sacrifice it demands, that creates in the first place the space whence the community surges” (GA 39, 73). At this particular point, there is nothing that distinguishes Heidegger’s sacrificial conception of the community from, say, Hegel’s.
20 Volksgemeinschaft or “national community” was the term used by the Nazis to designate the true essence of the German nation: a community bound by forces of blood and earth.
21 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (München: Beck, 1920). English translation by Charles F. Atkinson, The Decline of the West (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926), vol. II, chapters XI–XIV. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]), 1956). Translated in English under the supervision of Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), vol. I, pp. 40–3. Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Bern: Francke, 1963), Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, pp. 524–36.
22 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Psychologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellscahft, 1963). Translated by Charles P. Loomis as Community and Association (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955). Both the German version we refer to and the translation are based on the 8th edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in Leipzig, 1935.
23 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 243/263.
24 Ibid., 251/270.
25 Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1961) and Der Untergang des Abendlandes, op. cit.
26 Heidegger gave two lectures on Spengler at a “Scientific Week” in Wiesbaden in mid-April 1920, and praises Spengler’s work in his lecture course of the summer of 1923 (see GA 63, 55–7).
27 The Decline of the West, vol. II, 58/48
28 Ibid., 127–8/107
29 If Volk and Gemeinschaft serve to identify the proper way of being-in-common for Dasein, would there be a way of identifying the improper or everyday way of being together with Gesellschaft? There are certainly indications of such a possibility in Heidegger’s analysis, if only in the anonymity and the dictatorial dimension of das Man. Yet one should still bear in mind that Heidegger’s purpose is not to develop a critique of society on the basis of a more authentic mode of social organization, but to articulate the ontological structure of human existence.
30 Max Müller, “Martin Heidegger. Ein Philosoph und die Politik,” Freiburger Universitätsblätter, June 1986, pp. 13–31. Reprinted and translated by Lisa Harries as ‘A philosopher and politics: A conversation’ in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism. Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), eds Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, pp. 175–95.
31 Hans Jonas, “Heidegger’s Resoluteness and Resolve” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, op. cit., p. 200.
32 The communication that is spoken of here is to be connected with and yet distinguished from the average kind of communication referred to as Gerede (idle talk) in section 35. Here, Heidegger is referring to the possibility of an authentic communication, the authenticity of which would precisely unfold from the common resoluteness that constitutes the community as such.
33 For precise references regarding the use of this word in Being and Time, see Krell’s Daimon Life, op. cit., p. 338, note 7.
34 For further discussion on the question of tradition as Tradition and Überlieferung, see Robert Bernasconi’s “Repetition and Tradition: Heidegger’s Destructuring of the Distinction Between Essence and Existence in Basic Problems of Phenomenology” in Reading Heidegger from the Start (Albany: SUNY, 1994), eds Theodore Kiesel and John Van Buren, pp. 123–36.
35 SZ 385/437.
36 SZ 385/436.
37 This semantic of the opposition, the struggle, the rejoinder will find new developments in the rectoral address. We refer to what Heidegger says concerning the Wider stand and the Kampf toward the end of the address.
38 In that respect, one can only agree with Derrida who sees in Heidegger’s reference to the Kampf an anticipation of the later developments around the notion of polemos as ontological strife. See Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), pp. 359 ff.
39 Ten years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger will recapture his statements in the following way: “The properly temporal is the stirring, exciting, but at the same time conserving and preserving extension and stretch from the future into the past and from the latter into the former. In this extension, man as historical is in each case a “spread.” The present is always later than the future; it is the last. It springs from the struggle of the future with the past” (GA 45, 42/40).
40 SZ 2/21; my emphasis.
41 Is it a coincidence if Heidegger punctuates the first two pages of Being and Time with references to the “today,” as if, from the very start, the whole of that text were oriented toward a rethinking of the nature of the present? For further developments on Heidegger’s use of the word “today” and its implications, see Andrew Benjamin, “Time and Task: Benjamin and Heidegger showing the Present” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1993), eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, pp. 216–50.
42 Should it be reminded that the “Heidegger affair” appeared very quickly to be directed at Heidegger’s call for a deconstruction of the history of ontology, interpreted as an anti-humanistic (and hence anti-human, hence pro-Nazi) crusade? And should it be made explicit that, most often, such attacks were really aimed at destabilizing the spiritual son of Heidegger, the apostle and leader of world-deconstruction, the bogy philosopher, Jacques Derrida? For a thorough and illuminating discussion of the dominant interpretation concerning the connection between Heidegger’s alleged anti-humanism and his politics, see William V. Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism. Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 181–251. Although Spanos focuses on the American reception of this question, with specific attention paid to the debate that took place in the Winter 1989 issue of Critical Inquiry, he also analyses its French and German origins. Thus, along with the names of Arnold I. Davidson, Tom Rockmore and Richard Wolin, one also finds those of Jürgen Habermas, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, and Victor Farias. To this long list one might also wish to add Jean-Pierre Faye’s recent Le Piège. La philosophie heideggerienne et le Nazisme (Paris: Balland, 1994), sections 21, 25, 29, and pp. 165–89, as well as Nicolas Tertulian’s “Histoire de l’être et révolution politique,” Les Temps Modernes, February 1990, no. 523, pp. 109–36.
