The Nazis and Deconstruction Jean Pierre FayeIs Demolition o

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Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Fayes Demolition of Derrida http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/

5/28/2006

The Nazis and Deconstruction:

Jean-Pierre Fayes Demolition of Derrida

by Loren Goldner

Jean-Pierre Faye has for the most part and, to his credit, remained on the margins of

Parisian fashion. In 1972, his massiveLangages totalitaires, the prior volume of the workunder consideration here, fell into an unreceptive climate. This earlier work was anattempt at the exegesis of key concepts of German political and cultural thought from 1890to 1933, showing a profound "oscillation" between the language of the KonservativeRevolution, begun by Nietzsche, and Marxism, up to the triumph of National Socialism.Faye showed the remarkable trajectory of certain words, up to the extreme "oscillations"of 1923, where the KPD's "Schlageter turn" led it to work with the Nazis agalnst theVersailles treaty, and 1932, when Communists and Nazis again worked together to bringdown the Social Democrats in Prussia. Since this review is concerned with the sequel,dealing with the period from 1933 to 1990, it can only refer the reader to a masterpiecewhich unfortunately received little enough attention in France, and next to none in the

English-speaking world.There are many reasons for this silence. Faye's work is definitely part of the larger"linguistic turn" of French thought since the 1960s. but Faye's theory of language is verymuch sui generis. Further, what distinguishedLangages totalitaires from the greatmajority of contemporary attempts, in France and elsewhere, to understand society andpolitics through a theory of language, was that Faye's book was based on minute, detailedreconstruction of a vast array of German ideologies over four decades, and very much tiedto a theory, and critique, of political economy. In contrast to much fashionable theory, inwhich the unmasking of the "gendered subject" at the most abstruse literary orphilosophical level is presumed to explain whole historical epochs, Faye masters his

material in the manner of an empirical historian without ever losing sight of a theoreticalframework, whatever its problems. In the last instance, Faye too seems to see historyunfolding at the level of language but, in reading him, one never senses the kind of triflingwith the complexities of reality one finds in representatives of the postmodernist vulgatesuch as Hayden White or Dominick LaCapra.

Nearly two decades separateLa raison narrative from its predecessor. While its focus ison the impact of the work of Martin Heidegger, particularly in post-1945 France, it has afar wider range than the earlier book. Written in 1989-1990, and therefore in theimmediate wake of the Parisian "Heidegger affair" of 1987-1988, it draws on a far largertime frame, one adequate to a full assault on Heidegger and the French Heideggerians, and

Jacques Derrida in particular. Faye draws on elements as initially dispersed as Homer, thenew archaelogy of the history of writing in the ancient Near East, the broader context ofWestern epic narrative from Gilgamesh to Cuchulain, possible Indian influence on Greekphilosophy through Alexander's march to the Indus, Jewish haggadah, the Arab momentin the recovery of Aristotle by the medieval West, Cervantes, and Rabelais. It is, to thisreviewer's knowledge, one of the most far-flung critiques of the whole project ofla penseefrancaise as it has been exported, over twenty years, by Derrida in particular.

The core ofLa raison narrative, however, remains a very precise sequel to Faye's earlierhistory of German ideology in the 1890-1933 period. Its focus is on Martin Heidegger'sevolution in the crucial period from 1927 to 1952, (a period that was "not just any quarter


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of a century," as the author puts it), and how his transformation was understood, andinternalized, particularly in France after 1945.

The dominant version of this story, as told by la pensee francaise, prior to its explosion in1987 (in particular by French Heideggerians from Beaufret to Derrida), was as follows:Heidegger's main involvement with Nazism was in 1933-1934, when he accepted therectorship of Freiburg University, from which he resigned after understanding that Nazismwas not what it seemed in the first flush of its "revolution of the existence (Dasein) of the

