Monday, February 1, 2016

Heidegger, a treacherous millésime…



Charlie Hebdo (12/2015): How can anyone still be Heideggerian today?


“The words of the prophet are… / whispered in the sounds of silence.”
The Bard famously asserted that "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"; but while this may hold true for roses or for the awareness of love that moves a young Romeo when thinking of the Beloved, this sentiment does not hold for philosophy. Not all philosophy is worthwhile philosophy. In this at least, philosophy is more nearly akin to viniculture than to horticulture: there are good vintages and bad vintages, even in the most desirable of regions. And it seems now, finally, that the fat lady has sung out loud and clear for the “prophet”: Martin Heidegger, both man and thought, is simply a bad vintage.
            What do we do now, though? With bad wine it is at least sometimes possible to recycle it—to use it to spice up the cooking, or to make red wine vinegar, or even to engage in some private-time vinotherapy. But what does one do with bad philosophy, especially when it seems so smart?

“And the people bowed and prayed / To the neon god they made.”
Ever since Victor Farias put his foot in it, again, with his 1987 book Heidegger and Nazism, French intellectuals and philosophers have been working assiduously on the latest incarnation of “l’affaire Heidegger,” which Richard Wolin (1993) has translated as The Heidegger Controversy for those who work in English. Since the post-war period there have been many players in this international game, but the key figures in this current French scrimmage are Emmanuel Faye, with his 2005 book “Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans le philosophie autour des séminaires inédits de 1933-1935,” and François Rastier, with his (2015) “Naufrage d’un prophète, Heidegger aujourd’hui,” which has not yet been translated into English. And while there have been overtones of an ungracious Lebensmüdigkeit apparent in the critical acknowledgment of these recurrent publications and debates concerning Heidegger’s relationship to the Nazi state, which is a redundant and wearisome theme to some, there is an excellent reason for the cyclical nature of this controversy surrounding Martin Heidegger, and it has to do with The Master’s own pre-programmed schedule for the publication of his writings.

“Hello darkness, my old friend…”
The latest writings to be published in Martin Heidegger’s Collected Works have been his Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte), which were composed and amassed by Heidegger between 1931 and his death in 1976, and which finally began to make their appearance in the Collected Works in 2014. And because they are emerging only now, in the final stages of the publication of his philosophical opus, the timing of which was pre-determined by Heidegger himself, philosophers and intellectuals are right to construe these latest publications as representing, in some sense, a crowning feature in the monumental edifice of Heideggerian Thought. According to philosophy professor (UK) Gregory Fried, writing in Foreign Affairs, “Heidegger clearly intended [the Notebooks] to serve as the capstone to his published works, and they contain his unexpurgated reflections on this key period. Shortly before his death, Heidegger wrote up a schedule stipulating that the notebooks be published only after all his other writings were. That condition having been met, Trawny [the editor] has so far released three volumes (totaling roughly 1,200 pages), with five more planned.”
This sets up the context for the controversy.

“People talking without speaking, / People hearing without listening…”
One understands that part of the French motivation for their recent due-diligence in revisiting Heidegger’s “thought” has to do with the fact that among European intellectuals the French reception of Heidegger has been extremely enthusiastic, if not outright exceptional, profoundly influencing household-name intellectuals such as Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida. The French reception of Heidegger, both man and thought, greatly surpassed his reception in the world of Anglo-American philosophy, and also clearly overshadowed the rather mitigated post-war reception of The Master among his compatriots.
Another reason for the recent French assiduity is that, as it turns out, Heidegger was not just a part-time Nazi philosopher with a passing interest in Nazi values. The entire warp and woof of his thought-world is clearly interwoven with a longing for the revocation of Enlightenment rationalism, as well as with the affirming patterns of German and Volkish nationalism, and therefore also with an evolved and unmitigated anti-Semitism. Gregory Fried reminds us that with Heidegger it was so right from the beginning: “It is hard to exaggerate just how ambitious Heidegger was in publishing his breakout work, Being and Time, in 1927. In that book, he sought nothing less than a redefinition of what it meant to be human, which amounted to declaring war on the entire philosophical tradition that preceded him.”
One is also reminded that Derrida’s language of “deconstruction” is actually his disingenuously generous translation for Heidegger’s philosophical agenda of “Destruktion” –the destruction of European Enlightenment, of non-German identity, and of the Jew. And some French scholars are beginning to realize about this Heideggerian thought-world, that the results of an agenda of Destruktion for philosophy can only ever be so many echoes “in the wells of silence.”

