HEIDEGGER-Francia&Política

7/28/2019 HEIDEGGER-Francia&Poltica

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HEIDEGGERFRANCE, POLITICS, THE UNIVERSITY

Pierre Joris

First of all, an insistent reference to the West and to "Western

Civilization," a theme or lexicon whose careless manipulation has

often slid over into rather undemocratic theses, as we know now from

experience, especially when it is a question of a "decadence" of the

said Western Civilization. As soon as anyone talks about "decadence of

Western Civilization," I am on my guard. We know that this kind oftalk can sometimes (not always) lead to restorations or installations

of an authoritarian, even totalitarian order.

Jacques Derrida, "Like the Sound of the Sea

Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War", Critical Inquiry(page 601)

I

The American publication of Victor Farias' book Heidegger and

Fascism 1, though unlikely to cause the same kind of storm its orginalFrench publication did two years previously, is nevertheless bound to

retable the question of Heidegger's political stance and engagement.

The recent polemic concerning the young Paul de Man's involvement with

fascism seems now to be fading, possibly suggesting a certain

lassitude among the intellectual community. It would be most

unfortunate if this caused the Farias book to slip by unnoticed. What

follows does not purport to be an exhaustive examination of the

questions announced in the title: the hypertrophied size of the

current literature concerning these problems would make such an

undertaking impossible in the limited context of this essay. Rather,

what I propose to do is to examine the problem of Heidegger's

politics, with special reference to the University, in the light of

four books recently published in France2, while drawing on a number of

other essays, reviews and magazine articles published in that country

over the last two years3, as well as on some work concerning these

matters published in the US. That time period has witnessed, in

relation to Heidegger, what the French call 'un scandale', triggered

by the publication of Farias' book. This scandal, rather than

remaining confined to the hallowed halls of the university and the

'specialists' in Heidegger studies, instantly became a major media

affair, turning Farias' book overnight into a controversialbest-seller. Ever since, an unceasing stream of articles, essays,


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statements, rebuttals & "I-told-you-so's", instant books on the

subject and television appearances by the major tenors of the Parisian

intelligentsia, have kept the scandal simmering, if not on the boil.

Except for Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, which had been in

elaboration for quite some time, and parts of which had appeared overthe last years (published by the University of Strasbourg, for

example), the books I am mainly concerned with were written in the

wake of the publication of Farias' vehement, not to say defamatory,

attack on Heidegger. I will therefore start with a brief summary of

the latter book, before moving on to Fdier's essay which

attempts a point for point rebuttal of Farias' positions from the

point of view of a strict heideggerian. Finally, I will turn to

Lacoue- Labarthe's seminal analysis of the politics of fascism, an

analysis which goes far beyond both Farias and Fdier's

positions and tries to come to terms with the question Adorno put: is

Heidegger's philosophy "fascist in its most intimate components"?

Lyotard's essay and the Ferry/Renaud analysis will be discussed at

relevant moments of the essay.

Victor Farias' book, "Heidegger et le nazisme" claims to the

be both the most complete and most revelatory, in-depth

literary-historical analysis of Heidegger's political believes and

activities, especially of his relation to National-Socialism. Farias

sets himself up as an ex-student of Heidegger, and, as Hugo Ott notes

in the review4 we will discuss in more detail later on, Farias did

take part in the seminar on Heraklitus which Heidegger taught togetherwith Eugen Fink during the winter semester 1966/67 in Freiburg. But

this seems to be the only link to Heidegger: Farias graduated in 67 in

Freiburg under Gerhardt Schmidt (a student of Eugen Fink's) with a

thesis on Franz Brentano. The only other connection is Farias's claim

in interviews with media after the success of his book, that Heidegger

opposed a proposed translation of Being and Time into Spanish,

supposedly because he considered the latter an inferior language,

incapable of expressing his thought. Ott playfully suggests that this

"rejection" of Farias by Heidegger may have "traumatized" the young

Chilean philosopher - the motive for the Oedipian "crime"?

Be that as it may, Heidegger et le Nazisme is certainly not a

disinterested or 'objective' study of the German philosopher. The

admittedly vast amount of informations and documents Farias has

gathered, are marshalled not with the aim of making a dispassionate

presentation of the facts, or of opening up a debate that has been

simmering away on the back burner for a long time5, but with the

avowed intention of serving as buttresses for Farias' main project,

which is best described as a savage attempt to demolish Heidegger's

thought by suggesting that fascism was the mainspring, both

intellectually and politically, of the philosopher's life-longundertak- ing.


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Before going into a detailed analysis of the French reactions

to the Farias book, it may be useful to relate a more dispassionate

view from outside France. Hugo Ott, probably the best-known German

specialist in matters Heidegger (his biography of the philosopher,

Unterwegs zu einer Biographie, came out earlier this fall), reviewedthe Farias book for the Neue Zrcher Zeitung . He starts by

pointing out that, although the book first came out in France in late

1987 (originally written in German and Spanish, it is only after the

book's success in France that a German edition was projected6), the

manuscript must have been finished by 1985, as Farias does not make

use of material published in 1986, material that would have buttressed

his position, such as Karl Lwith's Mein Leben in Deutschland, or

the Erhart Kstner-Martin Heidegger correspondence, which gives a

detailed account of the origin, procedure and importance of the

Spiegel-interview.

Ott then points out in which ways Farias' book adds to our

historical knowledge of the "Heidegger and National-Socialism"

question: the author did have access to archival material in the

German Democratic Republic, such as the proceedings of the Prussian

Ministry of Culture and of the Reich's Ministry for Science, Art and

"Volksbildung". These archives are essentially off-limits for West

German citizens, but accessible to foreigners. What can now be judged,

says Ott, is:

"...was genau Heideggers 'politischer Auftrag' war, der mitdem zweiten Berliner Ruf im Herbst 1933 verbunden war: nmlich

der Plan eine Reichsakademie zu schaffen unter der

Prsidentschaft Heideggers. Bisher wussten wir nur, dass er eine

"Preussische Dozentenakademie" leiten sollte, wir wussten auch, dass

die NS-internen Gegner Heideggers Jaensch (Heidegger's

langjhriger philosophischer Kollege in Marburg) und Krieck sich

vehement diesen Plnen widersetzten und das Amt Rosenberg

einschalten."

