Peter Trawny, Jesús Adrián Escudero, Et. Al. - Gatherings The Heidegger Circle Annual 2015
Peter Trawny, Jesús Adrián Escudero, Et. Al. - Gatherings The Heidegger Circle Annual 2015
Peter Trawny, Jesús Adrián Escudero, Et. Al. - Gatherings The Heidegger Circle Annual 2015
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GAT H E R I NGS
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loves the philosopher. It knows eros, the erotic dimension of its respective philosophy. But beyond that it knows the erotic dimension of philosophy par excellence, the freedom of thought which inscribes itself
in every philosophy. The freedom of philosophy counts for more than
obedience to a beloved thinker. The Heideggerians are not familiar
with this experience. That is their weakness they are not philosophers
and never can be.
Heideggers texts require, perhaps more than others, a philosophical
interpretation. It could be that Heidegger knew a genuine reader is one
who enjoys his seductions, gives himself over to them but does not succumb to them. From this standpoint I reject the view that Heideggers
self-interpretations must be the beginning of every interpretation, just
as much as I reject the temptation of bathing in Heideggers thinking
as in the endless melody of Wagnerian music-drama.
ii
I turn now to the question of whether we can speak of a being-historical anti-Semitism in Heidegger. For this, it must become clear
what that could mean in the context of Heideggers thinking in general. In other words, we must try to understand the being-historical
character of these claims about Judaism. For this two things must be
accomplished: 1) we must get to know the essential characteristics of
Heideggers thinking of the history of being in the 1930s and 1940s,
and 2) we must question whether the remarks about world Judaism
are related to being-historical thinking and, what is more, we must
find out whether these remarks first become comprehensible from the
vantage point of being-historical thinking.
However, to make these two questions possible, we must take note
of the most important aspects of Heideggers remarks about Judaism
and world Judaism. Accordingly, I will begin my deliberations with
this. I want to cite three of Heideggers remarks, isolating the core statements in each.
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concerning a
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The second remark is divided into two propositions that are fundamentally difficult to connect: 1) there is a historical process in which
England has played a role that cannot be changed by an agreement; 2)
the role of world Judaism in which England has a role to play, and
in addition to which (this is important) Americanism and Bolshevism likewise play their parts this world Judaism is not racially
grounded but stems from the metaphysical question concerning the
kind of humanity which, utterly unattached, can take over the uprooting of all beings from being as its world-historical task.
The first part of this thought need not, it seems, detain us long. Heidegger much like Nietzsche despised not only English philosophy,
but above all the English spirit, which for him is a merely economically oriented imperialist pragmatism. It would perhaps be possible
to correlate Heideggers thinking at the end of the 1930s with Hitlers
speeches. If we think of Hitlers speech on the 8th of November 1939,
we find again this peculiar mix of contempt for England and antiSemitic allusions. In general, it appears to me that the person of Hitler
10
11
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the biological i.e. of the people (GA 97: 20). I refer only to the second
half of the citation. Marx, the Jew, turns Hegels metaphysics around.
With that inversion, spirit is the epiphenomenon of economy and
organization. Apart from the fact that Heidegger takes it as a disintegration, it can now become clear to what extent Jewry and world
Judaism are the source of Bolshevism, Americanism and England,
even of the biological of National Socialism that Heidegger mentions.
How different Heideggers reference to Marx in the Letter on
Humanism sounds, a reference that came perhaps only a year later:
Because Marx by experiencing alienation attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other
historical accounts (GA 9: 340/259, tm). The difference is deceptive,
for there is no difference between this statement and that in the Black
Notebooks. Simply put, the alienation Marx experiences is not the
alienation of the modern world of labor, but that of the homeless Jew.
Judaism is the principle of disintegration. In what way? The detachment of the Jewish is connected to the furthering of the uprooting of beings from being. The detachment of world Judaism is, as
it was called elsewhere, a kind ofworldlessness (GA 95: 97) or, in my
interpretation, homelessness. This concerns the Jewish Diaspora, in
Hebrew galut (), a disintegration that the Jewish people had to bear
since the Babylonian conquest of the kingdom of Judea in 597 BC. In
this sense the Diaspora is the condition of Zionism, and it is noteworthy
that the Dreyfus affair in France at the end of the 19th century had
both the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as well as Theodor Herzls Der
Judenstaat in its wake. But this is only an aside.
The unattachedness of world Judaism apparently allowed it to
further advance the uprooting of all beings from being. To give a being-historical exegesis of this idea, in my opinion, requires first briefly
considering Heideggers being-historical understanding of homeland
(Heimat) and homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit).
In a comment from the beginning of the 1940s, we read the following remark about the homeland : The homeland is the appropriation of
earth to become a site for the preparation of residence, which safeguards
12
the arrival of beyng from whose truth [Wahr-heit] gods and humans
first conceive the region of their response (GA 73.1: 755). Allow me to
add to this a further definition from the same text: Homeland is the
historical site of the truth of beyng, called and received by the earth,
rooted in it and in it held safe. This understanding of homeland is no
longer related to a concrete nationally bounded community, to a people
in the everyday sense. Homeland is at this point thought from Ereignis
as the event of appropriation, as the historical provenance of the truth
of beyng.
