review essay. dr. heidegger's experiment

Review: Review Essay. Dr. Heidegger's ExperimentAuthor(s): Joseph G. KronickReview by: Joseph G. KronickSource: boundary 2, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 116-153Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303374Accessed: 10-04-2016 16:04 UTC

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Review Essay Dr. Heidegger's Experiment

Joseph G. Kronick

... and is this the upshot of your experiment? -Nathaniel Hawthorne

Of this,

A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet- -Wallace Stevens

It is strange that Heidegger's name should arrive in America by way of Hawthorne; however, while the transmission of which I speak is obviously

not historical, it concerns history because it is a question of temporality and

reading. I borrow Hawthorne's title, but today I refer, as one may gather, to Martin Heidegger's involvement with Nazism. Although the upshot of

Books Reviewed: Jacques Derrida, De I'esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Gali- lee, 1987); Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme, trans. from Spanish and German by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset, pref. Christian Jambet (Paris: Ver- dier, 1987); Franpois F6dier, Heidegger, anatomie d'un scandale (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique: Heidegger, I'art et la politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987); Jean-Franpois Lyotard, Heidegger et "les juifs" (Paris: Galil6e, 1988).

boundary 2 17:3, 1990. Copyright ? 1990 by Duke University Press. CCC 0190-3659/90/$1.50.


Kronick / Dr. Heidegger's Experiment 117

his "experiment" remains unclear, one thing is certain: his commitment to Nazism was of a nature that will no longer let us dismiss it as an error or

a mere mistake. Yet, however much details of his support for Hitler, his

efforts to reorganize the university according to the Fbhrerprinzip, and his denunciations of colleagues may call for our condemnation, in so doing, we fail to read him and thereby avoid the question of the relation of politics to

Heidegger's thought and to philosophy (as such). Hawthorne's tale of "that very singular man, old Dr. Heidegger," in-

vites us to think that even in America "we will not get around Freiburg."1 But the question of Heidegger's politics comes to us by way of an ongoing debate in France over Victor Farias's Heidegger et le nazisme.2 The un- fortunate dubbing of the polemics as I'affaire Heidegger suggests that the debate is merely another "typically French" scandal; and since the publication of Farias's study, several books, numerous articles, reviews, and public statements have appeared by such figures as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jirgen Habermas, Maurice Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas.3 Franqois

1. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1987), 63; hereafter cited in my text as PC. Further references

to Derrida's works will be cited as follows (all translations published by University of Chi-

cago Press unless otherwise noted): DE = De I'esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galil6e, 1987); Psyche = Psych6. Inventions de I'autre (Paris: Galil6e, 1987); M = Mar- gins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (1982); P = Positions, trans. Alan Bass (1981); SP = Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973); LI = Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (1977; rpt. with a new afterword [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988]). I would like to thank Bainard Cowan for checking my translations. 2. Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme, trans. from Spanish and German by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset (Paris: Verdier, 1987); hereafter cited in the text as Farias. English trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci, ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). The most carefully researched and balanced appraisal of Farias's book is Thomas Sheehan's review in the New York Review of Books, 16 June 1988, 38-47. A brief but valuable review by Paul Gottfried, "Heidegger on Trial," appeared in Telos 74 (Winter 1987-88): 147-51. Gottfried refutes Farias's argument that Heidegger's Catholic upbringing destined him to be a Nazi. He

points out that the Catholic Center was one of the two parliamentary parties that re- sisted Hitler in 1933 and that the ultramontanist opponents of the Catholic liberals, with

whom Farias associates Heidegger, were forced into opposition against extreme German nationalism.

3. Jorge Semprun refers to the scandal as "typically French" in his sympathetic review of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's Heidegger et les modernes (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1988); see "A-t-on besoin de Heidegger?" Le nouvel observateur, 20-26 May 1988, 64- 65. Ferry and Renaut attack Heidegger as the inspiration for the "anti-humanism" of


118 boundary 2 / Fall 1990

deconstruction. In his preface to Heidegger et /e nazisme, Christian Jambert says that Heidegger has become "a French philosopher" since the war (13); and in Heidegger et "Ies juifs," Jean-Franpois Lyotard writes: "L'affaire Heidegger est une affaire 'franpaise'" ([Paris: Galil6e, 1988], 16). The debate in France over Heidegger and Nazism was initiated in Sartre's Les temps modernes with Karl L6with's essay tying Heidegger's politics to the philosophy of Being and Time, particularly with the concept of finitude: "Les implications politiques de la phi-

losophie de I'existence chez Heidegger," Les temps modernes 13 (Oct. 1946): 343-60. There followed in Les temps modernes a series of articles that established the story of Heidegger's involvement as an error that ended with his resignation from the rectorship. See also Les temps modernes 4 (Jan. 1946): 713-16, for Maurice de Gandillac's "En- tretien avec Martin Heidegger"; and in the same issue, Alfred de Towarnicki, "Visite a Martin Heidegger," 717-24. In his essay for the same journal, Alphonse de Waehlens also dissociates Heidegger's thought from Nazism in "La philosophie de Heidegger et le nazisme," 22 (July 1947): 115-27. Eric Weil is more critical in his "Le cas Heidegger," 22 (July 1947): 128-38. The secondary literature on Heidegger et le nazisme is already quite extensive. A portion of Le d6bat 48 (Jan.-Feb. 1988) is devoted to Farias. The contributors are Pierre Aubenque, "Encore Heidegger et le nazisme"; Henri Cr6tella, "Heidegger contre le na-

zisme"; Franpois F6dier, "L'lIntention de nuire"; Gerard Granel, "Le guerre de S6cession"; Stephane Moses, "Radicalite philosophique et engagement politique"; and Alain Renaut, "La 'd6viation heideggerienne'?" Also included is a selection of Heidegger's political writings from 1933 to 1934. Le d6bat 49 (Mar.-Apr. 1988), published three more essays on the matter: a translation of Hugo Ott's review of Farias, "Heidegger et le nazisme: Chemins et fourvoiements"-whose German original appeared in Neue Zurcher Zeitung 28/29 (Nov. 1987): 67; Jacques Le Rider's "Heidegger et le nazisme"-an account of the still inaccessible dossier containing Heidegger's answers to questions put to him by French authorities about his political activities; and Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt's "Heidegger et le nazisme: D'une abjection I'autre"-an intemperate reply to Granel's objection to Goldschmidt's identifying Heidegger's thought with Auschwitz and claiming that Heideg-

ger's "obstinate silence probably resulted from a profound agreement... with the Nazi genocide" (Goldschmidt, in La Quinzaine litt6raire, 1-15 Nov. 1987; cited by Granel, "Le

guerre de Secession," 146 n.2). Le nouvel observateur, 22-28 Jan. 1988, includes the following articles: Catherine

David, "Heidegger et la pensee nazie"; Maurice Blanchot, "Penser I'Apocalypse"; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Ni un accident, ni une erreur" (a section from La fiction du politique); Emmanuel Levinas, "Comme un consentement a I'horrible"; Franpois F6dier, "Une

grosee betise"; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Comme Platon a Syracuse." With the exception of F6dier, who does not accept the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi, the French contributors focus on Heidegger's silence on the issue of genocide and the problem of the

relation of his politics to his thought. Gadamer expresses surprise over the belatedness of the controversy, since the facts have long been known in Germany. English translations of Gadamer, Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Levinas, along with a selection from

De I'esprit and Jurgen Habermas's introduction to the German edition of Heidegger et le nazisme can be found in Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989), edited with an introduction by



Fedier, student of Jean Beaufret (the addressee of the "Letter on Human- ism") and friend of Heidegger, has written a book-length reply to Farias.4 Still, several of these books were written before the appearance of Farias's,

which, unfortunately, has received the greatest amount of attention. The other books were written independently of the "affair," with the exception of

Jean-Franqois Lyotard's Heidegger et "les juifs," a study closely tied to the concerns that culminate in Le differend.5 Pierre Bourdieu's L'ontologie poli-

tique de Martin Heidegger is a revised and expanded version of his 1977

Arnold I. Davidson, who focuses primarily on the "Rectorship Address" and other political writings.

In response to this controversy, Jean Baudrillard has argued that the fascination with the past is the result of our having "disappeared today politically and historically." See "Hunting Nazis and Losing Reality," New Statesman 115 (Feb. 1988): 16, a translation of "Necrospective autour de Martin Heidegger," first published in Liberation 27 (Jan. 1988). He attacks "both those who deny and those who assert the reality of the gas chambers" for participating in a "collective hallucination" wherein history has been reconstructed as

myth by the media. Baudrillard combines nostalgia for objective history with a celebration of "the way the media have substituted themselves for events, ideas and history." He closes his essay by suggesting that we skip the 1990s, since the "fin-de-siecle has already arrived" (173).

4. Francois F6dier, Heidegger, anatomie d'un scandale (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988); hereafter cited in my text as Fedier. This is not the first time Fedier has defended Hei- degger. See his review of Schneeberger's Nachlese zu Heidegger, Adorno's Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, and Paul Huhnerfeld's In Sachen Heidegger, in "Trois attaques contre Heidegger," Critique 22 (Nov. 1966): 883-904. Replies to Fedier by Robert Minder ("Lan-

gage et nazisme"), Jean-Pierre Faye ("La lecture et I'enonce"), and Aime Patri ("Serait-ce une querelle d'allemand?") appeared under the collective title "A propos de Heidegger,"

Critique 23 (Feb. 1967): 284-97. Fedier's reply, "Une lecture denonc6e," followed in Critique 24 (July 1967): 672-86. A final response came in "Une lettre de Heidegger a Francois Bondy," Critique 24 (Apr. 1968): 433-35. Bondy defends Heidegger's account of his relationship with Husserl and publishes his correspondence with Husserl's daughter, Elisabeth Husserl-Rosenberg. Yet another reply by Fedier immediately follows on pages 435-37.

Catherine David reports that posthumously published letters reveal that Beaufret, Hei- degger's foremost academic expositor in France and, as a member of the Resistance, Heidegger's "guarantee of morality," was a supporter of Robert Faurisson's efforts to deny the fact that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi extermination camps. See "Heidegger et la pensee nazie," Le nouvel observateur, 22 Jan. 1988, 42.

5. Works by Jean-Francois Lyotard will be cited in the text as follows: HJ = Heidegger et "les juifs"; JG = Jean-Loup Thebaud, coauthor, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); LD = The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).



article. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's La fiction du politique: Heidegger, I'art et la politique is a revised and expanded version of an essay submitted for his doctorat d'etat and represents a portion of his extensive work done on his own and in collaboration with Jean-Luc Nancy on politics and philosophy.6 Jacques Derrida's De I'esprit: Heidegger et la question reflects his long engagement with Heidegger's thought.