But, says Ott, "these are already questions of detail", and

proceeds to discuss what is clearly the weakest point in the Farias

book, namely the latter's framing device: the claim that both the

beginning and the end of Heidegger's career stand in the shadow of

Abraham a Sancta Clara, a medieval Capuchin monk from

Kreenheinstetten, a village near Heidegger's birth place, Messkirch,

"a powerful preacher in Vienna, during the time of the wars against

the Turks". Abraham a Sancta Clara, a declared and vocal antisemite,

was indeed the subject of a (one-page7!) paper by the young theology

student Heidegger in 1910 (on the occasion of the inauguration of a

monument in his honor in Messkirch), and again in 1964 when Heidegger

gave a conference in the same city, entitled: "On Abraham a SanctaClara". But as Ott shows, the relationship is tenuous and Farias can


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only make as much of it as he does by "freely associating - for all

its worth", i.e. by using a "methodisches Spezifikum" which, for the

historian at least, is more than dubious. It is indeed the weakest

point of the Farias book, suffering from the general shoddiness and

vagueness of Farias' thinking - "sobald es ans Deuten geht, wird es

bei Farias problematisch", ("as soon as Farias tries to interpret,things become problematic"), as Ott puts it. It remains, however,

that the Heidegger-Sancta Clara relationship could be worth

investigating by a more serious historiographer, if only because it

may give us a better insight into the cultural crucible from which

Heidegger emerged - and to which he kept returning.

Ott then points out a couple obvious howlers Farias committed,

and which every other critic and reviewer, sympathetic of inimical to

Farias's thesis, has also noted: the (voluntary?) misinterpretation of

the word "Kapauner" ( the name used by the locals to refer to the

theology students in Konstanz, which Farias links to "Capuchin" monks,

enabling him to further link Heidegger with Sancta Clara, though the

word in fact refers to a capon), and the association of

"Sachsenhausen" in an old German saying ("War and peace are as closely

linked as Frankfurt and Sachsenhausen"), used by Abraham a Sancta

Clara and quoted by Heidegger in his 1964 Messkirch conference on the

Augustiner monk, with the concentration camp of the same name

(situated near Berlin) rather then with the Frankfurt suburb meant in

the saying.

As far as the other main thesis - the SA thesis - of theFarias book is concerned, one needs to withhold judgment for the time

being. Briefly, according to this thesis Heidegger, the

ultraconservatist "Blut und Boden" revolutionary, had always been and

remained a firm backer of Rhm's SA movement. It is when the SA

and Rhm were wiped out by Hitler and the SS, that Heidegger is

supposed to have gone into opposition: in that sense, Farias claims,

Heidegger was a life-long "heretical" National- Socialist ideologue

opposed to the SS usurpers whom he considered as betrayers of the real

National-Socialist doctrine. Thus his troubles with the regime after

1934 could be ascribed purely to this "heretical" position within the

movement itself.

Much could be said for this thesis, and Farias of course tries

to milk it for all its worth, overstating his case in the

process. There simply is not enough accurate data available at this

point. The one utterance by Heidegger which seems to link him to the

SA comes in the posthumously published article "Das Rektorat 1933/34,"

in which he states that "by the spring of 1934 I was aware of the

consequences of my resignation [as rector]; I was totally clear about

them after 30 June of that year. Whoever accepted a position in the

administration of the university after that date had to know withoutthe shadow of a doubt with whom he was involved.8" That date (30 June


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1934) is of course the date of "the night of the long knives" when

Hitler had his SS physically eliminate the SA and Rhm. However,

Heidegger's formulation is, to say the least, ambiguous: Is it the

lawless brutality of the massacre that reveals to him the criminal

nature of the regime, or is it the fact that the victims of the

massacre were Rhm and the SA, and that now it is the SS who ranthe "revolution"? At this point there does not seem to be a sure way

of deciding either way, and we may never know unless new evidence,

buttressing one side or the other of the argument, came to light,

possibly after the Heidegger archives become accessible, something

that will not happen until next century. Ott dismisses Farias' SA

theory and suggests that in fact towards the end of the rectorat

Heidegger was in conflict with the SA-students at the university,

though this, it would seem to me, does not necessarily disprove a

possible gut-al- legiance to Rhm's early SA ideology.

Here is how Ott finally sums up his view of the Farias book:

Farias' Verdienst liegt in der Sammlung neuer Quellen und in ihrer

positivistischen Aufbereitung. Viele Fakten. Er gelangt jedoch rasch

an seine Grenzen, wo die Inter- pretation ansetzt, und vor allem, wo

der Zusammenhang von politischer Praxis und dem Denken Heideggers

erhellt werden msste. Aber gerade das sollte man von einem

Philosophen erwarten. Ansatzweise ist der Versuch unternommen. Doch

berzeugen diese Anstze nicht, z.B. das Bemhen, die

Schlageter-Rede vom Mai 1933 mit "Sein und Zeit" zu korrelieren.

The German historiographer's cool evaluation is indeed a far

cry from the hysterical reception the book got in France. When it came

out in October 1987, the scandal was instant and ubiquitous: rather

than merely stirring up the intellectual and university communities,

it spread like wildfire, a conflagration fanned by the eagerness of

the media who took the scandal up for all it was worth, vide the daily

Libration and its front page headlines which read: HEIL

HEIDEGGER. In his review Ott jokes: "In France the sky has collapsed -

le ciel des philosophes. " Understandably so," he claims, because

"France's clocks work differently": While in Germany most of the facts

and even some of the details of the Farias book were well-known,

France had always done its best to hide these facts from itself9.

