Phrontisterion: Charlie Hebdo's Great Heidegger Debate

Heidegger, Axelos, Lacan, Jean Beaufret, Elfriede Heidegger, Sylvia Bataille

~by David Aiken~

To its credit, the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo is currently hosting the Great Heidegger Debate for the intellectual world, which consists of answering the question: what to do with Martin the Nazi. Everybody gets now that he was a Nazi—but what should all those interested in the philosophical life of the mind (e.g., psychoanalysts, philosophers, students and other fans of Martin Heidegger,) do with the Nazi? Are his philosophical ideas also Nazi? And, other than the obvious and familiar political elements of the Nazi ideology, what does a Nazi philosophical idea look like? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we read Heidegger will we also become Nazi, insidiously, secretly, irretrievably? That is the question.

§ From the rubric Papier Buvard, by Yannick Haenel (CH, 8/11/2017, N^o 1320 /13): “Be Careful, Apparently Reading Heidegger Can Turn You Into a Nazi!”

Help! For years thousands of French psychoanalysts have been infected, and worst among them—the Lacanians. This was revealed to us by our comrade in arms, Yann Diener, in Charlie Hebdo (4/10/2017), who wants to deliver Lacan and his acolytes from the Heidegger virus, to disinfect Lacanism, and to purify contemporary thought, which Diener thinks has been poisoned by the pernicious influence of this horrible Nazi.

Isn’t such a desire to purify exaggerated? Is it really reasonable to think that one can isolate evil [le mal], or that it would suffice to liquidate one philosopher, or to forbid reading him, in order for everyone to think well in this best of all possible worlds?

Alright, Yann Diener is correct: let’s not read Heidegger any more, and we’ll be able to sleep easy, and right thinking will reign on Earth, especially in the heads of the Lacanians, who, healed from this deplorable influence, will finally be able to listen to the unconsciousness of their patients without being interfered with by any nasty Nazi cooties.

Thank you, dear Yann—we poor readers of Heidegger didn’t know that we were thinking badly [mal]. Thinking along with Heidegger, meditating about Dasein; about the ontological difference between Being [l’être] et being [l’étant]; about the event, or nihilism—all of which are things that have radically revolutionized the history of philosophy, we didn’t know that we were busy thinking Nazi thoughts. Thank heavens that you are there to remind us that Heidegger “would talk about Being when he wanted to say Fatherland or the Being-race.”

I can well imagine that Sartre, Derrida, Bataille and even Foucault are relieved that they escaped your retribution by their death: it’s obvious that these dangerous readers of Heidegger were closet Nazis, because they continued obstinately to read Being and Time, that book written in 1927; and to understand in that text that Being is the absence of belonging, and that it would be completely absurd (and thus malevolent) to affiliate that text with a German community, committed to a National-Socialist perspective (especially in 1927), which was tethered to a land [sol/Boden] and to a blood [sang/Blut].

But our friend Diener opens our eyes for us: when we imagine that Lacan used to admire Heidegger, that he would elaborate the abyssal and fundamental concept of “Thing” based on Heidegger’s thought, that he would even go to see him in Germany just to get his picture taken beside him! Of course, Lacan was deceived by Heidegger; and besides, he didn’t know what he was thinking (it is well-established that great thinkers don’t know what they are thinking). Wasn’t he also just a little bit Nazi? Didn’t he write: “After all, Hitler was only a precursor”? Didn’t he collaborate?

I have an idea: let’s not read Lacan anymore because of the risk of contamination. Let’s try, especially, to not think anymore: Thinking has become Nazi.

Let’s persuade ourselves that Heidegger’s daunting antisemitism (his obtuse prejudice) is sufficient to invalidate and to destroy the depth of his work [oeuvre]. And let’s especially not read, in the Contributions to Philosophy [Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), number 65 of the Gesamtausgabe] or in Nietzsche I and II, the way in which Heidegger deconstructs [démonte] without any pity whatsoever the racial ideology of the Nazi party and the biologisation of the human species that flows from that ideology.

Let’s not listen to Jean-Luc Nancy, who wastes his breath continually repeating to us that the hounding after Heidegger hides our own impossibility to accept those things that Heidegger decreed about our Western humanism that we find intolerable.