Grounding the intensity of the debate are the relation of Heidegger to deconstruction, the currency of the discourse of the Jew as Other, and events of a more conventionally political nature. We could begin with the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen to political prominence as the leader of the xeno-

phobic National Front and with the trial of Klaus Barbie and the shameful conduct of his defense lawyer, Jacques Verges. What may prove to be more insidious than the nationalism of Le Pen is the work of revisionist historians

who marshal the apparatus of scholarly research to deny that the Nazis carried out a policy aimed at the extermination of European Jewry.7 Hardly

6. Works by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe will be cited in the text as follows: FP = La fic-

tion du politique: Heidegger, I'art et la politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987); LIM = L'imitation des modernes. Typograpies II (Paris: Galil6e, 1986); for both texts I supply my own translations. In addition to these works, Lacoue-Labarthe has coauthored essays with Jean-Luc Nancy that are also of great interest. See "Le mythe nazi," a text delivered 7 May 1980 at the colloquium at Schiltigheim on "Les mecanismes du fascisme," organized by the Comit6 d'information sur I'holocauste; English trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 291-312. Also see "Ouverture" to Rejouer le politique, ed. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (Paris: Galil6e, 1981), 11-28; "Le 'retrait' du politique," in Le retrait du politique, ed. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (Paris: Galil6e, 1983), 183-205. I am grateful to Eduardo Cadava for bringing La fiction du politique to my attention and for making available to me "Le mythe nazi" and the interview with Jacques Derrida by Dedier Eribon, "Heidegger, I'enfer des philosophes," Le nouvel observateur, 6-12 Nov. 1987, 170-74.

7. The best account of Faurisson is Pierre Vidal-Naquet's, "Un Eichmann de papier," first

published in Esprit (Sept. 1980) and reprinted in Les Juifs, la m6moire et le pr6sent (Paris: Maspero, 1981), 193-289. An abridged version has appeared in English translation by Maria Jolas, Democracy 1 (Apr. 1981): 70-95. Also see his "Theses on Revisionism," in Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews, ed. Franpois Furet (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 304-19. Lyotard's discussion of Faurisson in Le differend is also of great value. Richard J. Evans has written a study of West Ger- man revisionists called In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to

Escape from the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). For an account of Verges and the Barbie trial see Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair (New York: Grove Press, 1985). Paris's book is mostly concerned with the public posturing of Verges prior to the trial, and her political analysis is rather clumsy. One

can also consult Andre Koulberg, "L'affaire Barbie: Strategie de la memoire et justifica-



ever mentioned but certainly an influence on these issues is the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

A sociointellectual accounting for either Heidegger's politics or his reception in France must perforce rely on a genetic model of representation. In this account, Heidegger's activities on behalf of Nazism follow as a product of his philosophy. This argument rests upon a claim that the thinker

is not separated from his thought and that textual abstractions are avoided,

but, I will argue, the opposite holds true. To the extent that a critical assessment of Heidegger's politics proceeds from the vantage point of his activities rather than his writings, it separates thinking from action by in-

sisting that the objective, as opposed to the textual and abstract, status of his thought inheres in its being anchored in the empirical individual. Under

the guise of avoiding the separation of thought from history, these critics close history within the schema of representational thinking, wherein objec-

tive acts have their origins in the individual as subjective being. Moreover, the errors of historical acts such as Heidegger's-because Nazism is now perceived as a deviation from truth rather than as a political and historical

event-are thought so in accordance with the notion of truth as adequation or the agreement of mental concept with the thing. Once truth is thought in

terms of correctness between thought and thing, then thought is divorced from reality, and history and nature are thought to be one and the same.

Such a narrative cannot, however, account for the relation between

truth and error in history because the two "exist simultaneously." In a much- maligned remark, Paul de Man suggested that "the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts mas-

querade in the guise of wars or revolutions."8 De Man's statement can be taken as a disavowal of history only by the most careless of readers; however provocative the statement may be, it makes the same basic point Derrida has made: history "always appear[s] in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation" (LI, 137). The equation of interpretation with history has ontological rather than epistemological force, for, de Man writes,

tion du mal dans les annees quatre-vingt en France," Les temps modernes 495 (Oct.

1987): 100-116. Koulberg provides a forceful argument against Verges's strategies of relativization.

8. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 165. The question of Heidegger's influence on de Man must be treated elsewhere. But it is interesting to note that Henrik de Man's The Socialist Idea was published in 1935 in a French translation by Henri Corbin-a translator of Heidegger-and by Alexander Kojevnikov-better known by his French name, Alexandre Kojeve.



"man himself, like literature, can be defined as an entity capable of putting

his own mode of being into question." I am suggesting that the temporal model of questioning, Heideggerean in form, is far more appropriate than a genetic narrative for an investigation of Heidegger and Nazism. Wars or revolutions or Heidegger's political activities are texts; as historical events they reveal their truth only in the questioning that resists reducing history

to a univocal narrative line, a sens unique, but keeps it open to the movement of thinking. For if Heidegger offers no ethical imperative, the temporal

movement of questioning is not a textual abstraction but a praxis. It is only

in interpretive experience that history appears. (This is a mundane point, but I will elaborate on it below.) If we fail to recognize this necessity, we are left with meager arguments over the relation between Heidegger's life and work and with such idiocies as not reading him because of his political beliefs or saying he might have been a terrible person, but he was a great thinker.

Of greater danger than losing sight of Heidegger's texts in intellectual history is the double lure of anecdotal tales of his activities on behalf of the Third Reich and the analogies drawn between his language and that of Nazi ideologues. Critics from Lukacs to Habermas have found in Being and Time the avoidance of "real history" and the "undermining of Western

rationalism" that destined Heidegger to Nazism.9 Along with Heidegger's

9. The first phrase in quotation marks comes from Jurgen Habermas's introduction to the German edition of Heidegger et le nazisme, translated by John McCumber as "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective," Critical In- quiry 15 (Winter 1989): 439. The second quotation is the title to Habermas's chapter on Heidegger in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 131-60. Also see his "Martin Heidegger: On the Publica- tion of Lectures from the Year 1935," trans. Dale Ponikvar, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6 (Fall 1977): 155-80. Lukacs's antagonism to Heidegger is well known; a harsh polemic can be found in his late work The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Verso, 1980). Much of the criticism directed against Heidegger is in the name of rationalism. Tzvetan Todorov shares Habermas's enlightenment ideals, but his warning against the appeal totalitarianism had for intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s is marred by the anti- intellectual bias of his polemic against Heidegger, Blanchot, and deconstruction (see Times Literary Supplement, 17-23 June 1988). Contrary to what Todorov says, Lacoue- Labarthe's assessment of Heidegger, like Derrida's, is not a "vindication." Other critical appraisals of Heidegger include Thomas Pavel, "The Heidegger Affair," MLN 103 (Sept. 1988): 887-901; a crude polemic by Russell A. Berman and Paul Piccone, "Hidden Agen- das: The Young Heidegger and the Post-Modern Debate," Telos 77 (Fall 1988): 117-25. Along with the article appears a 1919 letter from Heidegger to Husserl's daughter, given



critique of reason, erroneously assumed to make his philosophy one of irrationalism, the standard charges against Heidegger invariably refer to his

language of destiny (Geschick), of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), of the authentic (eigentlich), the "they" (das Man), and the "call" (Ruf), and of Being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode) as evidence of his incipient fascism.

In a host of books on the Weimar Republic, we typically find a few pages devoted to Heidegger in their accounts of the collapse of reason and of the desire for wholeness in the modern era.10 But I hesitate to call these

attacks on Heidegger "readings" because they invariably take his key terms as affective or psychological determinations rather than as formal struc-

tures for the temporality of Dasein. And yet Heidegger's language, while not analogous to the call for "ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer," shares more than just a certain vocabulary with Nazism.

the title "Heidegger's Letter to the Boss' Daughter" [sic]. Marxist critics also typically attack Heidegger for being abstract and for rejecting critical reason. The most important Marxist critique of Heidegger remains that of Theodor Adorno. In addition to The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), see his Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1979). For the views of a former student of

Heidegger, see the trenchant remarks by Herbert Marcuse in an interview conducted by Frederick Olafson, "Heidegger's Politics," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6 (1977): 28-40. Stephen Eric Bronner has a rather vulgar Marxist critique, "Martin Heidegger: The Consequences of Political Mystification," Salmagundi (Summer-Fall 1977): 153- 74. Bronner argues that historical context is crucial to an understanding of Heidegger, an abstract thinker unable or unwilling to confront concrete history. An angry exchange

then took place between Bronner and Thomas Sheehan. See Sheehan, "Philosophy and Propaganda: Response to Professor Bronner," and Bronner, "The Poverty of Scholasti- cism/A Pedant's Delight: A Response to Thomas Sheehan," Salmagundi (Winter 1979): 173-99.

10. See, for example, Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 204-6; Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 81-84; and Henry Pachter, Weimar Etudes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 208-24. Laqueur finds in Being and Time the end of traditional philosophy and the "advocacy of heroic behavior in a world that

was essentially without meaning or purpose" (204). Peter Gay dismisses Heidegger for his "peasant-like appearance," "nihilism," and his "disdainful rejections of modern urban rationalist civilization" (82). Pachter devotes more space to Heidegger, but his finding in Being-towards-death the fascistic exaltation of sacrifice (217) is a misreading; for sacrifice is dying for another and contradicts what Heidegger says about the "mineness" of death by overlooking his careful delineation of the typology of death that distinguishes it from mere perishing and defines it in accordance with his interpretation of time as the

horizon of the understanding of Being (see division 2, chapter 1, of Being and Time).



The danger of the anecdote also lies in its persuasiveness, for it em- braces more than tales of Heidegger's giving the Nazi salute at the start of his lectures in the late 1930s; it includes his efforts extending well beyond his service as rector to reorganize the German university, his anti-Semitic statements, his denunciations of colleagues, and his acknowledgment to

Karl L6with that his engagement with National Socialism grew out of his concept of historicity.11 Thus, the desire to settle the question of Heidegger and Nazism seems to leave us with two choices: either we condemn him

for his support of Hitler and for such publications as the "Rectorship Ad- dress," or we defend him on the basis of his refusal to allow the display of anti-Semitic posters at the university and his critique of Nazi ideologues in his lectures on Nietzsche. Yet these approaches fail to address the issue at

hand, as neither asks us to read Heidegger. What does it mean to say that Heidegger stood behind National Socialism? Or that Nazism stands before

11. L6with's account of his meeting with Heidegger in Rome in April 1936 can be found in Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 57. This episode has been translated by Richard Wolin for a special section on Heidegger and Nazism in New German Critique 45 (1988): 115-16. This issue also contains L6with's 1946 article from Les temps modernes translated by Wolin and Melissa J. Cox from a longer German version and selections from Heidegger's political speeches translated by William S. Lewis. Wolin also contributes an essay, "The French Debate," which is largely polemical and often contradictory. He complains that Farias "is so brazenly tendentious . . . he ends up undermining his own case" (142); he then attacks the "base

Heidegger-apologists (Fedier, Aubenque, Cretella), who have seized on the purportedly tendentious nature of Farias's study to avoid confronting the disturbing facts of the case"

(151, my emphasis). In a rather clumsy gesture toward objectivity, Wolin criticizes Farias, but his real objection is that Farias leaves himself open to rebuttal. He twists the works of others to make it seem as if they share his views. He cites, for instance, Arendt's "Heidegger at Eighty" to imply that Heidegger cultivated a following that resulted in his

receiving the support of the Nazi youth groups (144). But in writing about Heidegger's fame as a teacher prior to the publication of Being and Time, Arendt states: "Later some

cliques formed here and there; but there never was a circle and there was nothing eso- teric about his following" (294). He adds in a note on Thomas Sheehan's review of Farias that "Sheehan's conclusions may be read as a strident indictment of the French apologists" (161), yet Sheehan's conclusions are, in fact, quite in line with the position taken by nearly all French critics who continue to think that Heidegger is of great importance to twentieth-century philosophy. He maintains that "one must reread his works ... with strict attention to the political movement with which Heidegger himself chose to link his ideas. To do less than that is, I believe, finally not to understand him at all" (47). To sup-

port his argument, he then cites Derrida's De r esprit, 53-73, and "Heidegger, I'enfer des philosophes," 173. Finally, I will simply point out that Wolin does not know the meaning of techne in Heidegger's work and confuses it with technology, turning Heidegger into a neo-Luddite.