[IMAGE FROM RISS – FUME, C’EST DU HEIDEGGER]

Riss: Here, smoke a little of this; it's some Heidegger

The following is Phrontisterion’s translation of Charlie Hebdo’s (December 2015) interview with François Rastier, author of  Naufrage d’un prophète, Heidegger aujourd’hui (PUF: 2015).

“How can anyone still be a Heideggerian?” (Comment peut-on être heideggérien aujourd’hui ?) by Yann Diener (Charlie Hebdo No 1221/16 December 2015)

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is considered to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. He is studied in all the universities of the world, and his aura [of influence] goes well beyond philosophy departments. But then, post mortem, this sacred animal [of philosophy] comes along, in person, to bring heartache to his disciples. You ask: What is the rapport with psychoanalysis?

Heidegger has fascinated generations of philosophers and intellectuals, among whom Levinas, Sartre, and Arendt, who were his students in Germany in the 1920s. They are fascinated because their professor has undertaken a return to the question of Being, a question that has been thoroughly dominated for some 2,000 years by Plato. Heidegger announces to his students that this question can no longer be ‘thought’ except in German. That should already have started the wheels turning.

Everyone has known for a long time that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party. But his admirers and translators have always tried to relativize, by maintaining that he was Nazi the way “everyone was a Nazi in the day,” and that his philosophical work can be separated from this temporary commitment of convenience. But this contorting negation won’t work anymore: Heidegger’s most recent writings, that are only being published now because this is how he wanted it, are openly anti-Semitic and Nazi. Post mortem, these are the texts that have come to crown the complete works of some 100 volumes, and that by their publication vindicate the few philosophers who have been identifying violent elements in Heidegger’s writings for years. The president of the Heidegger Archives resigned; the zealots are panicking; and some are wavering between negation and affirmation: Slavoj Žižek has now declared that Heidegger is not great despite Hitler, but thanks to Hitler. And Badiou considers that one can be or can have been “anti-communist, Stalinist, philo-Semite, anti-Semite, hostile to women, feminist, in the resistance, a Nazi or a follower of Mussolini, […] and still be a philosopher of the highest importance” [consulted, 070116; http://strassdelaphilosophie.blogspot.fr/2014/04/lettre-dalain-badiou-propos-dune.html].

Using Heidegger’s unpublished seminars from the 1930s, the philosopher Emmanuel Faye showed already in 2005 that one really cannot separate Heidegger’s philosophy from Nazi ideas. His book, Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, garnered Faye a massive number of insults, but no challenger with any serious arguments.

A PHILOSOPHY THAT IS REALLY CRIMINOLOGY’S CONCERN

In the most recent editions, published this year, Heidegger says more clearly than ever that he lays the blame for every evil at the feet of the Jews, and most especially for having sealed off the question of Being. He calls for the “total extermination” of the internal enemy, and laments that the Allied victory in 1945 came along to interrupt the great purifying firestorm: just like the delirium of the Nazis, Heidegger’s thought is not only a negation of Difference or the Other, it is also defined by a millennialism that is also apocalyptic and conspiracist. It is for these reasons that Heidegger’s thought has been so warmly received, not only by German Neo-Nazis—their slogan is a phrase from Heidegger dating from 1933, but also by the Iranian Ahmadinejad, the Russian ultranationalist Alexandre Douguine, and Islamists like Omar Ibrahim Vadillo. The French philologist, François Rastier, who is a research scholar at CNRS, documents the logic of this convergence in his recently published book, The Shipwreck of a Prophet (PUF: 2015): “Is a philosophy that calls for murder anything other than a dangerous ideology?” François Rastier shows how Heidegger, for a long time, encrypted his writings with what he himself called pseudonyms, “because minds were not ready.” Now, the Master has given us the keys to reading him truly. Reading Heidegger closely would have the advantage of allowing for a reasoned critic of a number of disciplines—including psychoanalysis—that have been marked, more or less directly, by his disastrous ideas. This would represent an enormous amount of work, of course. But this question about [Heidegger] has a direct rapport with the current political banalization of Hate: Should Heidegger be read even more closely now in the regions of Provence, Alps, Cote d’Azur (PACA) and the Nord-Pas-de Calais [Editor’s Note: regions having a strong showing of Front National (FN)]?