Since he was a card-carrying Nazi (between 1933 and 1934)—and even though he himself qualified his punctual adherence [compagnonnage] as “stupidity”— let’s continue to persuade ourselves that Heidegger’s thought is null and void. This will be more comfortable.

§ From the rubric Les histoires du Père Sigmund, by Yann Diener (CH, 15/11/2017, N^o 1321 /15): “Heidegger and His Brothers.”

Since the publication of the recent chronicle entitled “My Nights Without Heidegger” (CH, N^o 1315), readers have been asking how they may get access to Heidegger’s controversial Black Notebooks, because they still have not been translated into French.

As things now stand, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who is still largely considered to be the greatest thinker of the 20^th century, organized the posthumous publication of his most explicitly anti-Semitic texts, in order to wait for a more propitious climate for their reception. In effect, since 2014 these texts have only been published parsimoniously, in Germany, under the title, Schwarze Hefte [Black Notebooks]. But the official translator of Heidegger in France, François Fédier, is really quite exasperated. He is working against the clock: if he was successful in toning down and euphemizing his earlier translations of Heidegger—for example, by translating Nationalsozialismus as ‘national Socialism’ rather than as ‘National-Socialism’—he has been having a much more challenging time with these more transparent texts, where their author embraces his racism and his antisemitism.

So… how is one to judge if one does not read German? There is a way: one can read Heidegger et sa solution finale [Heidegger and His Final Solution], the book by the young philosophy professor, Stéphane Domeracki, who teaches at a lycée in Dijon. He tucks in with no detours, describing Heidegger as ‘super-Nazi’ [archinazi], and translates for us extensive excerpts of the Black Notebooks, such as the passage where Heidegger explains:

Worldwide Jewry, spurred on by the emigrants that were allowed to leave Germany, is elusive everywhere, and does not need, despite its influence, to participate in any acts of war, so that it remains for the rest of us to sacrifice the best blood among the best of our peoples (Schwarze Hefte, 1939-1941).

The words ‘plot’ and ‘conspiracy’ recur page after page; Heidegger is obsessed with the Jews and, I quote, their “drive to do business,” their “tenacious aptitude for calculation.” An aptitude that, according to him, makes the Jews responsible for technology’s steel-grip on the world, and therefore responsible for their own extermination at the hands of the Nazis as well as for the atomic bomb!

But what is the relationship with psychoanalysis, you ask me? It’s this: now that we are in a position to read these ultraviolent texts, whether one is philosopher, psychanalyst, journalist, dentist, or baker, we shall no longer be able to cite Heidegger without wondering about its effects on our speech and on our body.

There are some “Heidegger boys” who are complaining that everyone is trying to censor their idol. Quite the contrary: we need to read Heidegger more than ever…, but then all of Heidegger! So that we can become aware of everything that he tries to encourage. So that we can get an idea about what those are thinking who adore him today. There is so much to choose from: the German NPD [TN: link]—the moral offspring of the Nazi party—takes a phrase from Heidegger as their slogan, and defends his theses concerning the responsibility of the Jews in their own extermination; Alexandre Douguine, the Russian National Bolshevik, cites Heidegger in order to call for the invasion of Ukraine and for the liquidation of its leaders; and then there are the Islamists: on one side there is the Shiite contingent with the Heideggerian school in Teheran, which inverts the function of the Fuhrer with that of the ayatollah—Ahmadinejad derives from this circle, and on the other side there is the Sunnite contingent of the Muslim Brotherhood, with Tariq Ramadan, who quotes from Heidegger when it suits his purposes. The well-received Islamologist can piggy-back his conspiracy theses on those of the well-respected German philosopher. And he is going to need to, given the numerous conspiracies that are stacking up against him these days…

Other Phrontisterion posts concerning Martin Heidegger:

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/04/heideggers-greek-inversions-reversals.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/11/my-nights-without-heidegger-editorial.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/04/martin-heideggeris-lady-philosophys.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/02/potpourri-from-charlie-hebdo-november.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html

· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page_24.html