Heidegger? And was his turn from fundamental ontology a turn from Nazi politics as well?

I do not propose to answer these questions. In approaching the question of Heidegger and the political, it is less important to have a thesis-for this usually implies foreknowledge of Heidegger's guilt or inno- cence-than it is to have a question: Where does one begin to ask the question of the political in philosophy? It is a question we can never cease asking, but never can begin to ask, for we are prevented from asking by our presuppositions. I suggest we begin by reading, although our engagement with Heidegger's texts cannot be a formalist one. For as much as we

would like to settle the question of the political by documenting Heidegger's

writings and actions and by passing from his fundamental ontology to the rhetoric of blood and soil, we must follow Heidegger's questioning of time and Being and his drift from guilt to the flame. Of this, a few words.

2

The question of Heidegger and politics is hardly without its presuppositions and may well be a question of the presupposition itself. To presuppose implies a knowing both anterior and posterior to any questioning. The answer is given before all questioning and is subsequently laid out (ausgelegt) through the questioning. Such questioning gives the hermeneutic circle its temporal character. We are familiar with this temporality

from section 32 of Being and Time, which sets out how circularity and questioning belong to the kind of Being that Dasein is. Dasein goes for- ward from in order to come back to what it is: "the question of existence

never gets straightened out except through existing itself."12 Heidegger is

12. Heidegger introduces the problems of temporality and historicality in sections 5 and

6 of Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), H. 12; hereafter cited in my text as BT. In keeping with the translators'

practice when cross-referencing and indexing, I will give the German pagination prefaced by "H."

All references to Heidegger's works will be cited as follows (all New York: Harper and Row except where noted): BW = Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (1977); ER = The Essence of Reason, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969); NIV = Nietzsche: Nihilism, vol. 4, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (1982); PLT = Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (1971); QCT = The Question Con- cerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (1977); WCT = What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (1968).

The essential political texts by Heidegger are "The Self-Assertion of the German Uni- versity: Address, Delivered on the Solemn Assumption of the Rectorate of the Univer-



not proposing that the meaning of existence is found through the immedi- acy of experience; rather, Dasein's interpretation of its existence is always oriented toward the future. Although he writes, "Dasein is its past," this past

does not merely stand behind Dasein, but is already ahead of it and waits to be disclosed in existing.

Circularity does not imply that interpretation (ausgelegt) is the cast-

ing of some preconceived meaning over some selected object, rather it has everything to do with ecstatic temporality, finitude, and mineness (Jemeinig-

keit). The relation of the questioner to the question is one of proximity: "That Being which is an issue for this being in its very Being, is in each case mine" (BT, H. 42). Presupposition, therefore, belongs to the structure of Dasein. As Jean-Luc Nancy remarks, the presupposition is already given to the questioner in its very mode of Being and forms its relation to Being.

But nothing precedes the presupposition: "the only Being presupposed is the Being of the presupposition."13 The circle never closes because Dasein is always trying to straighten itself out. Thus, interpretation belongs to tem-

porality as beginning and sending (envoi, Geschick), rather than to history, as conceived always within the motif of closure.14

I will have more to say about the hermeneutic circle, but here I wish

to point out that the relation of temporality to historicity is one crux of Hei-

degger and politics. We need also note how the question of Being, or the ontological question, is a question of origins, circles, and paths. The road that takes Heidegger from a fundamental ontology, to the 1933 celebration of spirit, and on to the ever early destiny of Being in his later works is a circle that never gets completely straightened out; instead, it becomes two roads forming a chiasmus or a somewhat crooked cross.

3

But I anticipate myself. Let me return to the question of presupposi-

tion. In the works by Farias and Fedier, Heidegger's political activity comes

sity Freiburg" (hereafter cited in my text as RA) and "The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts," trans. Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics 38 (Mar. 1985): 467-80, 481-502; "'Only a God Can Save Us': The Spiegel Interview (1966)," trans. William J. Richardson, S.J., in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chi- cago: Precedent, 1981), 45-67 (hereafter cited in my text as Spiegel). In addition, Farias's book contains extensive quotations from minor speeches and articles. 13. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le partage des voix (Paris: Galilee, 1982), 28. 14. Nancy, Le partage des voix, 37.



to us as the future, as a repetition, as having-been (BT, H. 385). Farias goes to texts written prior to 1933 to find that Heidegger must become a

Nazi sympathizer; Fedier reads Being and Time and discovers it excul- pates Heidegger from those errors of judgment he later commits. The two books are lessons in how not to read. But the furor over Farias's book

should not obscure the fact that Heidegger was much more enthusiastic in his support for Hitler than even his 1966 interview in Der Spiegel (published posthumously in 1976) suggests, an interview in which he reveals his finding in National Socialism an attempt to "achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity" (Spiegel, 61). (These facts are now easily available in numerous articles and reviews.) And through his memoirs and notes published after Heidegger's death, Karl Jaspers gives his own intimate picture of Heidegger's anti-Semitism: "I referred to the Jew- ish Question (Judenfrage) and the malicious nonsense about the sages of Zion. He [Heidegger] replied: 'There really is a dangerous international fra- ternity of Jews.' "15 Jaspers's notes from the 1960s confirm at least in part

Farias's argument that Heidegger went further in his aims for the university

than even the Nazi party desired, but Jaspers also says that Heidegger was blind to the crimes of Hitler's regime and that despite his participation

Heidegger also kept his distance: "[H]e remained a 'philosophic' national socialist." 16

Jaspers's memoirs are, nevertheless, primarily of biographical interest only, except for a remark that has more than anecdotal value. When Jaspers asked, "How shall a person as uneducated as Hitler rule Ger- many?" Heidegger replied, "Education does not matter. You should just see his wonderful hands!"17 This remark may well be a hidden subtext in the analysis of Heidegger's discourse on the hand in Derrida's "Le main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)." For Derrida, the hand in Heidegger is the prop-

15. Karl Jaspers, Philosophical Autobiography, in Paul Arthur Schlipp, ed., The Philoso- phy of Karl Jaspers, augmented ed. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981), 75/8 (translation modified).

16. Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Heidegger, in Basic Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986): "At that time, H. went further in some of his demands than the Party" (507).

17. Jaspers, Philosophical Autobiography, 75/9. Cf. Peggy Noonan on Ronald Reagan's foot: "I first saw him as a foot. ... I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek,

perfectly shaped. ... But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe even a little . . frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads" (from What I Saw at

the Revolution, excerpted in New York Times Magazine, 15 Oct. 1989, 24; last ellipsis found in the text).



erty of man and, as such, belongs to the discourse of humanism that ties together thought, speech, and the gift: "[T]he hand's gestures run every- where through language" and lead Heidegger to designate thinking as the gift of the hand (WCT, 16-17; Psych6, 126-29). The hand not only reflects Heidegger's privileging of handicraft and speech, but also determines the

question of humanity. In denying the hand to animals, Heidegger denies them a world. Only man possesses a hand, always in the singular: "But

the man who speaks and the man who writes by hand [ecrit a la main], as one says, isn't he the monster [monstre] of the single hand?" (Psyche, 438). This monstrous singularity signifies the hand that raised itself in the Nazi

salute; it is the hand that thinks humanity in the singular, a thinking of the

hand that both gives and takes and belongs to a discourse of earliness that includes alethbia, retrieval, destiny, and "the promise" that precedes the question-the promise of the spirit that is there (es gibt). But I am getting ahead of myself.

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Derrida have insisted that the story of Heidegger and Nazism is, by and large, a familiar one, thanks primarily to Guido Schneeberger, Hugo Ott, Jean-Michael Palmier, and others.18 But

18. Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern: Suhr, 1962), is to be used with caution as it does not always distinguish reports about Heidegger from authentic documents. Jean-Michel Palmier, Les ecrits politiques de Heidegger (Paris: Herne, 1968), devotes much attention to the influence of Ernst Jinger on Heidegger. The historical research of Hugo Ott is of extreme importance: "Martin Heidegger als Rektor der Uni- versitat Freiburg i. Br. 1933/34," Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins 102 (1983): 121-36 and 103 (1984): 107-30; "Martin Heidegger als Rektor der Universitat Freiburg 1933/34," Zeitschrift fur die Geschichte des Oberrheins 132 [n.s. 93] (1984): 343-58; "Martin Heidegger und die Universitat Freiburg nach 1945," Historisches Jahrbuch 105 (1985): 95-128; and "Martin Heidegger und die Nationalsozialismus," in Heidegger und

die praktische Philosophie, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert and Otto P6ggeler (Frank- furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 64-77. Farias relies heavily upon Ott's work. Richard Wolin summarizes Ott's work in "Recherches recentes sur la relation de Martin Hei-

degger au national socialisme," Les temps modernes 495 (Oct. 1987): 56-85. A philosophical commentary on Ott, Farias, and others is available in Michael E. Zimmerman, "The Thorn in Heidegger's Side: The Question of National Socialism," The Philosophi- cal Forum 20 (Summer 1989): 326-65; this is a valuable historical essay on the relation of Nazism to Heidegger's thought on Dasein and the confrontation with modern technology. A more critical assessment of the relation between technology and politics by someone equally well versed in Heidegger can be found in Karsten Harries, "Heideg- ger as Political Thinker," Review of Metaphysics 24 (June 1976); reprinted in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 304-28.



until the publication of Heidegger et le nazisme, Heidegger's own account of his dismissal from the rectorship and his fall into disfavor with the Nazi

regime was widely accepted in France and America. We now know that Heidegger remained a supporter of Hitler and a Nazism, for Heidegger's Nazism was not Rosenberg's, until the end. And despite his statements to the contrary, we know that he remained active in politics beyond his stint in

office, lending his authority to public occasions by participating in a cere- mony honoring Albert Leo Schlageter, a student who fought in the Freikorps and was executed by the French. In addition, we know of his infamous call to the students to serve by work and of his lesser-known participation in plans for the indoctrination of the workers and the unemployed (Farias, 138). Especially disturbing to us is his 1945 project for the organizing of the

Academy of the Reich (Dozentenakademie des Deutsche-Reiches) and his rethinking of "traditional science from the interrogation of the forces of

national socialism" as among his goals for the education of future leaders. But contrary to Heidegger's claim that his dismissal was due to his unwill- ingness to compromise the university, Farias informs us that a document from the ministry indicates that the authorities expected him to continue as

rector despite the battle over his appointment of Erik Wolf and Wilhelm von

Mo1llendorff as deans (Farias, 209). It now seems that the opposition came from the professors themselves, who resented deans being imposed upon their respective departments by the rector.