43 The view according to which history itself is a fall away from a higher and brighter origin is itself of course a very traditional interpretation, one that runs from Hesiod or Genesis to Spengler. Yet the originality of Heidegger’s thought lies in the fact that, for him, there is the possibility of what Rene Char would call a “retour amont,” a return that is not aimed at recapturing the lost origin, but at leaping back so as to leap forward, at leaping back before the origin so as to free a future. Implicit here is the complex structure of the step back, of the temporality underlying it and, ultimately, of the impossiblity of reducing Heidegger’s view on history to a linear conception of time (one that is necessarily presupposed in the interpretations of history we have just suggested). And it is precisely this complex structure of temporality that ultimately impedes the assimilation of the Heidegerrian Verfallen with Spengler’s “Decline of the West,” despite the similarities that can be drawn from a confrontation between the two texts.
44 For a sustained treatment of the question of nihilism, see Chapter 3 of this book, “After Politics.”
45 SZ 387/439.
46 What Heidegger enigmatically designates as “the essential sacrifice” in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Hw 50/62) is perhaps best exemplified in the following passage from the 1934/5 lecture course on Hölderlin, where Heidegger tries to thematize the experience of the soldiers in the front:
The comradery amongst soldiers in the front does not arise from a necessity to gather because one felt far from those who were missing; nor does it come from the fact that one first agreed upon a common enthusiasm. Rather, its most profound and only reason is that the proximity of death as sacrifice brought everyone to the same annulation, which became the source of an unconditional belonging to the others.
(GA 39, 72–3)
47 From the unconditional support of the ongoing revolution expressed in 1933–4 to the call for a revolution with respect to being and to the language of metaphysics expressed in 1935, there seems to be an evolution of the motif of revolution, one that reveals an increasing discontent on Heidegger’s part with respect to the outcome of Nazi politics.
1 Who would want to contest that, in the history of the twentieth century, from the Spanish Civil War to the Vietnam war, from May 1968 and the Prague Spring to Tian Anmen Square, the modern State lived some of its most decisive hours in the university and that this modern university played a role similar to that of the street or the factory?
2 See Heidegger’s statements in the interview that he gave to Der Spiegel on 23 September 1966 and published after his death on 31 May 1976 under the title “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”. English translation by Lisa Harries in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism. Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), eds Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, pp. 41–66.
3 See Der Streit der Facultäten in Kant, Werke, Bd. VII (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), Zweiter Abschnitt, section 7: “Die Wahrsagende Geschichte der Menschheit”. In many respects, this text could be said to be Kant’s own rectoral address. Kant addresses questions concerning the relation between thinking and governing, between the law of freedom and the laws of the State, between education and power. No doubt, a detailed confrontation of the two texts would be most fruitful. For a sustained treatment of Kant’s text, see Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos — ou le conflit des facultés” in Du droit a la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 397–438.
4 See Friedrich Hölderlin’s letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff, dated 4 December 1801 in Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1954), Bd. VI (Briefe), ed. Adolf Beck, pp. 425–8. English translation by Thomas Pfau in Essays and Letters on Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), ed. Thomas Pfau, pp. 149–51.
5 For a discussion of Heidegger’s remarks on the Greek polis, see Chapter 5 of this book, “Before Politics”.
6 See Schelling’s 1802–3 (“Lectures on the Method of Academic Studies”) “Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums” in F. W. Schelling, Werke, (München: Beck, 1927) ed. Manfred Schröter, Bd. III, 207–352.
7 Besides the Jena Lectures by Schelling already mentioned, we should also mention Fichte’s “Deductive Plan for an Establishment of Higher Learning to be Founded in Berlin” (“Deducierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden höheren Lehranstalt”), written in 1807 and published in 1817, in J. G. Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Dritte Abtheilung, Bd. III, 97–204; Schleiermacher’s response to Fichte in his “Occasional thoughts on universities in the German sense” (“Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten in deutschem Sinn”), in F. Schleiermacher, Sämtliche Werke, Dritte Abtheilung, Zur Philosophie, Bd. I, 535–644; von Humboldt’s 1809 or 1810 “On the Internal and External Organisation of the Higher Scientific Establishments in Berlin” (“Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin”), in W. von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Politische Denkschriften, Bd. I, 250–60; finally, Hegel’s 1816 “On Teaching Philosophy at University” (Über den Vortrag der Philosophie auf Universitäten”), in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Bd. IV, Nürnberger und Heidelberger Schriften, 418–24. For an excellent presentation and systematic analysis of these contributions, to which my remarks are indebted, see L. Ferry, A. Renaut and J. P. Pesron, Philosophies de l’université (Paris: Payot, 1979).
8 Letter to Karl Löwith, 19 August 1921, first published in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers: Symposium der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung vom 24–28 April in Bonn-Bad Godesberg, vol. 2, eds Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990).
9 See GA 61, 66.
10 “Heidegger in the University of Life” is the title of the fourth chapter of Krell’s Daimon Life, where one can find the most illuminating discussion of the question of life in relation to that of the university.
11 GA 56/57, 4.
12 See GA 61, 62–76.
13 GA 61, 73–6.
14 Now published under the the title “Was ist Metaphysik?” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), pp. 1–19. English translation by David Farrell Krell in Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), ed. D. F. Krell, pp. 95–112.
15 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger. Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1988).
16 One finds this finis universitatum (without the question-mark) inscribed in the diary of the Vice-Rector of the University of Freiburg, Josef Sauer, in an entry dated 22 August 1933.
17 See the telegram to Adolf Hitler dated 20 May 1933 and reproduced in Ott, op. cit. 187.
18 SA 208.
19 SA 210.
20 Sections 5 and 6 of the 1934/5 Germanien (GA 39) lecture course are devoted to this question of the “we” and to what looks like a problematization of a question that remained insufficiently thematized in 1933. Would Heidegger’s politics have been in any way different had he become aware of the difficulties underlying his appeal to the “we” of the German nation constituted as Volksgemeinschaft? For a further discussion of Heidegger’s first interpretations of Hölderlin, see Chapter 4 of this book.
