 |
| 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, No 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, No
1321 /15): “Heidegger and His Brothers.”
Since the publication of the recent chronicle entitled
“My Nights Without Heidegger” (CH, No 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 20th 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:
Further reading:
Further readings about Heidegger’s Rektorat
Rede:
· Fédier, François, “L'Intention de nuire” [« Le Débat ». 1988/1 n° 48 |
pages 136 à 141. ISSN 0246-2346. ISBN 9782070713035.
· Grün, Bernd, “Martin Heidegger als Gleichschaltungsrektor. Eine vergleichende Studie
anhand der Rektoratsreden des Jahres 1933,” in Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus,
Heidegger-Jahrbuch 5 (München: Verlag Karl Alber,
2009).
· Faye, Emmanuel, Heidegger, l’introduction du
nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).