What distinguishes this debate from earlier ones, both in France and

now in America, is not, in the final analysis, the new information that proves

beyond question that Heidegger actively supported the Nazi regime, but the way in which the controversy has turned into an assault upon deconstruction and what we could call postmodern antihumanism. I will treat the

question of humanism below, but here I simply want to say that the proper subject of debate, the relation between philosophy and politics, has been lost in the attacks and apologetics produced by Heidegger's detractors and dissenters. Responsibility for the urgency of the polemic, as well as the level to which it has sunk, may be placed upon Farias. For, despite its new information, Heidegger et le nazisme is notable for three things: (1) Farias's

inaccuracies and errors scattered throughout; (2) his shoddy argumenta- tion that makes Heidegger a Nazi of the left who fell from grace because

of his adherence to the faction led by Ernst R6hm centered in the SA; (3) the furor he raises in Heidegger's staunchest defenders and the ready reception his argument receives from those who have already decided that Heidegger was a Nazi. An account of all its weaknesses would fill a book,



and Fedier attempts to do just that. But then someone needs to write a book detailing all of Fedier's evasions and misinterpretations.

Whereas Farias twists facts to prove that Heidegger's Catholic origins in Messkirch destined him to be a Nazi, Fedier minimizes or reasons around the damning evidence of Heidegger's activities. For instance, he argues that Heidegger's assumption of the rectorate after thirteen Jewish professors of a faculty of ninety-three were dismissed "can hardly be interpreted without inappropriateness as a sign of approbation" (F6dier, 98). Perhaps it was not a sign of approval, but it is acquiescence of a grievous sort. Fedier disputes those who criticize Heidegger for writing a letter de- nouncing Hermann Staudinger, who was later to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry, as a pacifist during the First World War (Farias, 131; F6dier, 99).

Fedier rightly questions why Heidegger, if he was a Nazi sympathizer, would denounce Staudinger and yet make von M1llendorff, a Social Democrat, a dean. Fedier concludes that "it seems to me that one can interpret the letter of the rector Heidegger according to another probability. Summoned to 'purify' his university, the rector ... designated as the single professor to

evict a colleague on the one hand won over to the new regime, and on the other indispensable to the war effort" (F6dier, 101-2). Fedier's argument is not only specious, but it also ignores the date of the letter: 22 February 1934. In the letter, Heidegger accuses Staudinger of opportunism-that is why Heidegger says he must be dismissed and not merely allowed to re- tire. Moreover, the letter was written nearly six years before the start of the

war-so much for the notion that Heidegger was attempting to undermine the German war effort.

As to the extermination camps, F6dier remarks that the Nazis were

not unique in "the massacre of innocents": "New with Nazism is that the

right of living has passed under the control of science" (F6dier, 161). F6dier locates the "caesure," wherein Germany no longer is comparable to other nations, in the decree of 1 September 1939 instituting "euthanasia," a policy

aimed at the disabled and handicapped, but generally recognized as paving

the way for the destruction of Jews and postponed in part due to protests. Although technology played a significant role in the Nazi effort to annihilate Jews (one that is still to be thought through), F6dier's argument shifts the meaning of Nazism from its ideology and politics, not just to a more gener-

alized biologism, but to the mechanical means of destruction. He reduces genocide to murder; the difference lies in the number of victims. Fedier fails

to recognize that the uniqueness of the Third Reich lies in an ideology that, as Hannah Arendt explains, could only be satisfied by the destruction of a



people. Anti-Semitism explains the choice of the victims, she argues, but not the crime itself, its "attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a

characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words 'mankind'

or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning."119 Arendt's concept of humanity

begins not with some essence that makes us human, but with diversity itself

and the priority of political thought, that which resides, to use her phrase,

"between past and future." The appeal to humanity, or more properly to such reified notions as the "rights of man," is an abdication of political responsibility. Principles that essentialize humanity are signs of either the powerlessness of those who cannot protect their rights or the efforts of the

powerful to exclude certain people from the political community and to re-

duce the rights of freedom to the private sphere where, no longer subject to thought and action, they become supposedly essential and inalienable.20

The misunderstanding of technology and racism is shared not only by Heidegger's apologists but also by his attackers, who fail to see that political responsibility for Nazism does not mean Heidegger was a rabid anti-Semite; there is little to no evidence of this. Nevertheless, Fedier's analysis of technology reflects Heidegger's wretched remarks about the death camps. In a conference on technology held in the Club at Bremen on

1 December 1949, Heidegger makes his single reference to the gas chambers: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, in its essence the same

as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same thing as the blockade and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs" (FP, 58).21

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who has brought this obscure remark to

19. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), 268-69. 20. See Hannah Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), 290-302. 21. "Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernahrungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und Aushungerung von Landern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasser- stoffbomben." Heidegger gave four lectures under the title "Insight into That Which Is."

The subtitles were "The Thing" ("Das Ding"), "Enframing" ("Das Gestell"), "The Danger" ("Die Gefahr"), and "The Turning" ("Die Kehre"). All but the third were published (they are available in English in Poetry, Language, Thought and The Question Concerning Technology). The remark itself was first quoted by Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und

Gelassenheit (Freiburg: Alber, 1983), 25. This passage is from page 25 of a typescript of the lecture. A portion of the statement appears in "The Question Concerning Technology," an expanded version of the second lecture (see QCT, 15).



attention, notes that its injustice lies not in its relating "to technology mass extermination," but in its failure to recognize a difference between the Nazi

efforts to exterminate Jews and the American manufacturing of nuclear arms or the modern food industry. He concludes that Heidegger's failure to speak of this difference is "extremely simple: it is that the extermination

of the Jews (and its programming in the frame [cadre] of a 'final solu- tion') is a phenomenon which essentially is not any matter of logic (political, economic, social, military, etc.) other than spiritual, however much it be degraded [fft-elle degradee], and consequently historical [historiale]. In the apocalypse of Auschwitz it is neither more nor less than the West, in its essence, that is revealed-and that never ceases, afterwards, to re-

veal itself. And it is the thought of that event that Heidegger has missed" (FP, 59).

Perhaps the final irony of these two books lies in their agreement that

Heidegger's Nazism lay in his commitment to socialism and the nation. In- sofar as these commitments had real meaning for Heidegger, F6dier writes,

"One can affirm without hesitation that Heidegger's engagement was not

criminal" (F6dier, 185). For Farias, it was precisely Heidegger's socialism that made him a Nazi of the left. A survey of the existing literature does

present a complex picture of contradictory interpretations and information

on the part of commentators and contradictory actions and writings on the

part of Heidegger. But even if the matter of Heidegger's engagement with Nazism were resolved by either Farias or Fedier, we would still need to read him. And readings of Heidegger are what we find in Derrida, Lacoue- Labarthe, and Lyotard.

4

The lures of analogy and anecdote are powerful because they in- vite us to situate the political in the easily recognizable realm of ethical discourse. Nietzsche, of course, critiqued values for being granted validity in themselves, whereas they are the "results of particular perspectives of

utility for the preservation and enhancement of human constructs of domi- nation" (NIV, 50), a problematic phrase to say the least.22 For Heidegger, the positing of values signifies the objectifying logic of representational thinking and shares with historicism the tendency to think the present as a product of the past or the objectification of beings as a standing reserve

22. Heidegger is quoting from Nietzsche's The Will to Power, section 12.



(Bestand), a resource to be ordered by mankind (NIV, 242). Values, according to the "Letter on Humanism," subjectivize beings, turning them into

mere objects (BW, 228). The power of ethical discourse lies in its commonality with the mechanism of representation that finds its most potent form in

the age of technology where the objectification of beings is determined by the situating of man as the measure of truth.

The call for a politics or ethics of deconstruction signifies a passion for values, the tenacity of subject/object dualism, and the division between thinking and acting. That Heidegger should be cited in a consideration of values should not be taken as a recuperation of his thought from his politi-

cal mistakes because his politics are inextricable from his philosophy.23 On the one hand, Derrida's comments on history indicate that Heidegger sub- sumes history within the homogeneous space of the history of metaphysics.

On the other hand, he turns Heidegger's characterization of metaphysical thinking as the oblivion of the ontico-ontological difference toward a rethinking of the word "history," which "in and of itself convey[s] the motif of

a final repression of difference." Derrida's recovery of difference is a recovery of history: "one could say that only differences can be 'historical' from the outset and in each of their aspects" (M, 11). The differences that

Derrida refers to are not anthropological or cultural but are the products of diff6rance, a quasitranscendental.24 Diff6rance is a non-word that at once

indicates Derrida's distance from and his proximity to Heidegger. In his insistence that such things as "history" or "politics" never are

as such, but are always inscribed in a text, a contextualized network of differences, he attempts to think the structure of referral that accounts for

history, politics, and philosophy. This structure is neither empirical nor tran-

scendental but marginal to the text.25 We have to distinguish the taking of

political stands, which Derrida has not been afraid to do, from the finding in deconstruction of a political program. The error is to see in deconstruction

both a tool of analysis and a program, which would turn it into a theory. What it can do is situate the political on some ground other than theory and praxis, a situation resting upon the mystifications of subjectivity, pres-

23. See Gregory S. Jay's fine essay, "Values and Deconstructions: Derrida, Saussure, Marx," Cultural Critique 8 (Winter 1987-88): 155-58 and 178-80 especially. 24. Rodolphe Gasche defines quasitranscendental as "conditions of possibility and impossibility concerning the very conceptual difference between subject and object and even between Dasein and Being." See his The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Phi- losophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 317. 25. See the discussion of marginality in Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror, 316-17.



ence, and dualism. It would-and here it can be seen to do what Heidegger

sought-place the political within a region, a text, from which experience situates itself in the traces or network of referrals:

[T]he text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference-to history, to the

world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other-since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an

experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextual-

izes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral

to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible.

Differance is a reference and vice versa. (LI, 137)

To say that reality always appears in an interpretive experience hardly means Derrida is a relativist or a radical hermeneutician, nor does it mean

that experience is directed towards understanding, as in Heidegger,26 for Derrida deconstructs history as "the production and recollection of beings

in presence, as knowledge and mastery" (SP, 102). Context signifies that something called "Being" or "history" or "presence" is not understood prior

to differance. "Being" does not come to us as a repetition of what lies before us, as the term "prior" may suggest; it desists, does not arrive, as retrait

because, Derrida writes, "the infinite differance is itself finite" (SP, 102). The structures of referral must be thought as the trace or differance, "the structure of the trace being in general the very possibility of an experience

of finitude" (Psyche, 561).