21 SDU 10/30.
22 The Aufstehen and the fragende Standhalten that are here mentioned serve to introduce the motif of the stance, which plays a decisive role throughout the address and sheds a new light on the originary rectoral dimension of the rectorship. The stance that is spoken of here is none other than what Heidegger elsewhere (in Being and Time, of course, but also long after the project of fundamental ontology had been abandoned) characterizes as the ek-stasis or the transcendence of Dasein. To say that the stance proper to Dasein is ek-static is to designate its mode of dwelling on earth — its being in the world — as one of clearing and disclosedness, as a dynamic and ultimately temporal relation to its own being. If Dasein dwells on earth, it means that Dasein is at home in the world. Yet Dasein dwells in the world in such a way that it is driven toward the very limits of the world. Everywhere at home, since the world is its home, Dasein is also nowhere at home, since it is always thrown beyond itself. Dasein stands in the world as the Unheimlichste or the uncanniest of all beings. Now when Heidegger identifies this basic existential-ontological mode of standing with original questioning, it is clear that questioning, and along with it, “science,” mean something quite different from interrogation or raising questions with a view to answering them. In an archaic sense, questioning refers to Dasein’s own transcendence, to the fact that, for it, its Being is always at issue for it, or that it has always already understood its “to be.” It is in the light of this archaic meaning of questioning that one ought to (re)think the very possibility of the Seinsfrage: if being can become a question for us, it is because it is always in question for us. This being in question or at issue points in the direction of Dasein’s specific stance or mode of dwelling, which is none other than ek-static finitude. This connection between philosophy originarily understood and dwelling is perhaps made most explicit in The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30, section 2), where, quoting from Novalis, Heidegger identifies the Grundstimmung of philosophy with nostalgia or homesickness (Heimweh). Heidegger writes:
Let us remain with the issue and ask: what is all this talk about homesickness? Novalis himself elucidates: “an urge to be everywhere at home. Philosophy can only be such an urge if we who philosophise are not at home everywhere.
(GA 29/30: 7)
23 See in particular chapters II (“Der Anklang” — “The Resonance”) and III (“Das Zuspiel” — “The Interplay”).
24 The essential belonging together of technè and technology is of the utmost importance, for if technè can come to designate “the saving power”, to use Hölderlin’s terms, it is precisely by way of its historical-destinal attachment to technology. This attachment is what distinguishes Heidegger’s conception of history from redemption and messianism.
25 SDU 13/33
26 The most sustained treatment of Plato’s thaumazein (which Heidegger interprets as “wonder” and “amazement”) as the basic disposition of the primordial thinking of the West is perhaps to be found in GA 45, sections 36–8. There, Heidegger is careful to distinguish wonder from related kinds of marvelling, which include admiration.
27 Excerpt from an address presented by Heidegger at an election rally in Leipzig on 11 November 1933. Reproduced and translated in The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), ed. R. Wolin, p. 51.
28 For a thorough and remarkable reading of the economy of spirit in Heidegger’s address — and beyond — see J. Derrida’s De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987). English translation by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).
29 SDU 15/34.
30 This pathetic rhetoric invades most of Heidegger’s speeches and texts from the period of the rectorate. In a speech delivered to the Heidelberg students and dated 30 June 1933, Heidegger describes the “new courage” demanded of them in the following terms:
University study must become again a risk, not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls. The new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for the battle for the institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long time. It will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race [Geschlecht] with no thought of self must fight this battle…
(The Heidegger Controversy, op, cit., pp. 45)
Elsewhere, in a series of appeals launched in support of the plebiscite of 12 November 1933, called by Hitler to sanction Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and consolidate his power within the country, Heidegger indulged in the most zealously Nazi bombast:
Let your loyalty and your will to follow be daily and hourly strengthened. Let your courage grow without ceasing so that you will be able to make the sacrifices necessary to save the essence of our people and to elevate its innermost strength in the State.
Let no propositions and “ideas” be the rules of your Being.
The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.
(Ibid., p. 47)
And again:
It is not ambition, not desire for glory, not blind obstinacy, and not hunger for power that demands from the Führer that Germany withdraw from the League of Nations. It is only the clear will to unconditional self-responsibility in suffering and mastering the fate of our people.
(Ibid., p. 50)
(Here again, the confrontation with Kant, for whom the finality of nature lies precisely in the elaboration of a League of Nations, would be most illuminating. See Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” particularly the seventh proposition; English translation by H.B. Nisket in Kant: Political Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), ed. Hans Reiss, pp. 41–53.
31 In a speech delivered on 30 June 1933 to the Heidelberg Student Association, and published in the Heidelberger Neuste Nachrichten on 1 July 1933, Heidegger said the following: “The warning cry has already been sounded: “Wissenschaft is endangered by the amount of time lost in martial sports and other such activities.” But what does that mean, to lose time, when it is a question of fighting for the State! Danger comes not from work for the State. It comes only from indifference and resistance. For that reason, only true strength should have access to the right path, but not halfheartedness.” (Reproduced, and translated in English by William S. Lewis, in The Heidegger Controversy, op. cit., p. 45) Does the excessively heroic pathos of this passage find its roots in Heidegger’s own physiological halfheartedness, that very physiological defect that frustrated him from heroism in the First World War and turned him into a weatherman? Again, Nietzsche would have laughed at this poor constitution and at his desire for revenge.