What does seem characteristically odd is the fact that the

backers and defenders of the Farias book can be, along the French

spectrum, more or less identified with the new right, via the

so-called Nouveaux Philosophes: Heidegger et le nazisme was prefaced

by Christian Jambet and the most spirited defense of the book was

Heidegger et les Modernes, published in Grasset's collection 'Figures'

directed by Bernard-Henri Lvy, and written by Luc Ferry and

Alain Renaut, who had made a fairly good-sized splash with an essaycalled La Pense 68, a virulent critique of and attack on


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leftwing thought as it emerged in the sixties via Foucault, Lacan,

Derrida and Althusser. But it should be noted that the wide appeal of

this affair has deeper reasons than a mere 'querelle de chapelle'. In

late 1987 the French public was primed for this question: the

television showing of Claude Lanzman's film Shoa,10 the widely

publicized discussions that followed, and the long drawn-out trial,constantly in the news, of the SS muderer Klaus Barbie, "the butcher

of Lyon," had certainly sensitized a good part of the

population. Rivalry among the intellectual community used this fact to

the hilt - for their own purposes, in most cases, i.e., the discussion

turned all too often into a 'Rglement de comptes at Sorbonne

Corral'.

In an early response to the book Jacques Derrida observed:

"As far as the essential 'facts' are concerned, I haven't discovered

anything in this investigation that had not been known, and for a long

time, to those with a serious interest in Heidegger."11 This slightly

blas stance was shared and echoed by many of the more moderate

French defenders of Heidegger (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Michel

Deguy, for instance), while others, such as Franois

Fdier, Pierre Aubenque or Grard Granel12, clearly go

overboard in a defense of Heidegger, or rather in attacks on Farias

verging more often than not on the hysterical. Rather than trying to

argue with Farias, their strategy is one of unrelenting, global and

abusive attack: Farias' work is seen as a "shameless falsification"

"animated by a desire to occult the truth"13; it is an "delirium of

interpretation", an "imposture", a "hodgepotch" of "insinuations"which, were Heidegger alive today, would have landed the author "in a

court of law"14. The book is simply dismissed, in that most favorite

of French insults, as essentially a "stalinist trial"15: by claiming

to show that the author's intentions are biased, one can then simply

evacuate all the information he brings to his thesis. This is of

course to be expected from France, where Heidegger's reputation has

for a long time been that of an untouchable cult figure - a reputation

that goes back, and is due in great part, to the unremitting

proselytizing of Jean Baufret16 and Franois Fdier, the

former's heir as Heidegger's unconditional French champion.

A closer look at Franois Fdier's response will

give us an insight into the methodology of the unconditional

Heideggerians. Ferry/Renaud call this "degree zero of interpretation",

"the pure and simple refusal to consider Heidegger's philosophy, if

not on the basis of, then at least in relation to17" his political

involvement. Fdier is in that sense the faithful disciple of

Jean Beaufret. As late as 1984 the latter dismissed any questioning of

Heidegger's politics by bringing up Ren Char's war-time record

as a resistant fighter and the fact that General Eisenhower had

thanked Char personally, to suggest, rather ludicrously, that none ofHeidegger's critics had been so honored! He then claims that


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"Heidegger never did anything that could motivate the allegations

leveled at him," that any political interpretation of his philosophy

is "a conspiracy of mediocre people in the name of mediocrity", ending

by lamely suggesting that, in his as well as in Char's mind, it is

"simply charitable not to go into any further details."18

Fdier's essay in Le dbat , intitled

"L'Intention de nuire", which one could translate as "With harmful

intentions", sets the tone. First off, he decries Farias, noting that

two German publishers refused to publish his book, and then goes on to

point out the same mistakes we have already seen when analyzing Ott's

review. Fdier, in contradistinction to Ott, insists on the

supposedly willed mistakes, suggesting that the whole of Farias' work

is simply a fabrication, an attempt to discredit Heidegger's

thought. He carefully avoids bringing up any of the new information

Farias' book uncovers, and stubbornly holds to the classical line19,

which admits that Heidegger made a mistake by accepting the rectorate;

that the mistake was heroic, in that Hei- degger thought he could

influence Nazi cultural policy for the better; that during the

rectorate he behaved with dignity - "forbidding as far as he could all

acts of barbary such as anti-semitic autodafs"; and that

Heidegger realized his mistake quickly, ending his involvement with

national-socialism when he gave up the post in February 1934.

Fdier clearly felt that this article was not enough, and, in

the late spring of 1988, brought out a book-length denunciation of

Farias, Heidegger: anatomie d'un scandale.

This book does not convince any more than the article in Le

Dbat and is essentially a restatement of the Beaufret line of

defense. Faced with Farias' facts, Fdier's method is no less

cavalier than the former's. The basic line of defense consists in

pitching the Farias allegations against Heidegger's own statements

concerning his involvement with the nazis, especially the article "Das

Rektorat 1933-1934" (in Fdier's own translation). And to

triumphantly conclude that Farias must be making it up, given that

Heidegger has a different version of the facts, and that Heidegger's

word has to be taken at face value. That the work of Ott and others

has shown that "Das Rektorat 1933-1934" is a clear attempt by

Heidegger to whitewash himself, both by omission and distortion of the

known facts, is not mentioned by Fdier who, as France's main

orthodox heideggerian, can or should not be ignorant of the findings

of German heideggerian historiography.

A further objection to Heidegger: anatomie d'un scandale are

basic mistaken allegations and suggestions. Fdier claims for

example that Farias' bad faith is shown by the fact that he always

gives the German "Volk" as "peuple aryen". I found only three such

occasions: on page 136, and twice on page 175, and in all cases"aryen" is put between brackets. Aside from the fact that this may be


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due primarily to Farias' French translators (the original manuscript

is in German and Spanish), there is no question that the translation

of "Volk" presents problems, and the French word "peuple" does not

give the very loaded connotations the word had in Germany in the

1930s. In fact, there had already been a long and heated debate around

the translation of that word and its adjectival form "vlkisch"in France in the 1960s, with Fdier arguing against any

political overtones in the word, attacking Jean-Pierre Faye's

contention that the word holds connotations that could validly suggest

translations such as "popular", "populist". "national" and even

"racial"20. Fdier himself has given what one can only call

sanitized French translations of certain of Heidegger's texts, among

them the famous Rektorat Rede. "Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen

Universitt", ("The Self-affirmation of the German University")

becomes in Fdier's pseudo-heideggerian French

"L'Universit allemande envers et contre tout elle-mme"

- a transparent attempt to de-politicize and defuse the title of a

text that poses major problems concerning its political intentions.