Again, I anticipate myself, for I need to distinguish Derrida's notion of the retrait from Heidegger's notion of repetition. Heidegger's concept of identification of Dasein with an authentic community belongs to represen-

tational thinking or to what Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe call "mimetolo-

gism."27 We can say that it is precisely in this tireless investigation of the ontological difference that Derrida's work has its most positive meaning, and it is the rejection of the need to think the meaning of this difference that

determines Lyotard's mimetologism.

26. Paul de Man, "Heidegger Reconsidered," in Critical Writings, 1953-1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 104. 27. Derrida discusses mimetologism in "The Double Session," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 175-285. He describes it as a discourse for deciding or determining the logos of the on (being-present) (191). Lacoue-Labarthe employs the term to describe the double and the contradictory logic of identification. Also of interest are their contributions to Mimesis des articulations (Paris:

Flammarion, 1975).



Lacoue-Labarthe's treatment of Heidegger is more explicitly political than Derrida's, but one can say of the latter what he writes of Lacoue- Labarthe: "1. One cannot nor should not read him without Heidegger; he never writes without pursuing an interminable reading of Heidegger. 2. And yet, what he does remains completely different" (Psyche, 624). Lacoue- Labarthe's and Derrida's readings of Heidegger are caught in this double bind of never ending their readings of Heidegger's texts and always reading him otherwise. This hardly means their interpretations are the same. In

fact, Lacoue-Labarthe's is quite critical of the "univocity" of Derrida's reading and his failure to comment on the political in Heidegger (LIM, 233). An account of the differences between them are too complex to deal with here,

but the ontico-ontological distinction that governs Heidegger's thought even

beyond the Kehre is germane to Derrida's examination of the question, to Lacoue-Labarthe's investigation of mimetology, and to Lyotard's analysis of the sublime.

5

The ontological difference distinguishes transcendence from the em-

pirical. Being does not "exist" above or beyond beings or existent things, but rather has its locus in the being whose Being is a question for it- Dasein. Being is a priori or anterior to beings, but empirically there is no Being without beings-Being is finite: "Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing" (BW, 110).

The transcendence of Dasein is found in its authentic temporality as futural-in anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein comes toward itself from

the future; that is, in existing, Dasein takes over its Being-guilty (we might say, it straightens itself out, but not quite). "Guilt" is a formal structure char-

acterizing Dasein's thrownness or the fact that Dasein finds itself always already in the world. To put it crudely, Dasein is not responsible for the fact

that it exists, nor does it lay the basis for its Being-in-the-world in some futural possibility; it is that basis itself in the very fact that it is, and it can

never come up behind that basis. "In being a basis-that is, in existing as thrown-Dasein lags behind its own possibilities" (BT, H. 284). In resolutely choosing one possibility, Dasein must tolerate that it only has one choice

and cannot choose others (BT, H. 285); this is not determinism, but simply means that by choosing we exclude other possibilities. As thrown, Dasein

tries to catch up with its past; and as ahead-of-itself, it is already its own-

most possibility, death. "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility



of Dasein" (BT, H. 250), which is to say, Dasein is ontologically-existentially characterized by-I hate to say it-not being dead. I don't wish to imply that Heidegger is uttering banalities in an obscure jargon; instead, death needs to be recognized as a formal term characterizing Dasein's temporality. As the uttermost not-yet, death signifies the differential, non-relational

character of Dasein. In Being-ahead-of-itself, Dasein is already its not-yet: "That which makes up the 'lack of totality' in Dasein, the constant 'ahead-

of-itself,' is .. . a 'not-yet' which any Dasein as the entity which it is, has to be" (BT, H. 244). Dasein does not fulfill itself in death, but is already its end insofar as its end is a "not-yet." The path from birth to death is a chiasmus-the not-yet of Dasein's potentiality "intersects" with the nullity of its thrown basis. But not too neatly. Heidegger will come to speak of this

differential relation of Being to being as Ereignis and will cross out Being. This cross saves Heidegger from going round in circles. Being is sent from an already-has-been to a not-yet that is already. If the question of existence

is to get straightened out by existing, it can do so only by erasing the traces of difference.

And somehow this is connected to the political. Lyotard, for instance,

locates in Heidegger's determining of freedom on the basis of Being the very source for his political error (HJ, 146). Nullity is the basis for freedom-

in choosing, one excludes other choices. But this choosing is not arbitrary. What one chooses is handed down, and this heritage is constituted by resoluteness: "Only by the anticipation of death is every accidental and 'provisional' possibility driven out. Only Being-free for death gives Dasein its goal outright and pushes existence into its finitude." Once Dasein has grasped the finitude of its own existence, it is brought "into the simplicity of

its fate [Schicksals]." Heidegger calls this Dasein's "primordial historizing." But Dasein is not alone in the world; it "exists essentially as Being-with Others," and, therefore, "its historizing is a co-historizing and is determina-

tive for it as destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historizing of

the community, of a people" (BT, H. 384). Fate (Schicksal) individualizes Dasein or can be said to apply to the individual, whereas destiny (Geschick) applies to the community. The problem is, if death is always my own, and Being-free for death is non-relational, how can Dasein be authentically itself

and Being-with Others? The problem is solved by repetition (Wiederholen). Dasein's fate is guided in advance, or handed down, but only be-

comes Dasein's own when Dasein hands this inheritance over to itself. As

a being that is equiprimordially (gleichursprunglich) futural and in the process of having-been, Dasein can hand down to itself the possibility it has



inherited (see BT, H. 384-85). Following Derrida, we can say that Dasein absolves itself of its debt/guilt (Schuld) by assuming a relation to the proper

(eigentlich) (PC, 358). Repetition does not follow from some original event but repeats the differential movement of guilt/debt. In repetition, Dasein legislates itself, hands itself its own lack, its not-yet-it affects itself with death (PC, 352-57; BT, H. 240).

The arrival of Dasein to itself is a sending toward an ever-deferred destination: death. Derrida has remarked how destination is riveted to iden-

tity (PC, 192). The jointure of eigentlich (ownness, the proper) and Ereig- nis (event, occurrence) indicates how Dasein's identity and the differential sense of guilt, the not-yet, and death are regulated by a self-affection (P, 54;

M, 129).28 Repetition, or an explicit handing down to itself of what is still outstanding, is identification.

In "La transcendance finie/t dans la politique," Lacoue-Labarthe writes that the determination of Dasein by the ontological concept of a people was "programmed" in section 74 of Being and Time, where Hei- degger employs the Nietzschean term "hero": "The authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been-the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero-is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness" (BT, H. 385; LIM, 152). A certain voluntarism and decisionism governs this passage. Choosing a hero means that explicit handing down or repetition conforms to a mimetology or theory of imitatio that makes the co-historizing

with others possible (LIM, 163). Since Plato, the political formation of a people has been thought on the basis of the mimetic process (FP, 123): "[T]he political is a matter of techne in the highest sense of the term, that is to say, in the sense where techne is thought as the accomplishment and the revelation of physis itself. This is why the polis is equally 'natu- ral': it is the 'beautiful formation' spontaneously spurting forth [jaillie] from

the 'genius of a people' (the Greek genius), according to the modern-but in truth very ancient-interpretation of Aristotelian mimetology" (FP, 103). Transcendence ends in politics because the "structure of transcendence is

the very structure of mimesis, of the relation between physis and techne" (LIM, 171).

Mimeticism is the institution of the subject or the "becoming self of the self," and "by definition, mimeticism forbids the presupposition of a

28. For a discussion of Derrida's critique of eigentlich and Ereignis in Heidegger, see Thomas Sheehan, "Derrida and Heidegger," in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and Don Ihde (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 205-12.



subject prior to the mimetic process, except to render it impossible." The "political fiction" indicates that the subject of imitation is not already a subject; otherwise we would be in the dialectical tradition of the Platonic (eidos)

(FP, 125). The subject of imitation is never itself for it can never appropriate

an original object of imitation-"It is necessary that the 'subject of imitation'

is a 'being' ['etre'] (in the sense of an entity [un etant]) originally open to, or

originally 'outside itself'--ek-static. It is indeed what 'is' the Heideggerean Da-sein." Therefore, "diff6rance is original to the subject" (FP, 126).

By introducing the structure of the originary supplement to mimeti-

cism, Lacoue-Labarthe displaces classical "imitatio" with a "rigorous mimetology" that locates in imitation an original diff6rance which prevents the subject from having access to itself. Because there is no subject prior to imitation, "the structure of the original supplementarity is the very structure

of the relation between techne and physis" (FP, 127). If techne brings forth

or brings to light, it supplements physis, the emerging into itself of all things.

Physis is an "original" concealing, the presencing of Being within the sphere of that which is; but imitation requires the human in the sense of techn&, which, Lacoue-Labarthe writes, "is not a representation in the sense of a second presentation, specular or reproductive, duplicative, but representation in the full sense of the word in French, that is to say in the sense of to render present [rendre pr6sent]. The difficulty is, as always, to think

an original secondarity-or rather that the origin is second, initially divided

and deferred [differee], that is to say as diff6rance" (FP, 128).29 Lacoue- Labarthe concludes that insofar as the essence of techne is a mode of

unveiling (aletheia), then it is fundamentally language (Dichtung, Sprache Sage): "This is why it is in effect permitted to think that mythos is the most

'archaic' of technai and that, secondarily, the mimetic is always linked to

the mythic" (FP, 130).

6

In disclosing the mimetic grounds of the political, Lacoue-Labarthe reveals how Heidegger's project from the founding of the world as the site of transcendence through the introduction of Gestell as the essence of technology is determined by the thought of a people. Mimetology thema- tizes history as imitation and repetition, that is, as myth. Myth is the most

29. Rendre conveys the notion of repetition in its various definitions: to give in return, as

in paying back a debt; to return like for like; to present in translating.



powerful instrument of identification; it alone permits "a people to accede

to its own language [langue propre] and situate itself there as such in His-

tory." (FP, 88).30 When in the "Rectorship Address" Heidegger calls upon students and faculty to catch up with the greatness of the Greek beginning,

he calls upon them to repeat that which is still to come (RA, 473-74). In order to become itself, Germany must appropriate a model that, in its turn,

can accede to itself only in this repetition. The destabilization of mimesis is the destabilization of the structure

of transcendence and representation upon which rests Heidegger's concept of identification (LIM, 171). Heidegger's thought remains within the determination of Being by representation; in other words, the question of Being discloses itself in Greek thought, and its site is the most metaphysical of nations, Germany, the Abendland. The annihilation of Jews would,

therefore, mean the destruction of the testimony of a totally other history. As the revelation of the West, Auschwitz signifies the death of God: "God is indeed dead at Auschwitz, in any case the God of the Greco-Christian West" (FP, 62).