32 For more details on this “scientific camp,” see Ott, op. cit., pp. 214–23.
33 As John Sallis has so cautiously and convincingly demonstrated, this so-called model is far more complex and paradoxical than is usually thought. Heidegger himself would have benefited from taking this complexity more seriously. See John Sallis, Being and Logos (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1975), pp. 346–401.
34 Specifically, in the second edition of Introduction to Metaphysics, 1953, where Heidegger decided to leave the statement from the 1935 original edition untouched, only adding in parenthesis, by way of a further — and of course retrospective — explanation, the following sentence: “(namely the encounter between technology determined globally and modern man),” (EM 152/199). For a sustained and illuminating dicussion of this passage, see Janicaud’s L’ombre de cette pensée (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990), Chapter 4 (“La lettre volée”), pp. 77–96.
35 SZ 385/437.
36 SZ 386/438.
37 SDU 18/38.
38 SDU 18/37.
39 This motif of the polemos, first articulated in section 74 of Being and Time, begins to take its full measure in the rectoral address, but finds further developments in subsequent texts, at which point it has become a leitmotiv. As already indicated in Chapter 1 of this book, on the question of the polemos, see Derrida’s “L’oreille de Heidegger — Philopolémologie” in Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), pp. 343–419.
1 GA 2, 138/6.
2 SZ 396/448.
3 Martin Heidegger, letter to the Rector of the Freiburg University, 4 November 1995. Published and translated by Richard Wolin in The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), p. 65.
4 It is Russia and America which, for Heidegger, designate the two poles and extremities of this global process which he designates as “technological nihilism”:
From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organisation of the average man. At a time when the farthermost corner of the globe has been conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any incident whatever, regardless of where or when it occurs, can be communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed … when time has ceased to be anything other than velocity, instantaneousness, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples; when a boxer is regarded as a nation’s great man; when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph [would this critique apply to the Nazi rallies themselves?] — then, yes then, through all this turmoil a questions still haunts us like a specter: What for? — Whither? — And what then?
(EM 28–9/37–8)
These comments, which can be seen as retaining a critical or philosophical — and, specifically, Nietzschean — edge, eventually indulge in a rhetoric of “spirit” virtually indistinguishable from that of Nazism. The “emasculation of the spirit,” which originated in Europe, is now taken to an extreme in Russia and in America, which thus become figures of the demonic:
In America and in Russia this development grew into a boundless etcetera of indifference and always-the-sameness — so much so that the quantity took on a quality of its own. Since then the domination in those countries of a cross section of the indifferent mass has become something more than a dreary accident. It has become an active onslaught that destroys all rank and every world-creating impulse of the spirit, and calls it a lie. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic (in the sense of destructive evil).
(EM 35/46)
5 Alfred Bauemler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: P. Reclam, 1931).
6 SDU 13/33.
7 Should one have to be reminded that it is in this chapter that one finds Heidegger’s famous statement, along with the parenthesis added in the 1953 edition (the lecture course was delivered in the summer semester of 1935), according to which “the works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatsoever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between technology determined planetarily and modern man) — have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of “values” and “totalities.” (EM 152/199) For an exhaustive and illuminating discussion of the history and the implications of this statement, see Dominique Janicaud’s L’ombre de cette pensée (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1990), Chapter 4, “La lettre volée.”
8 Heidegger often emphasizes that the verb wesen, from which the substantive Wesen (essence) is derived, is itself derived from the old high German wesan, to dwell, to sojourn, thus to happen, to unfold, to rule.
9 These are the texts that focus on the question of nihilism:
1936–46: “Overcoming Metaphysics” (essay, first published in VA).
1940: “European Nihilism” (a lecture course, GA 48; also published in N II).
1944–6: “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being” (an essay published in N II).
1946–8: Das Wesen des Nihilismus (unpublished essay).
1955: “On ‘The Line’ “(“Über ‘die Linie’”). Originally written and published as a contribution to a Festschrift for Ernst Jünger’s 60th birthday, then reproduced as a book under the title Zur Seinsfrage (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1956). Now included in Wm.
10 Ernst Jünger, “Die totale Mobilmachung,” Werke Vol. V, Essays I. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1960).Originally published in 1930 in Krieg und Krieger, a collection of essays edited by Jünger himself.
11 Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), Werke, Vol. 6, Essays II, op. cit.
12 “On ‘The Line’,” Wm.
13 Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik (München: Beck, 1931).
14 Ibid., 55.
15 One might also wonder the extent to which Heidegger’s notion of Machenschaft, which appears in the mid- and late-30s, is indebted to the machinic and mechanical aspects of the modern age Spengler describes here. On Machenschaft, see below, “The essence of nihilism”.
16 VA 91–7.
17 N I, 183/N I, 156–7.
18 N II, 38–9/N IV, 8.
19 N II, 48/N IV, 16
20 Martin Heidegger, GA 56/57, 13–78 and 140–68. These early writings constitute Heidegger’s farewell to the neo-Kantianism of his youth and are directed against Rickert and Windelband, in whom Heidegger saw the true founder of the transcendental philosophy of values. Yet the key figure underlying the philosophy of values is not so much Kant as it is Fichte for Heidegger, so that this philosophy would best be defined as a “neo-Fichteanism” (GA 56/57: 142)
21 “With a view to the other beginning nihilism must be grasped more fundamentally as an essential consequence of the abandonment of being [Seinsverlassenheit]” (GA 65, 139).
22 See “The Question Concerning Technology,” TK, 5–36/287–317.
23 See GA 65, II: “Der Anklang” (sections 50–80).
24 GA 65, 145.
25 GA 65, 149.
26 In the Webster’s New World Dictionary, the word “might” comes with the following explanations:
might (mit) n. [ME. mighte < OE miht, akin to G. macht < IE base *magh-, to be able: cf. MAY] 1. great or superior strength, power, force or vigor 2. strength or power of any degree.