German people," as Heidegger put it in one of his famous speeches as rector. (Heideggerhad sufficient courage of his convictions to republish unchanged, in 1952, his 1935 essayIntroduction to Metaphysics, which refers to the "internal greatness" of the NationalSocialist movement, which he saw as a first attempt to come to terms with human fate inthe era of "planetary technique.") Most French Heideggerians ultimately regardedHeidegger's brief involvement with Nazism (shown by Victor Farias in 1987 to have beennot so brief) as a "detail," as Jean Beaufret put it succinctly, but interpreted this detailwithin a complex framework of damage control that moved quickly from Heidegger'sadmittedly vicious actions as rector to the much more abstruse level of his philosophy.Faye is hardly content with confronting this debate on the level of further detective workconcerning Heidegger's administrative role in 1933-1934, although he does turn up some

remarkable items generally overlooked by post-1945 Heideggerians. (One of these is thetext of Heidegger's November 1933 speech, "Bekenntnis zu Adolf Hitler und demnational-sozialistischen Staat," roughiy, "Declaration of Allegiance to Adolf Hitler and theNational Socialist State," a speech that had attracted far less attention than Heidegger'sMay Day 1933 speech to the Freiburg student labor brigade. In the midst of the French"Heidegger affair" in 1988, Francois Fedier managed to translate this speech into Frenchunder the title, "Appel pour un plebiscite") Faye shows that as rector Heidegger was nopassive Nazi, permitting, for example, the takeover of the Jewish student associationbuilding by an angry mob and the detention of the Jewish students by the SS. But Faye'sbook operates on a whole different level from that of Farias, which launched the"Heidegger affair" and which primarily detailed such actions and Heidegger's active

membership in the Nazi party through the end of the war. Faye, unlike Farias, takes onHeidegger at the jugular of his famous "redescription" (the term is Rorty's) of the historyof Western philosophy as a history of "nihilist metaphysics."

The more philosophical side of the story told by la pensee francaise after 1945 centered onHeidegger's Kehre, or turn, of the 1930s and 1940s, expressed in a series of essays,culminating in the 1946 "Letter on Humanism" addressed to former Resistance officer andphilosopher Jean Beaufret. In this Kehre, Heidegger recognized that all Westernphilosophy from Parmenides through Nietzsche up to the Heidegger ofBeing and Timehad been trapped in a "metaphysics of presence" (essentially, understanding truth asrepresentation), and that this metaphysics of presence had as its essence a "will to power"

of a "subject" aimed at the "planetary domination of technique," which had been theessence of Nazism. Heidegger, in this interpretation, from the Kehre until his death in1976, turned to the project of the "deconstruction" (in German,Abbau orDekonstuktion)of this Western metaphysics of presence.

The great power of Faye'sLa raison narrative is not merely to take on this wholeinterpretation of Western thought, which has become almost an ineffable mood in thepostmodern academy, but to show as no one else has done its origins in the same seamyparty politics emphasized by Farias. What Faye shows, in short, is that forty-five years ofpostwar French philosophy (for starters) were dominated by a problematic, and a


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vocabulary, first articulated in an attack on Heidegger by a party hack philosopher andfuture officer of the SS, Ernst Krieck. Prior to this attack, Heidegger had never called theWestern metaphysical tradition "nihilist"; thereafter, through a detailed evolution, markedby further difficulties with Nazi ideologues from 1933 to 1945, that characterizationmoved to the center of his project. (1ndeed, in his famous 1966 interview withDerSpiegel, published upon his death ten years later, Heidegger once again praised Nazism asthe first attempt to rethink the human relationship to technology.)

Further, Faye shows that the famous wordDekonstruktion was first used in a Nazipsychiatry journal edited by the cousin of Hermann Gring, and that the wordLogozentrismus was coined (for denunciatory purposes) in the 1920s by the protofascistthinker Ludwig Klages. In short, sections of French and, more recently, Americanacademic discourse in the "human sciences" have been dominated for decades by aterminology originating not in Heidegger but first of all in the writings of Nazi scribblers,recycled through Latin Quarter Heideggerians. Faye zeroes in with surgical skill on theevasions of those, particularly those on the left, for whom the "greatest philosopher" of thecentury of Auschwitz happened to be--as a mere detail--a Nazi.

But there is more, much more. (No short review can do justice to the multiple levels of this

book.) Faye argues that the evolution of Heidegger's thought from 1932-1933 to 1945 canbe understood essentially as a response to the party attacks, by Krieck and others, andHeidegger's (apparently successful) attempts to distance himself from what Krieck calledthe "metaphysical nihilism" of theJudenliteraten (i.e., Jewish litterateurs) which heclaimed to find in Heidegger's pre-1933 work.