Earth belongs necessarily to this homeland. It calls and receives the historical site of the truth of being. The site is rooted
and held safely in it. It concerns, in other words, what Heidegger elsewhere called the intimacy of the strife between world and earth (GA
94: 274). The homeland as world is rooted in and held safe by the
earth, the world occasions the earths opening and uncovering. Homeland/world and earth open a respective history, however, when they
happen as strife.
Returning to unattached world Judaism, this means that with
the uprooting of beings from being, world Judaism promotes homelessness in a being-historical sense. World Judaism in its earthless Diaspora works towards making a sense of home impossible. How could
it not, since it is excluded from the historical happening of the strife
between world and earth?
However, in order to further the uprooting of all beings from
being, that is to say, the separation of beings from being, a certain
capability is required. We are already acquainted with this. It is the
calculative capacity that grasps technology and mathematics as a
universal instrument to grind down every historically developed difference between cultures or peoples. And yet this is apparently not the
only way that world Judaism brings about disintegration.
Immediately after his depiction of the role that Marx plays in
the history of metaphysics, Heidegger continues with the following
thoughts:
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Only when what is essentially Jewish in the metaphysical sense fights against the Jewish, only then is
the pinnacle of self-destruction attained in history; assuming that the Jewish has everywhere completely
seized control such that even combat against the Jewish, and this first and foremost, will be brought under
its sway. (GA 97: 20)
Heidegger completes a movement of thought he had already discovered
earlier. It is not easy to grasp. National Socialism is an epiphenomenon
of machination, and that now means of the Jewish. The Jewish
(that means National Socialism, or rather, machination), however, he now
sees in a struggle with the Jewish. But what here is the Jewish? Do
we have to think of world Judaism and/or of the persecuted, deported,
and exterminated European Jews? However, the self-destruction of
machination is a self-destruction of the Jewish. To fight against this,
against what is Jewish, would be to be brought under its sway and
thus to become yet another form of the Jewish.
I would like to pose here again the question of a being-historical
anti-Semitism and respond to questions concerning its legitimacy. For
Heidegger, the peculiar worldlessness of the Jews goes together with
their calculative capacity. To the extent that this worldlessness is
driving the uprooting of all beings from being it collides with the
being-historical home as the appropriation of earth to become a site
for the preparation of residence.
*
A digression: Emmanuel Levinas attempts in his 1961 essay Heidegger,
Gagarin and Us to bring out this most important difference between
Judaism and Heidegger and the Heideggerians, whom he names explicitly. In essence, it concerns Heideggers emphatically topographic
world-order and the destruction of this order by technology, as approved
by Judaism.
14
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The proposition works with three subjects: a) world Judaism, b) emigrants who were allowed to leave Germany, c) we ourselves, who sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people. We have already heard
how world Judaism plays a role in the power of machination. The World
War is the decisive context for this remark. Emigrants spur on world
Judaism. It is not said who Heidegger is thinking of. Jewish refugees?
People such as Thomas Mann who broadcast his speeches with the help
of the BBC in London? They just like we appear to be identifiable.
It is stated of world Judaism that it is everywhere elusive.
The worldlessness of Judaism appears to mean that it is everywhere but in this everywhere it conceals itself and remains elusive.
The semantic of grasping, however, already indicates the problematic
of this point. The everywhere elusive world Judaism is powerful precisely because it is everywhere elusive. And it is even on account of
this special power that world Judaism needs to participate nowhere in
acts of war. But how is that possible?
At this point I want to remind us of the already mentioned Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. In his book, What is Anti-Semitism?, Wolfgang
Benz pointed out that the concept of world Judaism generally belongs
in the context of a myth of a Jewish world conspiracy.7 In this sense
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion represent a textual incunabula, an
absolute point of reference.8 It is the original document of modern
anti-Semitism even if it is not the only source of this.
The malicious fiction of the Protocols describes a Judaism which
strives for world domination and which recognizes even war as a possibility in this striving. Under the heading: the taming of the resistances
of the non-Jewish through war and a general world war, it states that
as soon as a non-Jewish state dares to resist us, we must be in a position
to incite its neighbors to war against it. But if the neighbors too want to
make common cause with it and advance against us, we must unleash
a world war.9
There is no way of proving whether Heidegger had actually
read the Protocols. There is a remark by Karl Jaspers according to
which Heidegger was aware of them. According to this remark, in a
16
discussion concerning the evil nonsense of the Elders of Zion, Heidegger had once maintained: But there is a dangerous international
association of Jews.10
Heidegger would not have needed to read the fiction of the Proto
cols in order to be taken in by them. They were an element of National
Socialist propaganda. Hannah Arendt had noted this in connection
with a book by Alexander Stein written in 1936 entitled Adolf Hitler,
Student of the Elders of Zion. 11 In any case, we hear a reference to
such anti-Semitism in Hitlers speech on the 30th of January 1939,
which states: If international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe
should succeed in plunging the peoples once more into a world war,
then the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and
therewith the victory of Judaism but the annihilation of the Jewish
race in Europe.12 One can consider this speech as the first announcement of the annihilative actions of task forces of the state police and
the SD [Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service] which began with the
invasion of Poland in September 1939.