Like the German Macht, then, which constitutes the heart of the word Machenschaft, “might” suggests power in the twofold sense of force and capacity (as being able to).
27 That power (as might) presupposes will (as capacity), that will (as volition) implies power (as disposition), that, in other words, will is always to power and power of the will, is something that should be clear from the previous footnote.
28 GA 65, 127.
29 GA 65, 219.
30 Heidegger’s critical engagement with Jünger’s position is played out in “On ‘The Line’,” Wm.
31 Wm 219/45.
32 N II, 373/N IV, 229. Heidegger’s statement dates from 1944–6.
33 Hw 273/118; my emphasis.
34 TK 44.
35 In 1944–5, one might be surprised, if not utterly shocked, to see Heidegger so concerned with the destruction of the essence of man, when millions of men and women were actually being annihilated. I discuss Heidegger’s inability to relate philosophically to the Holocaust in the last chapter of this book.
1 GA 29/30, 7.
2 This engagement, which was to take place over nearly three decades, totalizing four lecture courses, a collection of essays and numerous references can be chronologically gathered in the following three major periods:
1. Mid-1930s to the end of the 1930s:
Winter Semester 1934/5: a lecture course devoted to Hölderlin’s hymns Germanien and der Rhein (GA 39); “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (1936), later published in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1951); “Wie wenn am Feiertage …” (1939), later published in EHD; but the presence of Hölderlin is also overwhelming in the 1936–8 Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis) (GA 65).
2. Early 1940s:
Winter Semester 1941/2 (announced, but not delivered): in effect a dialogue between Nietzsche and Hölderlin (GA 50); Winter Semester 1941/2: a lecture course devoted to Hölderlin’s hymn Andenken (GA 52); Summer Semester 1942: a lecture course devoted to Hölderlin’s hymn der Ister (GA 53); “Heimkunft/An die Verwandten” (1943) and “Andenken” (1943), both published in EHD.
3. 1950s and 1960s:
“Hölderlins Erde und Himmel” (1959) and “Das Gedicht” (1968), both included in the 1971 Klostermann edition of EHD; and while the second part of What is Called Thinking? (1954) is largely devoted to an interpretation of Hölderlin, the poetry of Hölderlin continues to haunt many of the commentaries of On the Way to Language (1959).
3 See J. G. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1807–8), Sämtliche Werke (Berlin: Veit, 1845), Bd. VII.
4 This requires further explanation. By redeploying the question of national identity on the basis of a certain reading of Hölderlin, he does not simply displace the terrain of nationalism. Specifically, Heidegger does not simply redefine nationalism in terms of a privileging of a certain idiom, as opposed to the nationalism of blood and/or soil. As a matter of fact, this latter type of nationalism is almost always complicitous with a certain idiocentrism, which often serves as its metaphysical or ideological justification. Rather, by rethinking national identity via Hölderlin’s poetry, Heidegger subordinates the German idiom to what he designates as Sprache or poetic language, that is, as this language that is not instrumental but serves to designate the site of a historical dwelling. In the move from the terrain of nationalism to that of the nationell, what takes place is the abandonment of the terrain of the territory and of its logic of territorialization in favour of a dwelling that is essentially homeless. Whereas the nationalism of blood, of soil and of the idiom is essentially territorializing (colonizing and imperialistic), the nationalism of poetry is engaged in the most uncanny and dangerous of all activities, and that is in the exposure to the homelessness of the human condition. Despite the decisiveness of this move, Heidegger will regularly indulge in the most virulent — and at times even comical — nationalistic rhetoric, often by way of launching diatribes against the techno-practical imperative of the Anglo-American idiom (GA 53, 79–80), which culminate in broader attacks such as this:
We know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism is determined to annihilate Europe, which is to say, its homeland and the beginning of the West. What is of the beginning cannot be destroyed. The entry of America into this planetary war is not the entry into history, but is already the final American act of American ahistoricity and self-devastation.
(GA 53, 68)
More comical, perhaps, is Heidegger’s burning desire to identify the Brauen Frauen or tanned women from Bordeaux in Hölderlin’s Andenken with “the German women” (see EHD 108).
5 This is perhaps the point at which the most decisive break with the problematic of fundamental ontology occurs. One recalls how section 34 of Being and Time introduced the question of language (Sprache), yet in a way that made it entirely subordinate to its existential-ontological foundation, which Heidegger characterized as “discourse” or “talk” (Rede), and which served to designate the existential in which the intelligibility of something is articulated. Ultimately, then, the question of language was subordinated to the broader question of meaning, which marked the ultimate horizon of the treatise as a whole. In a unique reference to poetry, Heidegger also characterized “poetic discourse” as just one mode of expressedness (Hinausgesprochenheit) amongst many. Yet if Heidegger recognized the tool or ready-to-hand aspect of language, and even its present-at-handness, insofar as language appears as something that is encountered in the world, he also raised fundamental and puzzling questions that simply could not find an answer within the problematic defined in Being and Time, questions that, if pursued, would call the whole of the treatise into question, and to a large extent did. These questions have to do with the kind of being specific to language as a whole:
In the last resort, philosophical research must resolve to ask what kind of being goes with language in general. Is it a kind of equipment ready-to-hand within-the-world, or has it Dasein’s kind of being, or is it neither of these? What kind of being does language have, if there can be such a thing as a ‘dead’ language?
(SZ 166/209)
It is by focusing on these questions that Heidegger comes to see language no longer as the mere articulation of meaning, no longer as one mode of the disclosedness of Dasein, but as the very disclosedness of being itself.