More reasoned and responsible direct responses to Farias's

suggestions are hard to come by in France. Pierre Bourdieu's

L'Ontologie Politique de Martin Heidegger, for example, is simply a

reworked and slightly expanded text first published in 1975, and now

reissued in book-form, with the obvious desire to cash in on the

Heidegger/fascism craze of 1987/8821. In fact, the most interesting

French writings on Heidegger's fascism, run parallel to Heidegger et

le Nazisme: both Derrida's and Lacoue-Labarthe's books had either beencompleted or were well-advanced when the Farias book came out. The one

book clearly written after the "scandale" started is

Jean-Franois Lyotard's Heidegger et "les juifs". Let's turn to

it for a moment.

The first part of Lyotard's book is not directly involved with

Heidegger's fascism, or with Heidegger the thinker, but continues the

author's recent investigations around the Kantian notion of the

sublime, its relation to modern art and writing, Adorno's aesthetics,

and, before all, Lyotard's concern with "l'oubli", the forgotten,

"l'oubli oubli", and "l'immmorial", while articulating

the Freudian concepts of primary and secondary Verdrngung with

these concepts. It is only from page 88 on that he addresses the

question of Heidegger directly. He begins by laying down four rules to

be observed in any attempt to "bring to justice" the case in

question. These rules seem to me worthwhile to repeat here, as they

apply not only in Lyotard's own work, but seem generally valid:

1) The importance of Heidegger's thought has to be admitted,

for, says Lyotard, without that recognition, Heidegger's "faute"

(Lyotard uses the term Lacoue-Labarthe employs; the word "faute" isstronger than "erreur", error, and implies a sense of misdeed, or even


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of sin) would "unhappily be ordinary".

2) One has to admit that Heidegger's involvement with Nazism

was "not anecdotal, but deliberate, profound and, in a certain way,

ongoing..... One can hear that compromise in the texts Heidegger

signs, in those he gives as speeches without signing them... in thepolitical texts, but also in the philosophical ones... Before all, one

hears it in his silence concerning the extermination [of the Jews], a

silence maintained to the very last, except for a single sentence."

3) "One does not erase one of these first two conditions in

favor of the other". By this Lyotard means that one cannot solve the

problem by reducing it to a play of alternatives that would go

something like: if Heidegger was a great thinker than he was not a

nazi, or, its corollary, if Heidegger was a nazi, then he was not a

great thinker.

4) One must not remain satisfied with the affirmation of "the

coexistence of the two heideggerian sides, the venerable and the

ignoble, and the diagnosis of a fissure [clivage]."

He then proceeds to show how Heidegger's political

entanglements are related to his thinking, how the thinking of Sein

und Zeit, especially as relating to the notion of dread when applied

to the destiny of the community, the Volk, may allow for the politics

of fascism, even though it does not necessitate, or even authorize

these politics. The authorization comes, says Lyotard when commentingon Derrida's deconstruction of Heidegger's use of the words "geist",

"geistig", "geistlich", exactly at that point when Heidegger lets

spirit in, and with it, "one of the most insistent axioms of

(Christian) European metaphysics,"22 thus being unfaithful to his own

essential thinking. But this is not all, for the "Kehre" itself does

not remedy this lack, though it replaces Entscheidung with Dichtung,

and "the effectuation of destiny" with "waiting for the god."23

Something deeper is wrong here, says Lyotard, and situates it in the

"existential-ontological approach itself."24 He then goes on to

delineate two "motives" of the "topos of art" - and here his analysis

rejoins Lacoue-Labarthe's work in the latter's La Fiction du

politique, which, as I have said earlier, seems to me to be the most

interesting among the recent critiques of Heidegger, and to which we

shall now turn.

Lacoue-Labarthe's basic contention is this: Heidegger's

political involvement in 1933 is in no way an "error", it is clearly

inscribed in Heidegger's thought from the beginning on, and absolutely

coherent with his thinking, so much so that the combining of the

"political" and the "philosophical" was so powerful that up until 1944

nearly all Heidegger's teaching was devoted to an "explication" withnational-socialism, and the "truth" which Heidegger had, or had


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believed to have seen in it. "The temp- tation is great," writes

Lacoue-Labarthe25, "to credit the involvement of 33 to some breakdown,

to a sudden lack of vigilance, or even, and more seriously, to the

pressure of a thought not yet sufficiently freed from metaphysics. But

that would be to forget that metaphysics, at least under that form of

an unuprootable Trieb as recognized by Kant and Nietzsche, lies at themost secret heart of thought itself. "Thinking", if there is such a

thing as "thought", can never claim to be "freed" from metaphysics."

That is why one cannot speak of an "error" in Heidegger's

case. It could only be considered an error, a mistake, if

national-socialism had not carried the possibility Heidegger saw in

it:

"Or, manifestement il la portait, en certains de ses traits au

moins, eu gard au destin de l'Allemagne et au destin de

l'Occident. La dtresse (Not) qui commande l'insurrection

nationale-socialiste, comme elle commande la protestation du Discours

du Rectorat,.....est encore, et peut-tre surtout,

l'inquitude ou mme l'effroi devant l'puisement

du projet moderne o se relve son tre

catastrophique. Auncune emphase ne contraint Heidegger

invoquer, au centre du Discours du Rectorat, le mot de Niezsche: "Dieu

est mort": ce mot vient dire exactement la circonstance,

c'est--dire l'tre-abandonn ou la

drliction (Verlassenheit) de " l'homme d'aujourd'hui

au milieu de l'tant."26

Thus Lacoue-Labarthe can say that in 1933 Heidegger "ne s'est

pas tromp" , has made no error. But that by 1934 he knows that

he made an error. This error, still according Lacoue-Labarthe and as

far as Heidegger is concerned, does not concern the truth of Naziism

but its reality. None of this is really new, though Lacoue-Labarthe's

analysis is indeed the most nuanced French view of the "affaire" - and

we will come back to his thinking concerning the concatenation of

Heidegger's philosophy and praxis in relation to the University in the

second part of this paper.