[IMAGE FROM RISS – JE ME SUIS BIEN FOUTU DE BOTRE GUEULE, BANDE DE CONS]

Martin Heidegger: I got you good, you pathetic dumb-shits (Complete Works)

Interview with François Rastier, linguist: “Heidegger’s Thought Provides Fuel for Every Sort of Radicalism” (Charlie Hebdo No 1222/23 December 2015)

Although Martin Heidegger’s commitment to Nazism was known, the German philosopher has continued to fascinate generations of philosophers and intellectuals. After years of playing hide-n-seek, his published works have now been crowned by the publication of texts that are explicitly Nazi. When the philosopher, Emmanuel Faye, published his Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in 2005, he was rewarded by copious insults from Heideggerians, who accused him of staining Philosophy, but who did not substantiate their claims with any reasoned arguments.

INTERVIEW.

The linguist, François Rastier, research scholar at CNRS, has just published a book that thoroughly examines the Heidegger Question and shows how Heidegger encrypted his writings with pseudonyms [Deckwörte], while waiting for a more propitious climate for their reception. Heideggerian scholars and thinkers, who still try to trivialize the situation, agree that this is not a minor critique; it is a political question that touches upon the current disregard for and contempt of various hatreds and identity posturing.

CHARLIE HEBDO: You’ve recently published a book, The Shipwreck of a Prophet (PUF: 2015). What type of situation prompted this publication?
François Rastier: The racist and anti-Semitic murders committed in 2012, 2014, 2015, and the criminal attacks directed against our liberties and against our culture. The ingredients were racial hatred; the easy stigmatization of a fanaticized Western culture; being horrified of Human Rights and of the democratic project; and the refusal of any form of rationality and of any reality principle. So, two years ago the Black Notebooks began to be published, which crown the pre-programmed publication of the complete works of Heidegger, and they very clearly tie together his Nazi theses concerning the criminality of “world Jewry,” and the sufferings of a Germany that had become, according to the philosopher, a vast concentration camp after Hitler’s defeat. Apparently, we are under the rule of a Jew-ridden and “calculating” techno-science belonging to a globalized West, etc. Heidegger, reputed to be “the greatest philosopher of the 20th century,” whose academic credentials are unassailable, inspired the deconstruction movement and, through that movement, the ubiquitous discipline of cultural studies. Heidegger is a common-place reference in artistic circles. But let’s not forget that he sat on the commission that elaborated the Nuremberg (Race) Laws, which provided the legal framework for the extermination that was in preparation. Why and how did Heidegger so fascinate his students and interpreters? Heidegger preached a “return to Being,” this divine topic for philosophers, which was supposedly perverted by Judeo-Christianity. But in fact Heidegger reveals to us today that Being was a pseudonym for fatherland: it was ultra-nationalism. For Heidegger, because the Jews are not rooted in any particular soil, they are therefore stateless; so they do not have Being. They do not truly exist—which is the reason for his 1949 question about victims of the camps: “Do they die?”

CHARLIE HEBDO: You demonstrate that Heidegger is a millennialist. Today, though, we are dealing with prophets who have diverse styles and perspectives.
François Rastier: The boat has been taking on water for a long time, most especially due to a publication by Marcuse in 1933. All the while pretending to ask questions, Heidegger preaches “Sacrifice” (Sein-zum-Tote) in the name of the Community of people. He pulls the strings of being a prophet, which is normal for extreme right-wing, esoteric sects (Heidegger was a member of The League of the Grail), which accompanied the creation of the Nazi party. Hitler, himself, speaks of these prophesies, invokes God, and concludes his speeches with ‘Amen’! After the war, Heidegger will say: “Only a god can save us.” Political Theology, as one sees every day, calls for murder and justifies it: it is a sacred imperative.