Heidegger followed Hitlers speeches and would have taken note
of this remark about the international Jewish financiers. Their spirit
or rather their specter speaks from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This elucidates the context in and out of which Heideggers remark
about world Judaism being everywhere elusive is uttered. World
Judaism has become an international agitating power that can make
use of certain figures (England, the USA, the Soviet Union) without
having to come into view itself. At the same time, Heidegger obviously
regards it as an enemy of the German people. Otherwise we could not
explained the contrast he proposes: whereas for us it only remains to
sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people.
iii
Ernest Renan wrote in 1883: The Judaism which, so far, has been good
for the past, will be good for the future. It is the true root of liberalism,
it answers to the modern spirit [esprit moderne]. Every Jew is a liberal
[]. He is so by his essence. The enemies of Judaism, however, if you
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only look at them more closely, you will see that they are the enemies
of the modern spirit in general.13
Renans own position to Judaism is not unimportant here. It is vital
that he ascribes to Judaism a representation of the modern spirit. In
this way the anti-Semite is an anti-modernist.
If Heidegger uses the concept of modernity at all, he uses it in
quotation marks. While Heideggers use of quotation marks is a topic all
its own, with regards to modernity they are meant critically. Besides
antiquity and the Middle Ages, is there a fourth epoch after modernity
that we could positively define? Doubtful, according to Heidegger.
The determination of the concept modern remains problematic.
It is ambiguous and, therefore, mostly misunderstood. Even today there
is a dispute as to what extent the Enlightenment of the 18th century
is at the center of this concept. Is modernity a child of Kants Critique,
and if so, in what sense? Is enlightened rationality the leading authority
in our media-based public sphere? However such questions might shift
the meaning of the concept of modernity, its use in many contexts is
still unavoidable.
Here for my reading of Heideggers remarks on world Judaism
it is not necessary to present a complete account of modernity. It
is enough to single out from these remarks, without attempting to be
comprehensive, both negative and positive moments that cluster around
the concept of modernity. These meanings include: 1) homelessness, i.e.
the mobility of Judaism, 2) lack of origin [Ursprungslosigkeit] in relation
to the first beginning, i.e. the complete inclusion of Judaism in the
calculative thinking of modernity, 3) devastation, i.e. the complete
inclusion of Judaism in machination. All three meanings form a coherent semantic field and also revolve around each other. Accordingly,
Judaism would be the source of homelessness and lack of origin, as well
as the devastation of an idealistic ordering of metaphysics.
This semantic field belongs to the epochal sense of modernity. The
modern subject emancipates itself from national or ethnic determinations so as to be able to follow the advances of universal capital unhindered. In so doing, it assumes that ideological, political, religious,
18
aesthetic or moral determinations recede before the technical-pragmatic demands of a universal way of life.
If possible, has Heidegger here confused the modern subject with
the Jew? Does the meaning of being-historical anti-Semitism perhaps lie in a hidden being-historical survey of the modern spirit?
No. A shift from being-historical anti-Semitism to a being-historical anti-modernism is not permissible. In fact, the identification
of Judaism with the modern spirit itself remains caught up in a
stereotype, which today we would interpret as anti-Semitic, a stereotype, incidentally, that is countered by Zionism. In Zionism, there
were attempts, ignored by Heidegger, to ground Judaism back upon
its original source texts.
However, even if we do not permit the shift from being-historical
anti-Semitism to a being-historical anti-modernism, there remains,
nevertheless, a consistent interpretation that being-historical antiSemitism has traits of being-historical anti-modernism. The impact
of this connection is troubling. It seems to be a thorn in the side of
Heideggers thinking. For if we assume that today freedom consists in
a perhaps impossible minimum personal distance from the undeniably present universal reductions of modernity, then we would have to
acknowledge that this freedom is not only no longer to be thought with
Heidegger, but no longer to be thought against him as well.
19
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n ot es
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w h at
a r e t h e b l ac k n ot e b o o k s ?
Around the year 1930, a time in which the well-known turning (Kehre)
started, Heidegger undertook the drafting of texts that aimed to clarify
central elements of his most esoteric thought, especially the philosophical and conceptual experiments regarding the thought of the enowning-event (Ereignis-Denken), which begins to flourish in Contributions
to Philosophy (193638). His brother Fritz Heidegger was already alluding to these notebooks in a 1950 letter to Hugo Friedrich: Heidegger
is completely himself in the actual manuscripts (not in the courses and
lectures); these manuscripts themselves are here almost intact, only a
few have been transcribed. That fundamental attitude that should be
the beginning and end of all philosophizing appears here; for a while
22
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the
The appearance of Heideggers work has revealed serious doubts regarding the political viability of his thought. These doubts date to the political scandal the so-called Heidegger Case which led to the publication
of the pioneering works of the late 1980s by Derrida, Faras, Lyotard,
and Ott about Heideggers entanglement in National Socialism.9 These
first works concerning the political dimension of Heideggers work
were followed in the early 1990s by those of Nolte, Pggeler, Rockmore,
Sluga, Young, and Wolin, among others.10 In light of this scandal, it was
realized that Heidegger can no longer be read in the same way, and that
his connection with National Socialism was undeniable.
26
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the spiritual and symbolic significance of the National Socialist revolution than in its particular effects.