Where Lacoue-Labarthe's book is most interesting however is

when he links what Brecht and Walter Benjamin called fascist

"aesthetization of politics," and Heidegger's focus on the work of art

after the Kehre. Indeed, Heidegger's lecture "On the Origin of the

Work of Art" in 1936 coincides roughly with Hitler's Nuremberg "art

speeches" which proclaim that great architecture was necessary for a

great nation. In his review of the book, Michael Zimmerman suggests

that "Heidegger's account of the world-organizing role of the Greek

temple provided a philosophical interpretation of such political

architecture" while at the same time offering "an implicit critique ofthe National Socialist 'aesthetic' of giant public spectacles.27


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Lacoue-Labarthe shows how this aesthetization is not

necessarily confined to the politics of fascism but is indeed

inscribed in the Greek origins of Western civilization: the polis, the

city, and thus the politics of that polis as an aesthetic work of art,

a kind of early Gesamtkunstwerk. (The title of Lacoue-Labarthe'sbook, La fiction du politique, points to this fusion, or confusion.)

National Socialism was thus a kind of "National Aestheticism" in that

it "fictionalized" politics by conceiving, as Zimmerman puts it, " the

nation-state as a self-organizing, self-producing work of art, a

national version of the Gesamtkunstwerk of which Wagner dreamed at

Bayreuth," :

Rejecting the French Enlightment imitatio of the Latin Roman world,

many Germans - including Heidegger - made the paradoxical and

self-destructive attempt to imitate not the content of Greek culture,

but instead the Greek capacity for creating something radically

new. Lacoue-Labarthe argues that such self-invention led to

"mythification", aspects of which are discernable not only on National

Socialist rhetoric, but also in Heidegger's interpretation of

Hlderlin as Germany's Homer.

These are also the motives Lyotard addresses in the last

chapters of his book, and in specific reference to Lacoue-Labarthe's

work. This is however not the place to enter into the detail of these

discussions, or even to deal with Lyotard and Lacoue- Labarthe's

concern with what they see as Heidegger's gravest "faute": his silencein the face of the extermination of the Jews. In the second part of

this essay I will try to deal with Heidegger's thought and politics as

they involve the institution in which he spent most of his life, and

in which his own political praxis was most visible: the university.

II

In his review of Farias' Heidegger et le nazisme, Thomas

Sheehan sums up the political situation of Heidegger as follows28:

In outline, the story of Heidegger and the Nazis concerns (1) a

provincial, ultraconservative German nationalist and, at least from

1932 on, a Nazi sympathizer (2) who, three months after Hitler took

power, became rector of Freiburg University, joined the NSDAP, and

tried unsuccessfully to become the philosophical Fhrer of the

Nazi movement, (3) who quit the rectorate in 1934 and quietly

dissociated himself from some aspects of the Nazi party while

remaining an enthusiastic supporter of its ideals, (4) who wasdismissed from teaching in 1945, only to be reintegrated into the


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university in 1951, and who even after his death in 1976 continues to

have an im- mense following in Europe and America.

As a summing up the facts, this is more or less accurate. But

it does leave unanswered the major question: how could Heidegger's

thought lead him to align himself with the politics of the NSDAP? Howcould he accept the rectorate of the university of Freiburg, and,

after quitting that post, continue to militate within the

national-socialist intelligentsia for leadership positions and the

creation of new institutions for Geisteswissenschaft?

The easiest explanation would be to simply say that the

"ultra-conservative German nationalist," the viscerally anti-marxist

south German catholic (one of whose favorite political theorist's was

Friedrich Naumann), the firm believer in a strong, autocratic

wilheminian state, won out over the philosopher of Sein und Zeit. But

this does not really resolve anything. An external critique,

historical or psychological, tells us nothing of the work, or, rather

tends to incite one to simply dismiss Heidegger's thought; on the

other hand, a purely internal critique of his thinking, while capable

of showing up flaws in Heidegger's thinking, will have to do so in the

philosophical context of the work and risks to remain stuck there. The

difficulty resides precisely in the articulation of an internal

critique with a critique of the external praxis .

One way in may be to to examine certain essential concepts in

Heidegger's philosophy, or at least to show that some of hispresuppositions would inexorably give permission to a totalitarian

politics, either on the grand scale of the state or on the smaller

scale of an organization such as the university, i.e. the space in

which Heidegger's social praxis took place. One of the more obvious

concepts to choose in that context, is the notion of decline. The

inevitable decline of occidental civilization was a common topos of

German (and European) intellectual considerations from the late 19

Century on. This notion of decline is implicitly (and, indeed,

explicitly) present at the very root of Heidegger's questioning and

underpins much of his work, starting with Sein und Zeit. As Sheehan

puts it: "For Heidegger, Europe had entered upon a climactic - in fact

the "eschatological" - phase of the "forgottenness of Being" that had

plagued the West since Plato." Renaut gives a convincing analysis of

this problem in an early essay29, and then, with Ferry, takes it up

again in Heidegger et les modernes. I will follow their analysis in

most details.

According to these two writers, the notion of the decline was

described by Heidegger as a possibility inherent in man, as, in fact,

"a structure of human existence (Dasein) ," though, it seemed that,

for Being and Time, "this possibility actualized itself electively inwhat the later texts would describe as the modern era".30 Using


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to conclude that:

...in anxiety there lies the possibility of a disclosure which is

quite distinctive; for anxiety individualizes. This individualization

brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it thatauthenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being.