CHARLIE HEBDO: You characterize contemporary radicalisms. Why are there so many politicians and intellectuals who consider themselves Heideggerian? Is there a religious dimension in his writings?
François Rastier: For three generations Heidegger has been a pons asinorum for philosophy classes (NT: bridge of asses. Metaphorically: a puzzle whose solution separates the smart from the dumb). From Sartre to Arendt, from Derrida to Lyotard, from BHL (Bernard Henri Levy) to Finkielkraut by way of Badiou, Heidegger is an authority to be reckoned with. But his radicalism is seductive to diverse courants of thought. First of all, to the neo-Nazis. For example, the NPD (National Democratic Party of Germany), which is the “moral” successor of the Nazi Party), has for its slogan a phrase from the Master and takes for their own his theory about the responsibility of the Jews in their own extermination. Secondly, there is the National Bolshevik Front, as exemplified by Alexandre Douguine, which represents the most aggressive wing of Russian militarism. Douguine does not content himself with just publishing books in favor of Heidegger, when he was interviewed by Von Hermann (the Master’s trusted confident), Douguine declared in 2014 that “Russia should invade Europe,” and called for the assassination of the leadership in Kiev. Thirdly, Islamism: on the one hand there is the Shiite faction, avec the Heideggerian school in Teheran, which transposes the function of the Führer with that of the ruling ayatollah (Ahmadinejad is representative of this group), and on the other hand there is the faction of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood: Tariq Ramadan uses Heidegger whenever it is necessary, and Al Jazeera, which derives from this informal movement in Qatar, lends it microphones to the stars of Heideggerianism, such as Slavoj Žižek and Gianni Vattimo. For Al Jazeera Žižek has become the go-to pundit on the subject of Arab revolutions, in order to warn them against Western democracies. Fourthly, university radicalism remains Heideggerian: Žižek long ago asserted that “Hitler did not go far enough.” In 2005 Vattimo agreed with Ahmadinejad about “the idea of making the State of Israel disappear from the map,” and compared Ahmadinejad to the resistance fighters (maquisards) of the underground Al-Zarqawi, who was at that time leader of Al-Qaida in Irak, which was the germinating seed from which Daech would spring. Badiou justified the invasion of the Crimea and became all weepy about veiled women: they were resisting millions of potential “police auxiliaries,” who, according to him, began marching in the streets in response to the attacks against Charlie and l’Hyper Cacher.
            All of these radicalisms have a common enemy: The West; and more specifically: Enlightenment freedoms.
           
CHARLIE HEBDO: Had Heidegger anticipated an even greater adhesion to his ideas after his death?
François Rastier: As a partisan of the 1,000-year Reich, Heidegger thought in terms of centuries and was persuaded that his radical works would be well received: he was certainly aiming for a radicalization of his disciples. In 2001 there was a text calling for “total annihilation” and nobody said anything. Yes, Heidegger anticipated that his most aggressive writings would be welcomed by this new century like manna from heaven. It is up to us to prove him wrong.

CHARLIE HEBDO: In quoting Rithy Panh – “Before any massacre, there is an idea”—you ask the question concerning the responsibility of thought.
François Rastier: It’s the very least one can do. For Heidegger, morality does not exist, or, to put it briefly, it is a dangerous Judeo-Christian sentimentality. Badiou follows this up by saying that Nazism is absolutely unimportant in philosophy. Authors like Peter Trawny and Di Cesare now portray Heidegger as a courageous partisan of freedom, and especially the freedom to go to the extreme; as a sort of anarchist, a “no-global” who provides inspiration for the battle against globalization. On the model of groups such as CasaPound in Italy, (which also happens to claim Heideggerian inspiration), one is trying to create a trendy and uninhibited (décomplexé) neo-fascism, which makes us forget about that old, dusty Hitlerism.”

“Silence like a cancer grows…"

Further reading:
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