The studies of Faras, Sheehan, Ott, and others have clearly proved
the connection between Heidegger and National Socialism. However,
the discussion of Heideggers political stance frequently rests on an
ahistoric conception of Nazism, which tends to be understood more
as a moral failure than as a complex political, ideological, and social
movement that ended in a Holocaust which is unparalleled in modern
European history.17 National Socialism is not anything monolithic, but
rather a movement which, especially in its initial stages, sought a political and social revolution that was dramatically transformed into a
regime of human devastation.
Hence the necessity of situating Heideggers texts within the context of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist Partys
rise to power. Noteworthy studies of Weimar include Gays classic cultural approach, Fergussons in-depth research into the economic consequences following the Treaty of Versailles, Weitzs sociological analysis,
Jelineks legal study of the Weimar Constitution, Mllers sociological
approach, and Jays historical explanation.18 To these it is worth adding
Benzs studies of National Socialist ideology and the historical analyses
of the specific academic context of the German university of the thirties
compiled by Leaman and Martin.19
In conclusion, on the one hand, what Heidegger said during the era
of the National Socialist regime his reflections and did his actions
must be analyzed; and, on the other hand, it must be understood how
those actions would be interpreted in relation to his philosophy and
his historical context. In other words, the official history as told by
Heidegger himself as well as the Heidegger Case must be completed,
and, in part, corrected based on archival, documentary, historical and
philosophical research. Here it is interesting to focus attention on reading Heideggers reflections about Judaism as deeply rooted in the social
and historical context of a conservative Germany, a Germany that was
very critical of the Weimar Republic.
28
iii.
iii. a
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The same years in which Heidegger dedicated great effort to interpreting Aristotles texts on practical and political philosophy (192425) are
also marked by his detailed reading of the correspondence between Paul
Yorck von Wartenburg and Wilhelm Dilthey, which was published in
1923. In the letters Yorck sent to Dilthey, which crucially influence the
meaning of historicity in Being and Time, Heidegger finds an important source of inspiration for his concept of homeland (Heimatland).
In many of these letters, Yorck returns time and again to the subject of
Germanys groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit) and supports a life that is
rooted in ones own soil and in historical tradition. Remaining in ones
homeland constitutes a primordial element of stability (Stndigkeit) as
30
much for the individual as for the community. Those who abandon
their own soil in favor of the flux of capital and urban life have lost
their ties to their own historical identity. Here, Yorck points to Jews as
an example of this kind of life that is governed by money and a desire
for profit: Jews that entire tribe lacks all feeling toward physical and
psychological ground.26
The interest Yorck shows in place of birth and in a life settled
in ones homeland generated great influence on Heideggers thought.
By reconfiguring German identity in terms of groundedness and autochthony rather than by strictly economical and territorial criteria,
Yorck emphasizes a fundamental dimension of German existence:
its establishment in a land whose true significance is more historical
than topographical. The understanding Yorck has of homeland and of
local landscape as forces that form German historical destiny provide
Heidegger with a model that allows him to consider the connection
between groundedness (Bodenstndigkeit) and destiny (Geschick). In
paragraphs 7377 of Being and Time, Heidegger revisits Yorcks analysis and offers a particular understanding of the destiny of human existence: Dasein, as determined by care (Sorge), never exists in solitude,
disconnected from the heritage of its tradition. His reading of Yorck
allows him to reconceptualize the constitutive roles of tradition and of
groundedness in ones homeland as two basic elements that determine
individual and collective existence. This existence of individuals as
much as of communities is something dynamic, and is subject to a
constant process of revision and reinterpretation.
Yorck highlights the necessity of understanding Dasein not as an
isolated, monadic, and bourgeois subject, but rather as an entity whose
being is comprised by its generation. This means that the destiny of
every individual (Schicksal) is closely interwoven with the collective
destiny of the people (Volksgeschick) to which he/she belongs. Collective
destiny, Ge-schick, is not something granted in advance. Instead, it is a
collective search (Ge-) for the historical possibilities that tradition sends
(schickt) to a community, possibilities which should always be fulfilled
and adopted in conformity to their historical roots.
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In Heideggers opinion, groundedness is linked to historicity. Dasein understood collectively as people only becomes what it is (that
is, German) in the struggle and the effort to recover its roots in history, language, and homeland. However, during the twenties and the
era of the Weimar Republic, Heidegger never explicitly addresses the
meaning of what it is to be German. This will not happen until the euphoric outbreak of National Socialism in 1933, the time when Heidegger
shows growing interest in the topic of popular groundedness (vlkische
Bodenstndigkeit) in open dialogue with the politics of the conservative revolution.27 The emergence of National Socialism in 1933 offered
Heidegger what Machiavelli called loccasione: the political opportunity, the kairological occasion, the opportune moment for the German
people and the role of leadership of their Fhrer. Beyond the writings,
manifestos, and words of Heidegger, beyond his political intentions, one
must understand his political stance within the framework of the academic conservatism of the time period, one of whose objectives consists
of reestablishing the historical roots of the German people. This spirit
of revitalization is strongly felt in the famous Rectoral Address of May
1933, The Self-Assertion of the German University.
iii.c
When it is asserted that Heidegger develops concepts such as homeland, community, and people from reading Yorck and Spengler, it
is not suggested that the usage of such vocabulary justifies his involvement with Nazism, although neither can it be denied that it levels and
eases the road toward a positive interpretation of the National Socialist
movement. It can be claimed that the usage of such terms within the
intellectual context of the time period is not merely accidental. This
unexpected ideological background is easily mobilized when asserting
Germanness (Deutschtum), reclaiming blood ties, protecting rootedness
in the same soil, and appealing to sacrifice, patriotism, and nationalism.