(p. 235)

It thus becomes possible to fight the Verfallenheit of Dasein,

and this becomes a responsibility man has at the present

"eschatological" end of the modern world's decline. It is in this

sense that the possibility and even desirability of political activism

is inscribed in Heidegger's 1927 book. This is in fact obvious as soon

as the concept of the historicity of Dasein has been established, and

indeed, the whole second part of Being and Time, is, as Lyotard puts

it "dedicated to the power Dasein has, and notably that destiny called

Volk, to escape inauthenticity and to open itself to the advent of its

destiny..."34

It is therefore difficult to believe Heidegger when he claims,

after the event, that it took much doing to convince him to become

rector: the image he tries to project, namely that of the solitary

philosopher working in his mountain retreat on Heraklitus and who only

very reluctantly lets himself be persuaded to take on the task of the

rectorate, looks now like a transparent attempt to claim

posteriori an uninvolvement with, and even ignorance of, the politicalpower struggles of 1933.

Heidegger's aim was to "revolutionize" the university. A brief

analysis of the Rektoratsrede and other texts from that period will

give us some insight into how Heidegger conceived of this revolution,

and will show that, no matter what validity much of his thinking may

and does still hold for us today, his own praxis was, to say the

least, undemocratic and deeply reprehensible. In his Rektoratsrede the

philosopher-turned-rector sets his priorities straight: the address

begins with the assertion of the necessity for a "geistige

Fhrung". Derrida's already mentioned book, De l'Esprit, cogently

analyses and critiques Heidegger's use of the word "Geist", early on

banned or used only between quotation marks or under erasure, for

being one of the central terms of the onto-theological tradition, and

thus metaphysical, but resusci- tated in all its (worst) connotations

in Heidegger's political writings.

The notion of "Fhrung" and of "Fhrer," although

inevitably subject to the darkest connotations given its

socio-historical context, should however not be reduced to a mere echo

of Hitlerian cynical manipulation; on the other hand neither can it besimply equated with Plato's basileia, as Lacoue-Labarthe does when he


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attempts to show that this "error" of Heidegger could be seen as a

slipping back into the philosophical or onto-theological tradition of

Platonic politics and thinking. The ambiguous way in which Heidegger

himself tried to understand the notion of the Fhrer can be

glimpsed in the following extract from the speech he gave on 11

November 1933, asking for active participation in Hitler'sreferendum35:

Das deutsche Volk ist vom Fhrer zur Wahl gerufen; der

Fhrer aber erbittet nichts vom Volke, er gibt vielmehr dem Volke

die unmittelbarste Mglichkeit der hchsten freien

Entscheidung, ob das ganze Volk sein eigenes Dasein will, oder ob es

dieses nicht will. Das Volk whlt morgen nichts Geringeres als

seine Zukunft.

The suggestion being that the Fhrer "offers" a "free

choice" to the people. But, without being glib, one can say that this

was "an offer the people could not refuse," in fact, no free choice at

all. Unhappily there does not seem to be any specific text in which

Heidegger clearly thinks through the concept of the Fhrer, and

we have to rely on his own praxis as rector to deduce what this notion

could mean for him. As Lyotard points out36, terms like Wahl,

Entscheidung, Volksentscheidung, Volk, Arbeit, etc. have complex

ramifications that will link them on the one hand with Heidegger's own

philosophical writings and thought and on the other with the thinking

of writers such as Carl Schmitt or Ernst Jnger.

But no matter what the benefits of a discussion of the

theoretical origins of these concepts may be, it is clear that the

authoritarian, undemocratic concept of the leader was indeed used by

Heidegger as rector in his praxis. Three months after his installation

as rector of Freiburg university he established the Fhrerprinzip

, according to which the rector would henceforth no longer be elected

by the academic Senate of the university but would be appointed by the

nazi minister of education and provided with new, sweeping

powers. Heidegger obviously had as little respect of and use for the

traditions of academic freedom - no matter their limitations and the

legitimate criticisms one could and still can bring against them - as

he did for the par- liamentary institutions of the Weimar

republic. These developments were clearly fore- shadowed in the

inaugural address where he says:

Die vielbesungene "akademische Freiheit" wird aus der Deutschen

Universitt verstoen; denn diese Freiheit war unecht, weil

nur verneinend. Sie bedeutete vorwiegend Unbekmmertheit,

Beliebigkeit der Absichten und Neigungen, Ungebundenheit im Tun und

Lassen. Der Begriff der Freiheit des deutschen Studenten wird jetzt zu

seiner Wharheit zurckgebracht. Aus ihr entfaltet sichknftig Bindung und Dienst der deutschen Studentenschaft.37


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These three links between the "true concept of freedom" and

the student body are set then set out. The first one links the

students to the Volksgemeinschaft, the Volks-community and finds its

expression in the national-socialist Arbeitsdienst. The second links

the students to the "honor" and "destiny" of the Volk in relation toother "Vlker", demanding "Einsatz bis ins letzte", i.e. the

readiness to die for Germany in the service of the Wehrdienst,

i.e. the military. Finally, the third Bindung links the student body

to the German people's "geistigen Auftrag", its spiritual mission. The

question is how this spiritual mission links Heidegger's own sense of

knowledge and the nazi conception of science and knowledge.