The death of God, I would add, is properly a Christian and pagan theme and has nothing to do with Judaism. Moreover, to speak of Ausch- witz as the revelation of the West is to invoke the Heideggerean concept of destiny. And when the means of extermination are said to be indus- trial, then Auschwitz is the essence of the technological world picture. For Lacoue-Labarthe, this identification of Auschwitz with technology makes Heidegger's single reference to gas chambers "absolutely just," however inadequate it may ultimately be in accounting for the Nazi ideology of the Jewish menace to German identity and the policy of extermination (FP, 61).

Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis remains within the margins of Heidegger's text, not that he uses Heidegger to critique Heidegger, but that he subjects Hei- degger's questions to a reading that distances itself from what makes it possible.

Deconstruction, argues Lyotard, thinks the Other as Being and "has nothing to say of a thought of which the Other is Law" (HJ, 145). It approaches the end of philosophy within the thought of Being itself. Thus, according to Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe interprets Auschwitz as the des-

30. See also note 6 on Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "Le mythe nazi": "Myth is a fiction (in the strong sense, active fashioning, or as Plato said, of the 'plastic'),-myth is thus a fictionnement, whose rcle is to propose models or types ... with which an individual-or a city, or a people entirely-can seize himself and identify himself" (108).



tiny of the West and the framing of the question of the destruction of the

Jews-even the "Jewish question"-as inevitable within the Heideggerean opposition of techne and physis. Yet, for Lyotard, it is the absolute distance

of Jewish thought from all ontology and its proximity to the Law (God's commandment, "Be just") that makes Jews the victims of annihilation. For rather than assign a place to one who enunciates the Law, the Jews listen to the Law and to the Other (JG, 38-39). Unlike the obligation to obey the FOhrer because he is leader, the Jewish obligation is incurred by the Law, not by any being, including God (JG, 52-53). And insofar as Jews listen to the Law rather than Being, they are the custodians of the Forgotten, that which is without place, without name, a thought that lacks all representation

and all efforts to forget it. In place of mimesis, Lyotard proposes "an aes- thetic of shock, an anesth6tique," a writing that resists forgetting insofar as

it does not subordinate memory to the senses.

But also in opposition to this politics of forgetting, Lyotard then crosses the Kantian sublime with the Freudian problematic of memory to produce a politics of anamnese, "which does not forget that forgetting is not

an exhaustion of memory, but the immemorial always 'present,' never here-

now, always torn to pieces in the time of conscience, chronic, between a too early and a too late" (HJ, 41-42). A past that haunts the present signals an absence, an object of memory that affects us by its refusal to be recalled (HJ, 27). And if the sublime does not present an image adequate to an Idea of Reason, it "presents" by not representing. Such representing is akin to the Freudian concept of Nachtraglichkeit (deferred action), an aftering, a second blow or aftershock, that produces a before or first shock.

As "deferred action" suggests, the representation is a (re)constitution of presence by deferral. In this process, the forgotten is always present as the forgotten or the unrepresentable: not only the forgetting of the death camps, but the forgetting of the Jews as "the people of the other" (HJ,

45). To emphasize this Otherness, Lyotard writes "les juifs" to indicate he is not referring to Jews as members of an organized religion or a political movement (Zionism).

Representation is an active forgetting, but it cannot be avoided; it is a preserving in/as repressing. In art after Auschwitz, "the sublime does not express what is forgotten or repressed, but it says that it cannot say it" (HJ, 81). It "attends (upon) the Forgotten so that it remains unforgettable" (HJ, 128). Heidegger approaches this thought "of the Jews" in his reading

of H1olderlin as the poet of a "double lack and a double Not: the No-more



of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming."31 The withdrawal of the gods, however, is an anamnese that recalls the hidden in Western thought, the Other as Being.

In presenting Jewish Law as a thought that attends to the Law, not Being, Lyotard transforms the Heideggerean problematic of withdrawal, trace, and strife. The lack that constitutes Dasein is a lack that constitutes

the ethical, as contrasted with Heidegger's ontological description of conscience as hearing the call "guilty." In trying to destroy the Jews, Nazism tried to destroy the witnesses to a lack constitutive of the spirit, the Law that says, "Be just" (JG, 52-53). This Law is a debt that can never be discharged; it is "the difference between good and evil" (JG, 135); whereas guilt, grafted onto the concept of destiny, I would add, suggests that the debt can be discharged in the explicit handing down of an inheritance.

Lacoue-Labarthe charges Lyotard with remaining entrapped by a mimetology: the concept of the sublime as inadequation is a direct appeal to transcendence because this failure invokes a displeasure/pleasure that reveals to man his higher destination (LD, 165; LIM, 283). The debate between Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotard turns upon the question of mimesis; the former finds it far more determinative of Western thought than the latter

will allow. Although both find in Auschwitz a break or disruption in history,

Lyotard sees it as the end of speculative logic and the beautiful death (LD,

100-101). In invoking Hegel, Lyotard here and in Heidegger et "les juifs" locates in the horror of Auschwitz the end of ontology, for ontology is no longer possible without participating in the silence that sought to forget "the

Jews." Their difference ultimately lies in the question of Being and temporality, which is the question of the a priori. Lyotard argues that the call of Being presupposes the idea of man, from which flows Heidegger's concept of temporality as ek-stasis and the politics of the co-destining of a people (LD, 116). In opposition to the Heideggerean community, Lyotard proposes

a sensus communis free from determinative concepts, but "appeal[ing] to community carried out a priori and judged without a rule of direct presentation" (LD, 169). Lacoue-Labarthe argues that Lyotard's notion of the sublime is overdetermined by mimesis because he is too quick to pass beyond Heidegger; Lyotard dislocates Heideggerean epochal history with a

31. Martin Heidegger, "Hl1derlin and the Essence of Poetry," trans. David Scott, in Euro- pean Literary Theory and Practice: From Existentialism to Structuralism, ed. Vernon W.

Gras (New York: Dell, 1973), 40. Lyotard does not cite any specific passage but merely refers to the motif of waiting (128).



generalized mimesis that "is precisely . .. what you [Lyotard] claim": "the uncontrollable exchange of r6les and functions, the impossibility of a fixed

and determined assignation" (LIM, 276). It is what he calls elsewhere the logic of paradox-in order to imitate or represent, "it is necessary not to be anything by itself, have nothing of its own" (LIM, 27). It is a "fundamental

typography" in place of fundamental ontology (Psyche, 624).

7

Lacoue-Labarthe and Lyotard share a general tendency to regard the question of Heidegger's politics as a question of representation and temporality, the very question Heidegger addresses when he asks, what is Being? His questioning of the ontological difference is as important to Lyotard as it is to Lacoue-Labarthe. For the latter, the ek-static character of Dasein means that the subject accedes to itself only by means of an identification with a past that is still to come. And whereas Heideggerean

equiprimordiality maintains the opposition between fact and principle or ma- terial and formal transcendence, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the impossibility

of deciding the priority/proximity of Being to beings. The epochal history of the sending of Being is disrupted by what Derrida calls d6sistance: "an event, a law, a call, an other are already there, others are there-to whom and before whom it is necessary to respond. If 'free' as it ought to be, the

response inaugurates nothing if it does not come after" (Psych6, 625). The delay is "an other already there," a desisting, renouncing, a withdrawing- that is, simultaneously a stepping aside or stepping back and a waiting.

A delay or repression of the past governs Lyotard's critique of Hei-

deggerean representation. The thematics of near and far are replaced by a formal model of deferral inspired by Freud, and ontology is replaced by

the ethical. For Lyotard, "the thought of Heidegger remains enslaved to the

motif of the 'place' and of the 'beginning,' even after the turn" (HJ, 152). On-

tology ultimately closes off all questioning of Heidegger's silence because it remains incapable of thinking the Other (HJ, 153).

Nevertheless, in his preference for regional discourses, rather than

a master language or "meta-narrative," Lyotard participates with Lacoue- Labarthe and Derrida in what might be called the postmodern discourse of

heterogeneity. But his project differs from deconstruction in significant ways untraceable to his use of Kant and Wittgenstein instead of Hegel and Hei-

degger. Lyotard's leaning toward a pragmatism directly reflects his belief that Auschwitz signals a break in history that can very well be called the end



of philosophy. Derrida is far less sanguine about what he calls the closure of metaphysics: "We are still in metaphysics in the special sense that we are in a determinate language. ... So when I refer to the 'closure' (cl6ture) of metaphysics, I insist that it is not a question of considering metaphysics as a circle with a limit or simple boundary."32 Although Lyotard's pragmatism directs him to the judicatory powers of discourse(s) without a universal

principle, it also leads him to Jewish law as his model for a genre of ethics.

The Jew is the Other, according to Lyotard; Derrida finds heterogeneous elements in Judaism and Christianity that live on as a repressed subtext

in Western metaphysics (that is, in Greek thought), but is still less willing to describe the oppositional relatedness of Heidegger to Judaism as abso-

lute: Otherness is situated neither inside nor outside metaphysics, but in the fissure that characterizes Greek thought in its very beginnings.33

Finally, Derrida does not characterize Auschwitz as an end, just as he distinguishes the closure of metaphysics from an eschatological end of onto-theology. When he speaks of the divisibility of the limit-boundary,

however, he makes clear that we are not imprisoned in metaphysics. In view of his setting aside the metaphors of the line and the circle to char-

acterize closure, we should not look to impose a spatial metaphor in their place. The task of deconstruction is to discover "another topos of space where our problematic rapport with the boundary of metaphysics can be seen in a more radical light."34 The notion of divisibility entails a rethink-

ing of temporality and questioning. In privileging the question, Heidegger maintains beyond the Kehre the principle of an a priori that unfolds in the

future. This "given" is why Derrida can say that the question in Heidegger is always unthought. We might say the question has the form of a presupposition without any content; it is what makes thinking possible. Derrida

writes: "Geist is perhaps the name that Heidegger gives, beyond any other name, to this unquestioned possibility of the question" (DE, 26). Heideg- ger's political error lies in his desire for a master name that would delimit

the site of transcendence, that would reinscribe Being within the finite as Geist, spirit, flame.

We might say that the question of Derrida's relation to Heidegger

is the question of deconstruction and politics. De I'esprit: Heidegger et la

32. Richard Kearney, "Deconstruction and the Other" (an interview with Jacques Der- rida), in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 111. 33. See Kearney, "Deconstruction and the Other," 117. 34. Kearney, "Deconstruction and the Other," 111-12.



question traces the appearance of Geist, geistig, Geistlichkeit, and Geistig- keit in Heidegger's texts from 1927 to 1953. But Derrida's reading of Hei- degger is not merely a tracing of words, such as Geist or Geschlecht, in order to determine how Heidegger's thought is contaminated by the metaphysics he would avoid; it is an attempt to exhibit at once the necessity of Heidegger's thought and how that same thought is tied to Nazism(s)- Derrida will insist on this plurality. This passing through Heidegger's work

begins, not with the question of Being, but with the question that precedes this originary gesture, the question of the question and all the threads (fils conducteurs) bound in it-destiny and the beginning, die FrOhe, being among the most prominent, but also the question of animals, the hand, techne, destitution, and language. Finally, it is a question of the hermeneu-

tic circle-a question Derrida always raises but rarely mentions. Derrida asks why Heidegger avoids the word "spirit" in Being and

Time, only to write a hymn to it in 1933. He traces the "hidden teleol- ogy or narrative order" in Heidegger's thought of epochality that leads toward a notion of spirit between a Platonic-Christian concept and an onto-theological one (DE, 29). It will be a question of Geistlichkeit (a non- Christian spirituality) as opposed to Geistigkeit (a spirituality in an intellec-

tual sense) (DE, 51). In Being and Time, Heidegger takes as his point of departure the power of questioning itself. The problem of Dasein's exem-

plarity is the uncertainty of the point of departure for the question of Being.