In the final stages of the twenties one finds the testimonies of Max
Mller and Hans Jonas, which confirm Heideggers inclination toward
the German nation (deutsche Volkstum) and his sympathies toward the
32
ideology of blood and soil (Blut und Boden). Max Mller describes the
Freiburg Heidegger of 192829 as follows: Heidegger developed a style
with his students that was completely different from that of other professors. We went on many outings. Of course, connection to the people
[Volk], nature, and the student movement was a recurring topic of conversation. The word national [vlkisch] was a favorite of his, even if he
never associated it with any political party.28 Also, Hans Jonas offers
the following account: It is true that one could always detect in Heidegger a certain point of view influenced by the idea of blood and soil.
His origin from the Black Forest was of great importance to him. This
was not only due to the fact that he loved skiing and the mountains,
but also that it had something to do with his ideological standpoint: one
should remain close to nature. Some of his observations showed a sort
of primitive nationalism.29
Heidegger was truly convinced that a profound and lasting change
in German reality was necessary when he wrote a letter to Elisabeth
Blochmann in the spring of 1933 in which one detects revolutionary
language that marks the defining moment of his entrance into the
realm of politics: For me, the present situation demands action in service of a great commitment and participation in the construction of a
world founded in the people. We can find this, as well as the calling of
the German people, in the history of the Western world, but only if we
ourselves are exposed to and take ownership of it in a new way. The
time for a first awakening has arrived.30
Heideggers assessment of German society of that time concludes
with an appeal to change, a change that should lead to university reform. This is one of the messages expressed in his Rectoral Address.
Incidentally, similar proclamations are found among rectors of other
German universities of the same time period; for example, those of
Hans Heyse at the University of Knigsberg and those of Ernst Krieck
at the University of Frankfurt. Heyse, Krieck, and Bumler, among
many others, were convinced that German societys road to transformation was through university reform and a return to Greek culture. A
reform seasoned with an intense patriotic, military, national and heroic
rhetoric; a reform that invokes strength and severity. In this context,
33
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34
a n t i - s e m i t i s m o r a n t i - j u da i s m ?
Every time that Heideggers connection with National Socialism is spoken of there is a tendency to pose the question of whether Heidegger
was anti-Semitic or whether there are detectable anti-Semitic elements
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36
regard to Jews social position and the use of violence against them.36
When discussing Heideggers relationship with Jews, one must keep
in mind a set of distinctions and nuances about what anti-Semitism
means. One cannot limit oneself to only a few sources.37 Heideggers
thought process and life must also be considered from their specific
historical context.
In practice, a clear difference must be established between anti-Semitism, understood as racial and biological animosity against Jews, and
anti-Judaism, understood as reflecting a long-held European tradition
against the Jewish people and religion. According to the documentary
evidence available, it is difficult to speak of a systematic anti-Semitism in
Heideggers philosophy.38 What can be detected in Heidegger are strong
traces of a spiritual and cultural anti-Judaism, particularly present in
the university and academic spheres. There is no doubt that Heideggers
relationship with Judaism is highly problematic and ambiguous, but his
stance cannot be described as unilaterally anti-Semitic, if anti-Semitism
is understood as the racial persecution and systematic annihilation of
the Jews.
Therefore, how can the question of whether or not Heidegger was
anti-Semitic be answered? Towards the end of the twenties the rumor
was already circulating that Heidegger was anti-Semitic. Toni Cassirer,
the wife of Ernst Cassirer, acknowledges in her autobiography that [Heideggers] tendency toward anti-Semitism was not unknown to us. Also,
at the beginning of the thirties as Bultmann points out the rumor
was spread that Heidegger had joined the National Socialist Party.40 Even
his old friend and former colleague, Karl Jaspers, in his report written
for the University of Freiburg in 1945, showed reservations concerning
Heideggers attitude toward Jews.41 Additionally, in his letters from 1916
to his wife, Elfride Petri, published in 2005, Heidegger already spoke of
the jewification [Verjudung] of our culture and universities.42 Heidegger
again speaks similarly of jewification in a 1929 letter addressed to Victor Schwoerer, the vice-president of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen
Wissenschaft.43 These letters to his wife and Schwoerer are two instances
that seem to clearly show a certain racist anti-Semitism.