6 Hw 47–8/59–60
7 EM 122/159
8 EM 8/10.
9 This difficult question of the intimate relation and yet absolute separation between Denken (thinking) and Dichten (poeticizing), to which Heidegger often adds Handeln (doing or acting) — a question that will remain at the very heart of Heidegger’s meditation until the very end — finds one of its very first formulations in the following passage from the 1934/5 lecture course:
Given the singularity of our world-historical situation — and in general — we can neither predict nor plan how Hölderlin’s poetry will be put into words and to work in the whole of the actualization of our historical determination. We can only say this: the Western historical Dasein is ineluctably and unsurpassably a knowing [Wissen]. … Since our Dasein is a knowing Dasein — where knowing here cannot be taken to simply mean a calculation of the understanding — there will never be for us a purely poetic Dasein, no more than a purely thinking or a purely acting Dasein. What is required from us is not to set up regular and convenient equivalents between the forces of poetry, of thought and of action, but to take seriously their seclusion in the sheltered summits, and thus to experience the secret of their originary belonging together and to bring them originarily into a new and so far unheard configuration of beyng.
(GA 39, 184–5)
10 GA 39, 214.
11 Friedrich Hölderlin, Germanien, v. 17–27. English translation by Michael Hamburger in Friedrich Hölderlin: Poems and Fragments (London: Anvil Press, 1994), p. 423.
12 See GA 39, 98.
13 GA 39, 97.
14 Hölderlin coins this word in his famous letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorf, dated 4 December 1801. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlkammer, 1954), Bd. VI (Briefe), ed. Adolf Beck, 425–8. I have already discussed some aspects of this question in Chapter 2 of this book.
15 See GA 65, section 19: “Philosophy (On the Question: Who are We?).”
16 Address to the German students of 3 November 1933. English translation by William S. Lewis in The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), ed. Richard Wolin, 46–7.
17 See GA 39, section 6: “The Determination of the”We “on the Basis of the Horizon of the Question of Time,” a) “The Measurable Time of the Individual and the Original Time of the People.”
18 See, for example, Karl Löwith’s “My Last Meeting with Heidegger in Rome, 1936” in Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), pp. 56–9.
19 On the essential complicity between art and politics in general, and with reference to Heidegger in particular, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987) and L’imitation des Modernes (Paris: Galilée, 1986).
20 See SZ 385/437.
21 GA 65, 401.
22 GA 39, 104.
23 GA 53, 60.
24 Hölderlin, Briefe.
25 See GA 39, 290–4; GA 53, 168–70; EHD, 83–7.
26 There is some strong evidence to support this view, and we have already alluded to some of it at the beginning of this chapter. Heidegger’s Greco-German-centrism has come under severe criticism in the last few years. The most systematic and nuanced critique in the Anglo-American academy comes out of Robert Bernasconi’s work. See, for example, his “Heidegger and the Invention of the Western Philosophical Tradition” in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. XXVI, October 1995, 240–54 and “On Heidegger’s Other Sins of Omission: His Exclusion of Asian Thought from the Origins of Occidental Metaphysics and his Denial of the Possibility of Christian Philosophy” in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXIX, 2, 1995, 333–50.
27 GA 39, 293.
28 Friedrich Hölderlin, letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorf dated 12 December 1801, Briefe.
1 Yet the virulence and the dismissiveness with which Heidegger refers to both countries, and particularly to the United States, would suggest that more was at stake than just this global diagnosis. What exactly? A feeling of persecution? Heidegger will continue to see Germany as the victim of this historical process, and its fate as that of a third way, whether that of the conservative revolution of Adolf Hitler or the poetry of Hölderlin. This privilege of Germany — indeed an exclusively metaphysical privilege — will never be called into question, and will be largely responsible for Heidegger’s own ignorance and blindness with respect to not only Nazi Germany, but also the United States and the Soviet Union. For some of Heidegger’s most staggering statements — increasingly aggressive as the Second World War developed — see EM 28–9, 34–8, and GA 53, 68, 79–80, 86.
2 Specifically, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (GA 53), a lecture course from the Summer Semester of 1942, Parmenides (GA 54), a lecture course from the Winter Semester of 1942/3, and Heraklit (GA 55), a lecture course from the Summer Semester of 1943.
3 The question, however, is to know whether Heidegger, in his perhaps legitimate reinterpretation of the essence and function of myth, does not in turn mythologize myth itself, thus creating a new mythology, one that will forever be suspicious of any type of anthropology. Does this suspicion, already firmly in place in the very way in which the project of fundamental ontology comes to be formulated, not stem from a titanic effort to preserve philosophy, to keep it pure of any anthropology, to affirm its essence and task over and against all other disciplines, to grasp it as the mode of thinking attuned to the discreet voice of the non-foundational foundation of being? And is this not also what rendered Heidegger blind to the social, economic and ideological forces behind the rise of Nazism? Is it not this very thought of essence that allowed him to maintain the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism long after the collapse of the “movement”? Must philosophy not let itself be traversed and worked by the forces at work in the world and by the various discourses that try to thematize them? Does philosophy not become philosophy in the very opening to non-philosophy?
4 Is it not this absolute and unquestioned primacy of the visible that underlies the more recent theories of the “spectacle” and the “simulacrum”?
5 By way of comparison, and to indicate the extent to which Heidegger’s own translation/interpretation wrests the passage from its ethical, political and religious context so as to reorient it ontologically, this is how a more traditional, and perhaps more “correct” translation would read:
With some sort of cunning, inventive
beyond all expectation
he reaches sometimes evil,
and sometimes good.