In a letter to a colleague of 20 December Heidegger had stated

his aims: "From the very day of my assumption to the office my goal

has been the fundamental change of scientific education in accordance

with the strengths and the demands of the National Socialist State".38

These aims had indeed been presented in more detail in the

Rektoratsrede and are there linked more closely to Heidegger's

understanding of the Verfallenheitenheit of Western civilization. Here

is how Sheehan puts it:

The essence of the university, [Heidegger] says, is the "will to

knowledge", which requires returning to the pre-Socratic origins of

thought. But concretely that means unifying "science and German fate"

and willing "the historical mission of the German Volk, a Volk that

knows itself in its State" - all this within a spirituality "that isthe power to preserve, in the deepest way, the strengths [of the Volk]

which are rooted in soil and blood.39

On 30 November 1933, Heidegger gave a conference at the

University of Tbingen, organized by the students of the

university and the Kampfbund, the local NSDAP party section.40 He

starts by giving a brief history of the German university and mentions

W. v. Humboldt who, he says, insists that "the state should never lose

sight of the fact that for the university it constitute an obstacle,

and that therefore it should not interfere with its work. Things would

function infinitely better without the State. On the other hand the

state has the obligation to procure the means necessary for the

university to function". After developing the Humboldian view further,

Heidegger arrives at the present : " Meanwhile we have witnessed a

revolution. The state has transformed itself. This revolution was not

the advent of a power pre- existing in the bosom of the state or of a

political party. The national-socialist Revolution means rather the

radical transformation of German existence." The new student is no

longer a bourgeois, but a revolutionary SA or SS member who has gone

through the Arbeitsdienst, is physically fit, etc. Teaching also has

changed: the new teacher "writes on the new concept of science",speaks about the political student, discusses political faculties;


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there are now courses on "Volkskunde", etc. But, Heidegger goes on,

all of this is only "the old under new colors." At best it is only "a

purely exterior transfer of certain results of this revolution while

at bottom everything remains stuck in its usual inertia."

So, he asks, what has to happen? "According to theFhrer's own words, the revolution has been completed and is

making place for evolution... However, in the university, not only has

the revolution not yet achieved its aims, it has not even started."

This is so because "revolutionary reality is not something that exists

already (etwas Vorhandenes), but, by its essence, something that has

still to develop, something in gestation."

Heidegger then develops his vision of this revolutionary

university, first by defining the new reality according to which the

German people are finally coming into their historical destiny,

totally inside of and guided by the state, and by the new "Wissen",

the new knowledge that will be dispensed there. He defines learning as

follows: "To learn does not mean to receive and store given

knowledges. To learn does not mean to receive, but, profoundly, to

give oneself to oneself. In the act of learning, I give myself in

full possession of myself, I give myself what in the depth of my being

I already know and guard carefully."

Lyotard, commenting on this same speech, and after noting that

the above- quoted definitions echo what Heidegger said concerning

Wissen in 1927 and will say concerning lernen in 1951, suggests thatthe concept of "fate", if resolved according to this knowledge, can

only be determined as "destiny", Geschick. The latter term is defined

by Heidegger in Being and Time as "the historizing of a community, of

a people."41 This destiny, Heidegger goes on, is thus "not something

that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than

Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occuring together of

several Subjects. Our fate have already been guided in advance, in our

Being with one another in the same world and in our reso- luteness for

definite possibilities."

And, as Lyotard again points out, this analysis is echoed in

the Tbingen speech when Heidegger declares that: " To learn

means to give oneself to oneself by founding that possession on the

original belonging of one's existence as member of a people

(Vlkisches Dasein), and to become conscious of oneself as

co-detainer of the truth of the people in its State."42

It seems clear from the foregoing that essential Heideggerrian

concepts as first developed in Being and Time lend themselves without

ambiguity, and in Heidegger's own practical thinking to implementation

in the context of a fascist university structure. This is not todismiss Heidegger's thought : there is no doubt that in certain


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essential aspects it addresses some of the most fundamental questions

we are faced with at this end of the century. But it also means that

we have to re-examine Heidegger's thinking and to do so not only by

claiming that his thinking was not yet post-metaphysical enough, as

many heideggerian deconstructionists are wont to do.

Lacoue-Labarthe's line, that "thinking can never be separated frommetaphysics" implies that no matter how consciously, how fully, one

tries to think beyond the forms of onto-theology, there always lurks

the possibility - the danger - of erring, especially, it would seem,

in the complex act of articulating abstract thought and political

action. Sheehan says at the end of his article: "We know now how

greatly he 'erred.' The question remains about how greatly he

thought. The way to answer that question is not to stop reading

Heidegger but to start demythologizing him." That means first of all

to read and reread Heidegger, but it also means that the time has come

to rethink and recontextualize essential aspects of the pre-war

european intellectual endeavors, especially those who fell prey to

what Bataille termed "la tentation fasciste."


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beaufret, Jean. Entretien avec F. de Towarnicki Paris: PUF, 1984.

Bourdieu, Pierre. L'ontologie politique de martin Heidegger (Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1988).

Critique n. 234 Paris: October 1966.

Derrida, Jacques. De L'Esprit . Paris: Galile, 1987.

Farias, Victor. Heidegger et le Nazisme . Paris: Verdier, 1987.

Faye, Jean-Pierre. "La lecture et l'nonc," in Critique

n.237, February 1967.

Faye, Jean-Pierre.Langages totalitaires, Paris: Hermann, 1972.

Ferry, Luc & Renaut, Alain.Heidegger et les Modernes, Paris: Grasset, 1988.

Fdier, Franois. "A propos de Heidegger, une lecturednonce," in Critique n. 242, July 1967.

Fdier, Franois. Heidegger, Anatomie d'un scandale . Paris: Laffont, 1988.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tr. John Macquarrie & EdwardRobinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitt

/ Das Rektorat 1933/34, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983.

Lacoue-Labarthe,Philippe.La fiction du politique . Paris: Christian

Bourgois, 1988.

Lanzman, Jacques. Shoah. Paris: Fayard, 1985.

"Le Dbat" n. 48, jan.-feb. 1988. Paris: Gallimard. [Contains a

section on the

Farias book with articles by Pierre Aubenque, Henri Crtella, Michel Deguy,

Franois Fdier, Grard Granel, Stphane Moses and Alain Renaut.]

"Le Messager Europen", n. 1 pp. Paris: POL, 1987.

Lyotard, Jean-Franois. Heidegger et "les juifs." Paris:

Galile, 1988.