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Once again, there arises the same question that was posed at the beginning: what type of anti-Semitism does Heidegger support? In light
of the available documentation, it seems difficult to speak of a racist or
biological anti-Semitism in Heidegger. Also, in the Black Notebooks and
in other writings there are passages in which Heidegger appears extremely critical of this type of anti-Semitism. It is true that Heidegger
establishes a difference between Jews and non-Jews, but this difference is not based on biological criteria. His commentary about Jews is
made from the perspective of spirit and not race. Thus, for example, in
his book about Nietzsche he leaves it clear that biology as such never
decides what is living (GA 6.1: 468/N3: 42). The true debatable question concerning Heideggers relationship with Jews cannot be settled
in this way. Instead, one must consider how his philosophical approach
to Hebrew tradition comprises a deciding moment in the way he interprets the whole history of philosophy. Heidegger is not interested at
least not philosophically speaking in legitimizing the extermination
of the Jews, but rather in reaching a critical understanding of their
condition. His assessment of the present is strongly influenced by his
interpretation of Nietzschean nihilism: the present is a time that is
controlled by the metaphysical principle of will to power. The introduction of a racial breeding, which Heidegger speaks of in his texts about
Nietzsche in the thirties (GA 6.2: 278/N3: 231), has nothing to do with
what Faye calls a selection of race like that which was in those times
bloodily set in motion with National Socialism.44 It is not an ontological legitimization of National Socialist racism. The breeding of human
beings (Zchtung des Menschen) is the culmination of the metaphysics
of subjectivity; it is the maximum expression of modern technology
in its attempt to exploit natural and human resources a product of
the mechanization (Machinalisierung) that governs the present. Heidegger believes that Nietzsche is the first to recognize the metaphysical
character of the machine, which transforms human beings into a type
(Typ); into a simple form (Gestalt) on which a shape can be imprinted;
into material for experimentation (Versuchsmaterial) (GA 50: 5556/
N3: 22930).
38
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40
The present essay contains some of the results reached in the frame of the Senior Fellowship
for Advanced Researchers, awarded by the Humboldt Foundation, and in the research project
funded by the Spanish Department of Science and Innovation with the reference number
FFI201344418P.
e n d n ot es
There will come a day, perhaps, when we will know every single
aspect of Heideggers life and every single detail of his work. Perhaps, then, we will be able to establish a freer relationship to his
philosophical heritage, not exclusively guided by finding traces
of National Socialism in his thought. Miguel de Beistegui, Hei
degger and the Political: Dystopias (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3.
See, for example, Eric Aeschimanns opinion in Le Nouvel Obser
vateur regarding the polemic between Franois Fdier, Hadrien
France-Lanorad and Peter Trawny (December 7, 2013). It is
also worth mentioning the words of Donatella di Cesare, VicePresident of the Heidegger Gesellschaft and member of the Jewish Community in Rome, published in the Italian journal La
Reppublica (December 18, 2013), the comments of Jrg Altweg
on the collapse of French philosophy published in Frankfurter
Allge-meine Zeitung (December 13, 2013), and the reply of the
German editor of the Black Notebooks Peter Trawny published
in the German journal Die Zeit-Online (December 27, 2013). For a
rejoinder by the co-editor of Heideggers Collected Works Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann see the cultural supplement of the
Italian journal Avvenire (July 17, 2014). Other German scholars
like Rdiger Safranski, Gnther Figal and Klaus Held have
discussed this issue on various radio and TV shows. Likewise, the
international press has rekindled the controversy by publishing
phrases and quotes where Heidegger openly expresses his attitude
toward National Socialism and Judaism.
This letter can be found in the archives of the University of Frei
burg; see Angel Xolocotzi, Facetas heideggerianas (Mexico: Los
Libros de Homero, 2009), 66.
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4
5
6
7
8
9
10
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44
21
22
23
24
25
45
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39
40
41
42
into philosophy. It is another matter to evaluate Heideggers statements about Judaism from the perspective of his philosophical
program. This work, of course, can be carried out at the same
time that one continues to examine Heideggers personal and
political attitude and his sympathies toward certain aspects of
National Socialist ideology. In this context, see the work of Roubach dealing with Heideggers reception in Israel: M. Roubach,
Die Rezeption Heideggers in Israel in Heidegger Jahrbuch 5,
41932.
In this sense, one leans more toward the more moderate stances
of Grosser, Martin, Safranski, Sluga, Thom, Xolocotzi and Zaborowski than toward the accusations of Faye and Faras. In this
regard, one might cite the letter that Herbert Marcuse writes
to Heidegger in August of 1947, in which Marcuse accuses him
more of a total lack of sensitivity than of an evil and perverse
anti-Semitism; Herbert Marcuse, Brief an Martin Heidegger
vom 28. August 1947, in Heidegger und das Dritte Reich. Ein
Kompendium, ed. Bernd Martin (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 156.
Tony Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 187.
See Heidegger and Bultmann, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 2009), 187f, 191f. Heidegger himself confirms the existence of such rumors in a letter written to Hannah
Arendt in the winter of 1932/33: Martin Heidegger and Hannah
Arendt, Briefwechsel 1925 bis 1975 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1999), 68.
See Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 19201963
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 270.
Martin Heidegger, Letters to his Wife, trans. R.D.V. Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 28. However, twelve years later he writes
to his wife: Indeed, the best are Jews (ibid., 115). It remains
difficult to support the theory that Heidegger was a spiritual antiSemite in the twenties. This situation changes at the beginning
48
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44
45
46
47
48
49
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m ac h i n at i o n
However brief his flirtation with National Socialism, Heideggers attraction to it was related to what he perceived as a problem in the
contemporary human condition. While his own National Socialism
was not aligned with Hilters regime, this was not because he was
critical of Hitler and National Socialism per se, but because the latter
had not remained true to itself; instead, it had itself become swept up
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make up the first three volumes of Black Notebooks, and these references are consolidated in the second and third volumes (GA 95 and GA
96). The disparaging references to the Bolsheviks and Christianity
are far more numerous. But, as Heidegger himself observes in a different context, we should not succumb to machinations temptation of the
quantitative, and think that just because the references are fewer in
number that they are therefore less significant.