If he honours the laws of earth,
and the justice of the gods he has confirmed by oath,
high is his city; no city
has he with whom dwells dishonour
prompted by recklessness.
(Translated by David Grene in Greek Tragedies [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991], eds David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, p. 195)
6 In a remarkable essay devoted to the “shapes” and the “limits” of technological thought in ancient Greece (“Remarques sur les formes et les limites de la pensée technique chez les Grecs,” Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs [Paris: Maspero, 1974], vol. II, pp. 44–64), J. P. Vernant notes that the Greeks, who invented philosophy, science, ethics, politics and certain forms of art remained utterly non-innovative in the area of technology: their tools and their industrial techniques, inherited from the Orient, were not modified by further discoveries and inventions. They simply perfected, and sometimes innovated within the technological system that was already fixated in the classical epoch, a system that consisted in the application of human or animal force to a wide variety of instruments, and not in the use of the forces of nature through driving machines, such as the windmill, which appeared only in the third century AD, thus marking the beginning of a new technological age. Vernant expresses his surprise before this “technological stagnation,” given the fact that the Greeks, by that time, possessed the “intellectual tools” (sic) that should have enabled them to make some decisive progress in the development of machines and technologies. Specifically, many technical problems, most often mechanical in nature were already resolved mathematically. But these discoveries remained unrealized. They were meant, Vernant argues, to impress the spectator, who would see them as objects of marvel, as thaumata. Their practical use as well as their concrete realization was not the principal stake. And Vernant, in a statement that is a direct allusion to Descartes, and that, no doubt, Heidegger would have delighted in, concludes: “Never does the idea appear, according to which, through the help of these machines, man can command the forces of nature, transform it, become its master and possessor” (p. 50). To the interpretation of certain scholars, who attribute this lack of interest in the concrete application of scientific expertise to the availability of slave labor and to the largely depreciated categories of the useful, of labor, of the practical and of the artificial (as opposed to the highly valued domain of theory, contemplation and nature), Vernant wishes to oppose the following metaphysical interpretation: for the Greeks, an insurmountable gap separates the realm of the mathematical from that of the physical, in that the mathematical, and science in general, aims at grasping unmovable essences or the regular movements of the skies, whereas the terrestrial world is the domain of moving substances, and therefore of the approximate (this separation is perhaps most clearly articulated in the Aristotelian corpus). One can only imagine how, from a Heideggerian perspective, although on the right track, that is, on the track of the metaphysical framework within which certain material specificities come to be developed, Vernant’s interpretation would simply be not metaphysical enough. One would need to go further and see how, in the Greek context, mathematics, and the technology that might result from it, remained subordinated to metaphysics, not as a constituted science, but as this experience of truth according to which there is more to nature than its sheer visibility, that the extension and the mathematical spatiality of the world does not exhaust its essence. If movement belongs so essentially to the realm of phusis, as Aristotle pointed out, it is because phusis is the open region in which beings come into being and withdraw into concealment, because phusis is not primarily physio-mathematical, but aletheo-poetic.
7 In a footnote of his English translation of Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 160.
8 GA 53, 87.
9 GA 53, 88.
10 100 GA 53, 97.
11 GA 53, 98.
12 GA 53, 98. For those who might believe that, in 1942, Heidegger had lost all of his National Socialist illusions, this statement will serve as a reminder.
13 GA 53, 98.
14 GA 53, 100.
15 I am indebted to Marc Froment-Meurice for this ingenious translation of Umstand and Zustand. See his recent C’est-à-dire. Poétique de Heidegger (Paris: Galilée, 1996), p. 128.
16 GA 53, 106.
17 Vernant, Mythe et pensée, I, p. 126.
18 Cratylus, 401 c-e.
19 Louis Deroy, “Le culte du foyer dans la Grèce mycénienne,” Revue de l’histoire des religions, 1950, pp. 32, 43.
20 Vernant, Mythe et pensée, I, pp. 168–9.
21 See GA 55, 6–10.
22 Aristotle, De part. anim. A5. 645 a 17ff.
23 The other story that Heidegger recounts in the Heraclitus volume (GA 55, 10–13) can be seen as the symmetry of the first one, and is perhaps more directly political: it is the story told by Diogenes Laertius (IX, 3) according to which, one day, as the Ephesian surprised Heraclitus playing knuckle bones with some children in the temple of Artemis, goddess of phusis, the master dismissively replied: “What, you wretched imbeciles, do you find so surprising? Is it not better to do this than to concern myself with the polis with you?” The truly political action is perhaps not where one ordinarily expects it to be, and it is perhaps more essentially political to be playing games with children in the temple of Artemis than to be “doing” politics. In playing in such a way in a divine abode, Heraclitus is perhaps asserting the innocence of childhood as a divine activity of nature, and his action is perhaps the revelation of play as the most unfamiliar of all activities. Is there a parallel between Heraclitus in the temple, or by the oven, and Heidegger in the university, or in the Hütte after the turn away from politics in the strictest sense?