This point is not univocal but equiprimordial, of multiple characteristics: "as

futural, [Dasein] is equiprimordially in the process of having-been" (BT, H. 385). Dasein's exemplarity lies in the identical structure of the question and temporality; both have the character of disclosing the past as something that lies ahead.

Derrida's inverted title points to his preoccupation with the question

of departure or the sending of the question. Spirit precedes the question of-of Being, time, Heidegger's politics. Although Heidegger will say in Being and Time that "spirit" is a word to be avoided, it is nothing other than

temporality, as his critique of Hegel's interpretation of time as Vorhandenes makes clear: "'Spirit' does not first fall into time, but it exists as the primordial temporalizing of temporality. Temporality temporalizes world-time, within the horizon of which 'history' can 'appear' as historizing within-time.

'Spirit' does not fall into time; but factical existence 'falls' as falling from primordial, authentic temporality" (BT, H. 436). Spirit, Derrida comments, does not fall; it "is essentially temporalization" (DE, 51). The fall into inau-



thentic time is a fall into the Present. "The Present leaps away from its au-

thentic future and from its authentic having been, so that it lets Dasein come

to its authentic existence only by taking a detour through that Present" (BT,

H. 348). Derrida's reading of the ecstatic character of temporality discloses that the uncertainty of the point of departure lies in spirit/time itself. Spirit

haunts Heidegger's text; as temporality, it makes questioning possible. Heidegger's failure to ask "What is spirit?" does not just mean his

thought is haunted by metaphysics. When Heidegger no longer avoids the word Geist, "spirit itself," Derrida writes, "will be defined by this manifesta-

tion and by this force of the question" of how to avoid confirming a priori

the structure of the question that gives Dasein its privileged character (DE, 37). "Spirit" will be the signpost marking Heidegger's efforts to "break the empty circle of reflection which menaces the question of Being" (DE, 70), to free the question from the a priori, and to situate it in a more fundamental

primordiality than the temporalizing of Dasein. When Heidegger drops the quotation marks in the "Rectorship Address," the question manifests itself as will: "If we will the essence of science understood as the questioning, unguarded holding of one's ground in the midst of the uncertainty of the totality of what-is, this will to essence will create for our people its world,

a world of the innermost and most extreme danger, i.e., its truly spiritual [geistig] world. For ... spirit is primordially attuned, knowing resoluteness toward the essence of Being" (RA, 474). The "self-affirmation" of the

title will form the union between the people, the leader, the world, history,

the will, and "the existence of Dasein in the experience of the question" (DE, 63). Self-affirmation is "of the order of spirit, the very order of spirit"

(DE, 55). Therefore, nothing precedes the question in its freedom, for in the "essential opposition of leading and following," the "FOhren [leading] is already a questioning" (RA, 479; DE, 69).

Heidegger's hymn to spirit is governed by the motifs of leading and following, before and after. It is, as Derrida describes it, a discourse of "response and responsibility" (DE, 63). Derrida follows Heidegger's self- defense, that he only wanted to save what was positive in the movement and did not endorse nationalism or racism (see his Der Spiegel interview and his 1945 report to the Allies), but finds in this strategy the problem of choosing between irreducible choices. "Because one cannot remove the marks of biologism, naturalism, racism in its genetic form, one can confront it only in reinscribing [on ne peut s'y opposer qu'en r6inscrivant] the spirit in an oppositional determination." But the discourses which today



oppose racism and totalitarianism themselves act "in the name of spirit, namely of liberty and spirit, in the name of an axiomatic-for example, that

of democracy and the 'rights of man'-which, directly or not, return to this

metaphysics of subjectivity" (DE, 65). Derrida warns the reader against thinking he is equating Nazism and democracy, but he is arguing that the irreducibility of their complicity in a discourse of spirit is a fact that demands "responsibilities of 'thought' and of 'action' absolutely new [inedits]" (DE, 66).

Derrida can hardly be said to be straddling the fence, being no more

willing to exculpate Heidegger than to condemn him; he situates Heideg- ger's politics in the most fundamental aspect of his thought, the question, and plots the trajectory of his discourse within the European discourse of humanism. Derrida's analysis of this "logic" aims at exhibiting the "terri-

fying mechanisms of this program, all the double constraints which they structure," but refrains from criticizing Heidegger's teleological humanism because it is "the price to pay in the ethico-political denunciation of biolo-

gism, racism, naturalism, etc." (DE, 87). Derrida's analysis is neither Heideggerean nor anti-Heideggerean.

Although Heidegger is of undeniable importance to deconstruction, Der- rida breaks with Heidegger's interpretation of metaphysics as the forgetting

of Being. And his translation of Being by text makes Heidegger's efforts to leave behind the ontico-ontological difference for the neutrality of Being

impossible. In his late works Heidegger sought to think Being apart from beings, as the destining of Being, as an event without a "why?" But as Der- rida demonstrates in La carte postale, the thinking of the destiny of Being

as epochality, a sending that holds itself back, still partakes of representational thinking because the epochal transmutations of Being are what allow Being to show itself. Were Being to arrive, it would be the "worst of 'final solutions,' " a final selection (Derrida puns on Triage, "selecting"; trier, "to sort"; tuer, "to kill" [PC, 16]). Hence, Being, like postcards, can always not arrive at its destination. Deferral is essential, or, to put it another way, dif-

ferance is older than Being; it is nothing itself, but it "renders determinacy both possible and necessary" (LI, 149).

With such terms as differance, re-mark, and text, Derrida sets out what makes philosophical discourse possible and impossible. This is why deconstruction is, as Derrida says, affirmative; it exhibits the ethico-political

in philosophical thought. And here is where he agrees with Heidegger; as long as we are situated in a determinate language, we are in metaphysics. The point is not to get out of metaphysics and even less to get in it the



right way; we can only have recourse to an untranslatable pas, a step that annuls and makes possible.35

Although Derrida's grammatology is decisively different from Hei- degger's fundamental ontology, he rhetorically asks: "But at the moment where we explicate with Heidegger in a critical or deconstructive fashion, shouldn't we continue to recognize a certain necessity of his thought, its character inaugural in so many respects and above all which remains to come for us in its decoding?"36 If Heidegger's envoi of spirit is refused for

all the obvious reasons that De I'esprit explores, a possibility remains that it will not reach its destination.

I refer to the "Envoi" of La carte postale and the determination of the

sending of Being by the "postal principle." Heidegger's thought is haunted by this possibility of not arriving, for spirit must leave itself in order to be

itself. The "figure of evil for Heidegger," Derrida writes, is "the certitude of the cogito in the position of the subjectum and thus of the absence of

original questioning" (DE, 101). This absence means the spirit is reified as subject, but the proximity of spirit to itself is not spatial but postal: "Man having a privileged relation to being [I'6tant] as such, his opening to that which is sent-dispensed, destined-him confers to him an essential Ge- schichtlichkeit. This permits him to be and to have a history" (DE, 122). Derrida characterizes Heidegger's thought on the envoi of spirit as a chias-

mus rather than a circle: "It belongs to the essence of spirit that it may be its own (eigentlich) only if it is close to itself" (DE, 127). But to be itself, spirit must go outside itself to return, or else it is thought as being present-

at-hand. In 1953, Heidegger calls spirit "flame," a gathering apartness.

Die Sprache im Gedicht, Eine Erorterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht represents Heidegger's ultimate response to the question, "What is spirit?" He seeks "to point out the proper place or site" of Trakl's poetic statement,

which, he insists, is single or univocal. But as Derrida indicates, any such univocality must issue from flame, the self-dividing gathering; and gathered

in Heidegger's dialogue with the past are the paths of questioning that find themselves intersecting where "a more original thought of time opens itself to a thought more appropriate to spirit" (DE, 144). This thought will be of a singular Fruhe, an original earliness "before the first" (avant I'au-

35. For Derrida's discussion of the pas, the step and the not or negative, see "Pas," in his Parages (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 21-116. The pas is the double movement of an arrival that does not arrive in Maurice Blanchot's Le pas au-dela (see pp. 56-57). 36. Eribon, "Heidegger," 171.



paravant), that is, "a coming of the event, Ereignis or Geschehen, that is

necessary to think in order to approach the spiritual, of the Geistliche dis- simulated under Christian or Platonic representation" (DE, 149-50). This thought, more appropriate to spirit, is the promise because "man is man

only because he is granted the promise of language" (OWL, 90). Anterior to all questions, anterior even to the call of Being, the prom-

ise is "old enough to have never been present in an 'experience' or an 'act of language' " (DE, 147n). If what we speak is already ahead of us, as Heidegger says, then questioning, the "piety of thinking," is listening: "ques-

tioning [Fragen] is not the proper gesture of thought but-the listening to the Zusage (promise) of that which is to come in the question" (DE, 148n). In "The Nature of Language," Heidegger writes: "Every question posed to the matter of thinking, every inquiry for its nature, is already borne up by the

grant of what is to come into question. Therefore the proper bearing of the

thinking which is needed now is to listen to the grant, not to ask questions"

(OWL, 75). The question is a listening to the promise that comes before, but this before only arrives in the question.

Language must grant itself, for we must already be in language in order to speak: "This promise sets nothing down, it does not promise [pro-met], it does not put before, it speaks. This Sprache verspricht.... Language or speech [Ia langue ou la parole] promises, promises itself [se promet] but also it disavows itself, it undoes itself or breaks down, it is

derailed [deraille] or raves [delire], deteriorates, corrupts everything immediately and essentially [tout aussit6t et tout aussi essentiellement]" (DE, 145-46).37 What the promise promises is authentic temporality, a before that grants to man a more original questioning more appropriate to spirit. This will be, according to Heidegger, a "flame that inflames, startles, hor- rifies, and shatters us. . . . What flame is the ek-stasis which lightens and calls forth radiance, but which may also go on consuming and reduce all to white ashes" (OWL, 179). Derrida traces a trajectory in Heidegger's thought from Being and Time and the Schuldigsein that precedes moral conscience to the spirit that is "both gentleness and destruction," evil and pain, that animates the soul (OWL, 179-81).