It is indeed disconcerting that when Heidegger references certain
figures of Jewish heritage, he mentions them disparagingly precisely in
the context of their race, linking it to spiritual flaws. For example, he
mentions his former teacher, Edmund Husserl (Jewish by birth, but who
converted to Protestantism), in the context of the putative increase of
the power of Jewry, empty rationality, the aptitude to calculate, and the
lack of ability to penetrate the realm of essential decisive resoluteness
(GA 96: 46); he cites the Jew Freud in the context of psychoanalysis,
which reduces everything to life and instinct and whose thought is
pure nihilism (GA 96: 218); and when discussing a Soviet diplomat as
an example of the underhandedness of Bolshevik politics, he names
the Jew Litvinov (GA 96: 242).8
Heidegger stereotypically associates the Jews with the propensity
for calculating and profiteering, and therefore ascribes machination,
and the alienation of Beyng, to the Jews and to Judaism. Furthermore,
unlike the Germans, who are rooted in soil and history, the Jews are
homeless (evoking the typecast of the wandering Jew); unlike the
Germans, Judaism suffers from a so-called uprootedness, being putatively bound to nothing, and therefore having a propensity to make
everything serviceable or at its disposal.9 In short, the Jews are not only
caught up in and susceptible to the intoxicating matrix of machination
(like everyone else), but they are also cast as the privileged conveyors
of machination, who facilitate the domination of modern technology
over human beings and nature, draining themselves and everyone else
of their Beyng-historical existence and of their humanity.
Put differently, Jews were not for Heidegger a political or a racial
problem, but a metaphysical problem because the Jews (among others
54
of their ilk) are the symptomatic conveyors of the withdrawal, forgetfulness, or the abandonment of Being. Heidegger reflects: The question concerning the role of world Jewry is not a racial one, but rather the
metaphysical one concerning the type of humanity that can straight
forwardly and non-bindingly undertake as a world historical task the
uprootedness of all beings from Being.10 Machination is not the Jews
fault, but because of Judaisms apparent similarity in structure, the Jews
are presumably particularly adept at the machinations domination and
can especially prosper in it.
Thus, it is not a matter of world-domination as the quantitative spread
of Jews et al., all over the earth, because machination is itself the power
of quantitative manipulation and measured extension in which human
beings become entangled, and of which they are thoughtlessly the
executors (GA 96: 6, 25, 302, 467, 48, 523, 111). The true danger is not
world Jewry or world Judaism, but the exclusive success of machination
in the metaphysical sense what we can call metaphysical Judaism
the abandonment of the Being of beings through the forgetfulness of
the Being of beings. It cannot be just world Jewry that is implicated
here as a metaphysical problem; like the latter, England, Americanism,
pragmatism, liberalism, Bolshevism, and Christianity are oriented toward and play themselves out in the global unleashing of machination
such that they (and we) live uncritically in the abandonment of Being
(GA 96: 11011).11
Machination was expressed in the war as technological prowess,
power, and the will to calculate; it had further implications for reducing the earth to a resource under quantitative measure, bringing all
beings under our dominion as controllable and at our disposition, as
well as reducing human beings to the status of beings deprived of decisive resoluteness. In his sweeping critique of such machination in 1949,
Heideggers original version of the Question Concerning Technology
maintained that the motorized food industry is essentially the same as
the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps.12
Granted, we all like to make connections and to detect structures
that animate apparently disparate experiences. Who has not at the
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very least been struck by if not impressed with Horkheimer and Adornos sweeping discernment of Enlightenment Rationality operative
already in Homers Odyssey, and with having read the domination
of nature in Odysseuss act of having plugged the ears of his shipmates and bound himself to the mast while gaining knowledge from
the Sirens? But do we not at the same time, at least with Heidegger,
witness the loss of individuation and uniqueness of persons (despite
his protests to the contrary) when equating the murder of even one
person with the motorized food industry? A possible animal ethics
notwithstanding (where motorized food has evolved into fast food),
are there not any moral discriminations to be made? Was Heidegger
able to rethink his position when he excerpted this statement from
the 1953 version of this work?
While machination is expressed in the radical quantitative indifference and interchangeability of all beings (GA 96: 213), finding its
political expression in popular movements like democracy, pluralism,
liberalism, Bolshevism, Christianity, mass communication, etc.; while
it is also expressive not only of the withdrawal of Being, but of our perilous forgetfulness of the withdrawal, for Heidegger, the extreme position
of machination meant that we were (and presumably still are) also on
the verge of something else, a new beginning, precisely in the possible
recovery of the self-denying withdrawal. The recovery of the latter as
openness to the mystery of Beyng, as the overcoming of machination
qua metaphysics, should be the harbinger of a new sense of uniqueness
that has no essential connection to the leveling-out of all differences in
terms of interchangeability, and quantitative and technological control.