Faye shows that after 1933, under pressure from Nazi polemics, Heidegger began tocharacterize the prior Western metaphysical tradition as "nihilist" and worked out thewhole analysis for which he became famous after 1945: the "fall" in the Westernconception of Being after Parmenides and above all Aristotle, the essence of this fall in itsmodern development as the metaphysics of the "subject" theorized above all by Descartes,

and the evolution of this subject up to its apotheosis in Nietzsche and the early HeideggerofBeing and Time. Between 1933 and 1945, this diagnosis was applied to the decadentWestern democracies overcome by the "internal greatness" of the National SocialistMovement; after 1945, Heidegger effortlessly transposed this framework to show nihilismculminating not in democracy but...in Nazism. In the 1945 "Letter on Humanism" inparticular, Western humanism as a whole is assimilated to the metaphysics of this subjectThe new project, on the ruins of the Third Reich, was to overthrow the "Westernhumanism" that was responsible for Nazism! Thus the initial accommodation to Krieckand other party hacks, which produced the analysis in the first place, passed over to a"left" version in Paris, barely missing a step. The process, for a more American context,goes from Krieck to Heidegger to Derrida to the postmodern minions of the Modern

Language Association. The "oscillation" that Faye demonstrated for the 1890-1933 periodinLangages totalitaires has its extension in the contemporary deconstructionists of the"human sciences," perhaps summarized most succinctly in Lyotard's 1988 call to donnerdroit de cite a l'inhumain.

Faye is tracking the oscillation whereby, in 1987-1988, it became possible for Derrida,Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, and others, to say, in effect: Heidegger, the Nazi "as a detail,"by his unmasking of the nihilistic "metaphysics of the subject" responsible for Nazism,was in effect the real anti-Nazi, whereas all those who, in 1933-1945 (or, by extension,today) opposed and continue to oppose fascism, racism, and antisemitism from somehumanistic conviction, whether liberal or socialist, referring ultimately to the "metaphysics


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of the subject"-such people were and are in effect "complicit" with fascism. Thus the callsfor an "inhuman" thought.

It is perhaps here that the "linguistic" level on which Faye operates achieves both itsgreatest success and reveals its weakness. Because, quite apart from philosophy andlanguage, there is no shortage of examples in which liberalism, Social Democracy, andStalinism, to take three major sorts of forces that have been enlisted in antifascism, havebeen complicit with fascism itself. In Germany, before 1933, it was the liberal parties of

the center that melted away, losing their base to Hitler; the German Social Democratsoutdid themselves, even after January 1933, in attempting to carve out a role as a loyalopposition to Nazism (right up to May Day 1933, the date of both Heidegger's rectoralspeech and of the banning of the SPD); as for the Stalinist KPD, it is the case in point ofFaye's "oscillation."

In the last decade in France and in Germany we have seen moderate right and moderateleft parties, in classic fashion, moving to accommodate the demands of the new racist farright. Faye, writing in the now forgotten democratic euphoria of 1989-1990, feels free touse terms such as "democracy" and "human rights" in a completely unexamined way,whereas such terms have also been sullied in the mouths of the likes of Francois Mitterand

and Jacques Attali, not to mention Bernard-Henri Levy and Alain Finkielkraut. Faye isabsolutely right to show where the full force of the Heideggerian project comes from andto what moral bankruptcy it leads: Heidegger, in three decades after World War II, couldnever bring himself to condemn Auschwitz, and in a 1952 essay mentioned concentrationcamps in the same breath with the mechanization of agriculture as comparable examples of"nihilism". Faye is also right to show how Heidegger and the Heideggerians, in their"redescription" of Western thought, have distorted everyone from Aristotle to Spinoza toNietzsche, the last of whom virulently denounced German anti-Semitism and whodescribed himself as "at one" with Spinoza, whereas for Heiegger Spinoza was aFremdkrper--a foreign body--in philosophy. There is a deep critique to be made ofHeidegger, the French Heideggerians, Foucault and Derrida, and their latter-day bastard

progeny the postmodernists, and Jean-Pierre Faye has made a major contribution to it.Western thought will be extricating itself from the effects of their "redescription" of thetradition for a long time. Nevertheless, this project cannot be carried through tocompletion without a critical examination of the way in which many "democrats" anddefenders of human rights, by their hypocrisy and double standards, have themselvescontributed to the malaise over the positive meaning of such concepts, through the mostremarkable emigration of words, of the ideas of Ludwig Klages, Dr. M.H. Gring, and SSofficer Ernst Krieck.

From the Break Their Haughty Power web site http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner

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The Nazis and Deconstruction Jean Pierre FayeIs Demolition o