Derrida's engagement with Heidegger and the promise of spirit re-

37. Derrida cites Paul de Man's discussion of the promise in Rousseau, the discussion where he introduces Die Sprache verspricht (sich). See Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rilke, Proust, Nietzsche, and Rousseau (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1979), 277. See also Derrida's discussion of the promise in his Memoires: For Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 96-101.



veals that the promise promises what is already there or was in place before

the Platonic-Christian beginning; it is what Heidegger calls Geschehen. The piety of questioning gives way to a listening that Derrida calls a "responsibility" or response to this primordial sending. "Thought," he writes, "is fidelity to this promise" (DE, 151). The word en-gage, which he employs throughout a lengthy note (DE, 147-54), is used in conjunction with a call to military service, thereby echoing Heidegger's exhortation to the

students in the "Rectorship Address." The characterization of thought as listening and obeying is, consequently, more deeply rooted in Heidegger's thought than any easy analogy between his terminology and Nazi ideology would indicate. Derrida's disturbing proposal concerning the "necessity" of Heidegger's thought is that Nazism cannot be held at a distance; to think

otherwise "is in the best hypothesis a naivet6, in the worst, an obscuran- tism and false politics."38 His concern with Heidegger's elevation of spirit rests, in part, upon its commonality with the discourses of the spirit (political,

religious, humanist) opposed to Nazism. When Derrida says that "Nazism could have developed itself only with the differentiated but decisive com-

plicity of other countries," he is as much concerned with European thought

as he is with accommodation, collaboration, and avoidance. For in reading Heidegger, he is proposing that Nazism was neither a historical aberration

nor a perversion of a healthy tradition, but linked to this tradition in a very

specific if highly mediated way. This link does not justify an easy move from listening, to the promise of language, and to obedience to the Fuhrer, but

it suggests that Nazism belongs to Western thought as much as we may wish to exclude it. Moreover, this charge of adherence is far from a simple equation of Nazism with Western thought; it is a challenge to think and not to fall back upon slogans, one of the most prominent being the call to preserve humanism.39

The basic charge leveled against Derrida's and Lacoue-Labarthe's readings of Heidegger is that they attribute Heidegger's adherence to Nazism to remnants of metaphysics and/or humanism in his thought, but they do so only to argue that the late works on techne following the "Kehre" are anti-Nazi. I hope that my account of their works indicates that this interpretation is a distortion. Lacoue-Labarthe, for instance, insists that Hei- degger's writings help us think the truth of "national aestheticism," even if

38. Eribon, "Heidegger," 173.

39. The most vociferous defenders of humanism are Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. See their Heidegger et les modernes for an attack on Heidegger, Derrida, and Lacoue- Labarthe.



that truth would be unrecognizable to the Nazis (FP, 160), and that Hei- degger "never renounced the possibility of linking the possibility of History [I'historialit6] to the possibility of a people or the people" (FP, 168). Der- rida's essay on Heidegger closes by examining the double road of Heideg- ger's thought: one that leads to the spirituality of the promise and the other

that is Other, an original heterogeneity that makes the thought of the origin

possible (DE, 176-78). For Derrida, Heidegger's account of heterogeneity as "contamination" of the essence opens questions that let us examine Nazism and his response to it. In an interview he says: "I try on the contrary to define deconstruction as a thought of affirmation. Because I believe

in the necessity of exhibiting, if possible without limit, the profound adher-

ence of the Heideggerean texts (writings and acts) to the possibility and the reality of all Nazisms."40

Just as Derrida critiques the notion of Nazism as monolithic ideol-

ogy, he also argues that Heidegger's text is not homogeneous: it is "written

with two hands, at least" (Psyche, 447). And, we might add, it follows two roads of thought, for the flame/promise/spirit that Heidegger inscribes at the origin is not singular but a Riss, a word signifying the "retrait by which

spirit relates to itself and divides itself in this kind of internal adversity that

gives place to evil in inscribing in it, as it were, flame" (DE, 171). Evil resides

in this primordial earliness, for it belongs with Geist to the metaphysics of

humanitas and animalitas (only man, Heidegger writes, can be evil) (DE, 169). And when Derrida looks at Heidegger's language of spirit, flame,

promise, arch6-originality, he finds analogies not only with Christianity but with Jewish messianism as well, although he does not reduce these echoes to sameness.41 Therefore, if the path of Heidegger's thought of the "hetero-

40. Eribon, "Heidegger," 173. 41. In this context, Derrida footnotes Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption (DE, 165), where we find under the section heading "Blood and Spirit": "There is only one community in which such a linked sequence of everlasting life goes from grandfather to

grandson, only one which cannot utter the 'we' of its unity without hearing deep within a voice that adds: 'are eternal.' It must be a blood-community, because only blood gives present warrant to the hope for a future" (1971; rpt. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Uni- versity Press, 1985), 298-99. Derrida's argument that similarities exist between what are taken to be opposing discourses tends to obscure the problem of the relation of philosophy to political action, but this should not lead us into thinking he is equating Nazism

with Judeo-Christian thought. Karl L6with found a strong affinity between Heidegger and Rosenzweig. See "M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig: A Postscript on Being and Time,"

in Nature, History, and Existentialism. And Other Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. Arnold Levison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966).



geneity at the origin" is the Other of Christianity, it also intersects Christian

thought (DE, 176-82). Heidegger's two roads of thought trace a circle and a cross, a circular path to the spirituality of a promise foreign to Christianity

and a crossing that grants "access to thought, thinking access to the possibility of metaphysics or of pneumato-spiritualist religions" (DE, 183). But Heidegger's repetition is hardly simple; if the path to another site, a site that is other than the Platonic-Christian one, gives access to spirit in all its modes, both Christian and non-Christian, then this path is always double,

both same and Other, a vertiginous site shared uneasily by Heidegger and others.

Derrida finds nothing fortuitous in Heidegger's exchange with Chris-

tianity: "Nazism was not born in the desert [Le nazisme n'est pas ne dans le desert]. ... And even if, far from any desert, it had sprouted like a mush-

room in the silence of a European forest, it had done so in the shadow of great trees, by the tree of their silence or of their indifference but in the

same soil. Of these trees which plant in Europe an immense black forest I will not make a list; I will not count the species" (DE, 179).

8

What was the upshot of Heidegger's "experiment"? The question of Heidegger's politics is the question of where do we stand when we think?

This is a question of temporality and of reading rather than of history because without the thinking that situates us in time, there can be no history. When Hegel, in response to the remark that his theory didn't fit the facts,

replied, "So much the worse for the facts," he was not suggesting that truth

does not matter. His remark can stand as philosophy, but not as political

thought, as long as we do not mistake facts, which are "always related to other people," for truth, which "is foreign to the realm of human affairs." As

Arendt argues, facts, unlike truth, can be distorted by lies, but truth exists

in relation to error, not lies.42 Politics and philosophy conflict because the former is a matter of representation, the latter of truth. Hegel knew this dis-

tinction in writing "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling

of the dusk." Philosophy comes on the scene too late to give instruction. And Marx responded: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world

42. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 238, 249; hereafter cited in my text as BPF. Arendt is following Heidegger's translation of truth as aletheia, "unconcealment."



in various ways; the point is to change it." Marx, as Arendt points out, left philosophy for politics, but carried theory into the realm of action (BPF, 21).

For Heidegger, theory and action are united in thinking: "Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because

it is applied. Thinking acts insofar as it thinks" (BW, 193). The critique of Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida is that Heidegger's thinking was of a nature that could not overcome the traditional conflict between politics and philoso-

phy. In other words, Heidegger's thought is still bound by representation- in all its ramifications; and insofar as truth is linked to representation, his

thought allows for his adherence to Nazism. In Arendt's terms, Heidegger succumbed "to the temptation to use his truth as a standard to be imposed upon human affairs." When philosophical truth enters the political realm, coercion replaces freedom: no one is free to reject the transcendent truth of philosophers (BPF, 237, 239).

And yet Heidegger, inasmuch as he remains a thinker, helps us see

this. Arendt argues that the thinker stands in non-time, the gap between past and future, where time no longer conforms to the Roman concept of tradition as linearity but is broken. This gap, Arendt writes, is "not even a historical datum" but is "the path paved by thinking" (BPF, 13). This "think-

ing removes what is close by, withdrawing from the near and drawing the distant into nearness-[it] is decisive if we wish to find an answer to the question of where we are when we think."43 It is this step back of thinking

that allows what is near to distance itself and allows the epochal principles, which govern thinking and acting, to show themselves.44

But insofar as Heidegger could maintain that "questioning is the piety

of thought" (QCT, 35), then his thought belongs to the epochal principle that Derrida calls the "metaphysics of humanitas." To find a way in which

43. Hannah Arendt, "Heidegger at Eighty," in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 300. This essay originally appeared in New York Review of Books, Oct. 1971. Also see her discussion of Heidegger in The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978). 44. Epochs are revealed in the crises or reversals which separate one epoch from another. Arendt, as we have seen, calls these reversals the between or the gap where thinking takes place, and the concept is not without affinities to Derrida's retrait. I am in- debted to Reiner Schirmann's analysis of epochal principles in Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros and Reiner Schormann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 25-32. Although he only deals briefly with the polemical aspects of the debate, Schirmann's book is an invaluable contribution to the understanding of Heidegger and politics. It is not only a superb work of Heidegger scholarship but is also a powerful work on political philosophy in its own right.



thinking participates in the realm of political action, we must "invent the other," to use Derrida's phrase, recognizing that invention does not occur without an inaugural act and, at the same time, must "be able to be re-

peated, exploited, reinscribed" (Psyche, 16). This "originary" repetition is the invention of "the impossible," that is, the invention of what cannot be invented but only comes in not coming, as Other: "Because the other is always an other origin of the world and we are to be invented. And the Being of the we, and Being itself. Beyond being" (Psych6, 60). Heidegger tried to think the event of Being, an event, to put it crudely, that could not think the Other. His we was inherited, not invented; it was Greco-Germanic.

And at least for a moment, he felt the gap close and anticipated the dawn of a beginning that, inaugurated by the Greeks, stood before the German people. Unlike Heidegger, Derrida remains in the gap, in a writing open to the Other, where thinking, what he prefers to call "writing," is of political

relevance precisely because it is bound to others: "This writing is liable to [passible de] the other, open to the other, and by it . . . like the future, because it is the only care that it bears: to let come the adventure of the

event of the completely other. Of a completely other which can no longer confuse itself with the God or Man of onto-theology nor with any of the figures of this configuration" (Psyche, 61). The non-humanist thinking inaugurated by writing is responsibility to the Other. Thinking is no longer a matter for the individual in the private sphere but occurs with others; it has,

in other words, become a concern for us all since, as Arendt puts it, the

breaking of tradition, what we may call the linear or genealogical concept of time, "became a tangible reality and perplexity for all" (BPF, 14). This

critique is something more than debating the relevance of Heidegger's politics to his philosophy. When anecdotes and analogy are used to settle this question, then philosophy is metamorphosed into opinion; and when this metamorphosis occurs, we abandon reading and are left with the nonsense

of "/'affaire Heidegger."


review essay. dr. heidegger's experiment

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