24 See Republic, 616ff; Phaedrus, 247a; Cratylus, 401 c-e.
25 See GA 53, 130–52, in particular section 18, “The Hearth as Being,” and GA 55, 5–27.
26 GA 53, 147.
27 On this question of translation, see GA 53, 74–83.
28 See GA 54, section 6.
29 See Jacques Taminaux, Le théâtre des philosophes (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), pp. 220–1.
30 In his essay on “The Formation of Positive Thought in Archaic Greece” (Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, II, pp. 95–124), Vernant reveals how the emergence of the Greek polis is not an event of a purely political signification, but is also accompanied by a transformation in the economic sphere. Specifically, to the increase and the acceleration of the power, the speeches and the deeds characteristic of the polis also corresponds an intensification of the exchange of goods through the systematic introduction of money. To be sure, this transformation is one that for the longest time will be considered as counter-natural: whereas an old term such as tokos (the interest of money), derived from the root tek- (to give birth, to generate), associated the product of capital with the increase of the cattle that grows, season after season, according to the laws of phusis, Aristotle describes interest and usury as an artifice that establishes the appearance of a common measure between things of entirely different values. Similarly, the term ousia, which, in the philosophical vocabulary, designates being, the substance, the essence or even phusis, also designates, at the level of economy, the patrimony, wealth, the most stable and permanent economic substance, generally associated with the possession of land (kleros). This apparent good (ousia phanera) is opposed to the category of the ousia aphanes, the inapparent good, which includes cash, money. In this opposition, money is clearly less valued than land, the more visible, substantial, permanent, in other words “real” good. Nonetheless, as the commercial experience grows and the monetary practice develops, the vocabulary, including the philosophical one, under the influence of certain Sophists, evolves and tends to incorporate money into the sphere of those things that can be said to be. (This is not simply to say that the philosophical discourse comes to map itself after the practice of monetary exchange. Far from it. Philosophy — at least that type of philosophy that begins with Plato, perhaps even with Parmenides, and that came to be designated as metaphysical — will insist on isolating and thematizing a sphere of being that is absolutely singular, excludes change and division, and is opposed to the constant becoming of the plurality of beings. The being that is at stake in such a sphere would seem to escape monetary economy altogether: it is neither exchangeable nor interchangeable, and is a principle of fixity, not circularity.) Thus, ta chremata, Vernant suggests, designates all things, reality in general as well as goods in particular, specifically in the form of ready money. This is confirmed by Aristotle, who writes: “We call goods [chremata] all things the value of which is measured by money” (Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 1119 b26)
1 Søren Kierkegaard, Frygt og Baeven, Samlede Vaerker (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1901–6), vol. III, p. 160. English translation by Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. VI, edited, with Introduction and Notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong, p. 114.
2 Ibid., p. 115.
3 Emmanuel Levinas, XXIII Colloque des intellectuels juifs de la langue française.
4 Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980) p. 107.
5 Edmond Jabès, La mémoire des mots (Paris: fourbis, 1990), p. 14.
6 The longest treatment of the passage is to be found in Derrida’s “Heidegger’s Ear. Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),” trans. John P. Leavey, originally published in Reading Heidegger, ed. by John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) and now available in French under the title “L’oreille de Heidegger. Philopolémologie (Geschlecht IV),” in Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994). Other references include Christopher Fynsk’s Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 42–4 and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “La tentation d’exister” in “Etre et temps” de Heidegger ed. Dominique Janicaud (Marseille: Sud, 1989), p. 239.
7 SZ 276/320.
8 “Ackerbau is jetzt motorisierte Ernähungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und Aushugerung von Ländern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben.” Cited in Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit (Freiburg: Alber, 1983), from p. 25 of a typescript of the lecture. The English translation, along with an explanatory footnote, appears in Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” New York Review of Books, 16 June 1988, pp. 41–2. As Thomas Sheehan rightly points out in his footnote, it is interesting to note that “all but the first five words of the sentence are omitted from the published version of the lecture,” “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Die Technik und die Kehre (Neske: Pfullingen, 1962), pp. 14–15. English translation by William Lovitt, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), ed. David Farrell Krell, p. 296. The reference to the gas chambers and the Berlin blockade, as well as to their technological essence does not appear in the published version of “Das Ge-stell.” Is it because Heidegger thought these events were no longer relevant, indeed past events of a still ruling essence? Or did he find the comparison inadequate, perhaps too controversial?
9 Letter from Marcuse to Heidegger, dated 28 August 1947. Reproduced and translated by Richard Wolin in The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993), ed. Richard Wolin, p. 161.
10 Letter from Heidegger to Marcuse, dated 20 January 1948. Reproduced and translated by Richard Wolin in The Heidegger Controversy, op. cit.
11 This is made clear throughout the lecture, and is confirmed in the fact that in the published version of the lecture, the references to the extermination camps and the Berlin blockade are omitted and replaced by other examples (and it is precisely the use of the gas chambers as an “example” that we find most problematic and in need of deconstruction).
12 TK 16/298
13 TK 26/308
14 To locate the “essence” of Nazism in the figure of “evil” and not in the Gestell is of course to suspend the possibility of associating technology as the covering up of the withdrawal of being with evil as the “malice of rage,” and thus to think against Heidegger himself, who always ran the risk of that association (see in particular the “Letter on Humanism,” Wm 189/237). Thus it is also to wrest evil from its Heideggerian delimitation, while reaffirming its ontological and existential nature. For a renewed and sustained discussion of the question of evil in connection with Heidegger, see Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’expérience de la liberté (Paris: Galilée, 1988), section 12. “Le mal. La décision”.
15 Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 80.
1 Reiner Schürmann, Les principes de l’anarchie. Heidegger et la question de l’agir (Paris: Seuil, 1982). English translation by Christine-Marie Gros, in collaboration with the author, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). See Parts II and IV in particular.
2 To my knowledge, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe are the only ones to have made decisive steps in that direction. See Nancy’s La communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986), Part II, “Le mythe interrompu,” as well as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s Le mythe nazi (La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’aube, 1991), first published in 1980. More recently, John D. Caputo’s Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) addresses similar issues.
3 G. W. F. Hegel, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus,” Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), Band I, pp. 234–6.