Moehling, Karl. "Heidegger and the Nazis" in: Thomas Sheehan ed.,Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker, Chicago: Precedent Publishing

Inc.,1981.

Ott, Hugo. "Wege und Abwege," in Neue Zrcher Zeitung, 28-29November 1987.


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Renaut, Alain. "Qu'est-ce que l'homme? Essai sur le chemin de

pense de Heidegger," in: Man and World, 1976, vol. 9, n. 1.

Schneeberger, Guido. Nachlese zu Martin Heidegger. Bern: 1962. [no pub.]

Sheehan, Thomas. "Heidegger and the Nazis," The New York Review of

Books, June 16, 1988.

Zimmerman, Michael. "L'affaire Heidegger", in Times Literary Supplement,

October 7-13, 1988, London.


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FOOTNOTES

1Victor Farias, Heidegger and Fascism, translated by (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1989) Originally published as Heidegger et leNazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987)

2 Franois Fdier, Heidegger, Anatomie d'un scandale

(Paris: Laffont, 1988)Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris: Christian

Bourgois, 1988)Jean-Franois Lyotard, Heidegger et "les juifs" (Paris:

Galile, 1988)

3 Jacques Derrida, De L'Esprit (Paris: Galile, 1987).

Pierre Bourdieu, L'ontologie politique de martin Heidegger (Paris: Editions de Minuit,1988).

Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, Heidegger et les Modernes, (Paris: Grasset, 1988)."Le Messager Europen", n. 1 pp. 13-121 (Paris: POL, 1987) publishes a dossier on

Heidegger put together and with an essay by Elisabeth de Fontenay. It includes a

french translation of the Spiegel interview and a commentary by the Czech

philosopher Jan Patocka."Le Dbat" n. 48, jan.-feb. 1988 (Paris: Gallimard) contains a section on the Farias book

with articles by Pierre Aubenque, Henri Crtella, Michel Deguy, Franois Fdier, Grard

Granel, Stphane Moses and Alain Renaut.

4 Hugo Ott, "Wege und Abwege," Neue Zrcher Zeitung, 28-29

November 1987.

5 In France the debate concerning Heidegger's fascism goes back to

1945, when Sartre's Les Temps Modernes published, in its very firstissue, a dossier concerning this question.

6 An English edition is projected for 1989, to be published by Temple

University Press.

7 Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger and the Nazis," New York Review of Books,June 16, 1988. See footnote 5.

8 Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschenUniversitt / Das Rektorat 1933/34, Frankfurt: VittorioKlostermann, 1983. The article "Das Rektorat 1933/34 - Tatsachen und

Gedanken" was written in 1945 but not published until 1983.

9 cf above, note 4.

10 See also Lanzman's book by the same title: Shoah, Paris: Fayard, 1985.

11 in Le Nouvel Observateur, 6-12 November 1987. (Cited by

Ferry/Renaud, Lacoue- Labarthe and others. I have not been able to

locate the article in the international issue of the NouvelObservateur available at the SUNY-Binghamton library.


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12 cf. Le Dbat , n. 48, January-February 1988, Paris, which

contains a dossier on Heidegger.

13 F. Fdier, "L'intention de nuire", Le dbat, p.136.

14 P. Aubenque, Le dbat, p.113-115.

15 G. Granel, Le dbat, p. 143.

16 The recent publication of 1978 and 1979 letters of support from

Jean Beaufret to the revisionist neo-fascist "historian" MauriceFaurisson are casting grave doubts on Beaufret moral and politicalcharacter.

17 Ferry, Renaut, p. 75.

18J. Beaufret, Entretien avec F. de Towarnicki, PUF, 1984,p. 87. Cited by Ferry/Renaud, p.75.

19 This classical line is not confined to France. In America it isrepresented by, among others, Karl Moehling, whose essay "Heidegger

and the Nazis" (in Thomas Sheehan ed., Heidegger, The Man and the

Thinker, Chicago: Precedent Publishing Inc., 1981) completely endorses

the thesis of a momentary lapse in judgment on Heidegger's part.

20 This acrimonious quarrel started after the publication in Critique

n. 234 (October 1966) of an article by Fdier attacking recentHeideggerian scholarship (especially Schneeberger's Nachlese

). Jean-Pierre Faye, then involved in a large-scale research project

concerning nazi discourse ( published in 1972 as Langages

totalitaires, by Hermann) answered with "La lecture etl'nonc" in Critique n.237 (February 1967), and

Fdier came back with "A propos de Heidegger, une lecturednonce" in Critique n. 242 (July 1967).

21 Pierre Bourdieu, L'Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, Paris:

Editions de Minuit, 1988.

22Lyotard, p. 119.

23Lyotard, p. 122.

24Lyotard, p. 123.

25 Lacoue-Labarthe, p. 39.

26 Lacoue-Labarthe, p. 40.

27 Michael Zimmerman, "L'affaire Heidegger", in Times Literary

Supplement, October 7-13, 1988, London.

28 Thomas Sheehan, "Heidegger and the Nazis," The New York Review ofBooks, June 16, 1988.


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29 ALain Renaut, "Qu'est-ce que l'homme? Essai sur le chemin de

pense de Heidegger," in: Man and World, 1976, vol. 9, n. 1.

30 Ferry, Renaud. p. 78-79.

31 Ferry,Renaut. p. 82.

32 Ferry,Renaut. p. 84.

33 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Tr. John Macquarrie & Edward

Robinson. NewYork: Harper & Row, 1962. p. 167.

34 Lyotard, p. 110.

35 Schneeberger, p.148.

36Lyotard, p 117ff.

37 Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschenUniversitt and Das Rektorat 1933/34, Frankfurt: Vittorio

Klostermann, 1983.

38 Sheehan, citing Ott, Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsverein ,(1984), p. 116.

39 Sheehan, p. 39.

40 Farias, p 154ff. My translation from the French translation of the Farias.

41 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 436.

42 Farias, p. 161.

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