The task for Heidegger is to overcome the metaphysics of presence as the uncritical prevailing privilege of this way of Being. The
question for us, however, bears on the structure of Heideggers thought
given the problem of overcoming metaphysics, which amounts to overcoming machination, and therefore overcoming world Jewry as the
privileged cipher of the latter and of its manifold expressions. The
question is not therefore whether or not Heidegger was anti-Semitic
or a Nazi, whether we might become contaminated by his writings,
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58
presuppose Being, Time, etc., but would render them accessible as objects potentially at our disposal). In order for this not to be a mere difference in idioms or a theme of ordinary language analysis, it is necessary
for Heidegger to turn to the phenomenological experiential dimension
of this expression and to describe the It and its giving. How this Es
gibt can be experienced and seen concerns the how of givenness of
Being and of Time, that is, our relation to Being and Time without an
appeal to beings (including Dasein).
Heidegger notes that from the very beginning of Western thinking, Being and Time are thought, but not the Es gibt that gives the
gifts of Being and Time. How is it that we have missed the Es gibt? It
is because, according to Heidegger, the Es gibt, the It gives, withdraws
in favor of the gifts which It gives. This retreat opens the space for
the gifts to be thought misleadingly and exclusively as Being with
regard to beings, conceptualizing Being as the ground of beings, as
Time with regard to the present (as the punctual now or as the living
present); Being and Time can then become the objects of thought, the
possible projects of calculative manipulation at our disposal, in short,
the province of machination (GA 4: 12/8). Although (and this can be
seen as one of Heideggers points) the fact that we could become forgetful of the giving at all such that Being as sending becomes Being as
present the forgetfulness of Being is testimony to the withdrawal/
denial of giving in favor of the gift. There must accordingly be some
sense in which machination is also given. I revisit this point in my
concluding section.
Allow me to continue by noting that this giving that holds back in
favor of the discernibility of the gift is qualified in a distinctive way.
What is the nuance of this giving for Heidegger? This giving, which does
not give itself, but only its gift, this giving that holds itself back is called
sending (Schicken). In other words, the way of Being as letting-presence,
and which in its own way belongs to giving, is a giving as sending and
as a making place for. Thus, Heidegger can contend that the sending
in the destiny of Being is characterized as a giving in which the sending source keeps itself back and, thus, withdraws from unconcealment
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(GA 14: 28/22). Being with regard to the grounding of beings is what is
sent, Being is unconcealed (or more dynamically, unconcealing) in the
concealing withdrawing of the It gives. It is when Being is disconnected
from giving that the metaphysics of presence or Western thought
only grasps the gift of Being as something present or as the ground
of beings.
Similarly, Time is not present. Here Time itself as is the case
in machination would lend itself to being managed (time management) or saved like something I could possess (saving time), or designated as some period in time (modern times), or some slice of a day
(tea time); likewise, Time is not mundane and measurable clock
time (what time is it?). Rather, It gives Time as the temporalizing
movement itself that cannot be contained as a moment in time. Accordingly, the way of Time as letting-presence, which in its own way
belongs to giving, is a giving as extending that opens and conceals
space-time (GA 14: 20/16). This is also why, for Heidegger, giving that
gives time is determined by denying and withholding nearness: An
extending is itself a giving, the giving of a giving is concealed in genuine Time (GA 14: 20/16, tm). Belonging to giving as sending, we can
also find a keeping or holding back, which is a denial or removal from
the living present.
This holding back/withdrawing/concealing therefore also designates a peculiar temporal structure of Being as sent. The holdingback, the holding in abeyance, is epochal as in the Greek epoch. The
epoch/epoch is the holding back of Itself for Being and Time. Each
of its transformations (epochs) remains destined in this way such that
the history of Being means the destiny of Being. Being is unconcealed
for thinking with its epochal modifications, with its manifold sendings
that in some way take place as history (GA 14: 1214/810).
If Being and Time are unconcealed gifts, then we can ask (to remain close to Heideggers formulation): What withdraws in the granting as opening of Being-Time, and preserves what remains denied in
what has-been? What is withheld in the approaching? In the expression
It gives, it is the It as giving. Heidegger capitalizes the impersonal
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We have seemingly taken a few steps back, from beings to Being, from
Being and Time as gifts to giving, from giving to the It as Ereignis.
According to Heidegger, the gifts are not expurgated, but retained in
Ereignis; Time and Being take place in Taking Place, disappearing as
they send/extend-open. Sheer eventing as sheer destining in this way
admits decisively no point or motivation for responsibility.
For Heidegger, the forgetfulness of Being, and machination that
is occasioned by the withdrawal, cannot be due simply to a deficit in
human existence; rather, in a more primordial manner, It gives
itself to be forgotten. Original forgetfulness would then be the veiling
(Verhllung) of the difference between Being and beings understood
as concealment. This veiling has in turn withdrawn itself from the
beginning such that forgetfulness is not a consequence of mere human thinking (or unthinking), but must be somehow endemic to the
withdrawal itself. Machination is a sent forgetfulness rooted in the
denial of the presencing of Being, as withholding the disclosure of
Ereignis (GA 11: 59/50).20
64
But, to play on Heideggers metaphors, do we not also need a stepforward, completing the step-back? On my view, not only do we have to
recognize that the gifts are retained in the giving, as Heidegger recognizes; we also have to acknowledge that giving accompanies its givenness
in and as the gifts. To put it in Heideggers terms, we would insist that
Time takes place as the revelation, as the extending-opening of Er
eignis; Being takes place as the revelation, as the sending-presence of
Ereignis. Recognizing this, or going this far, however, would be going
too far for the position advocated by Heidegger because it would place
his thinking into a radically different structure in a two-fold sense.
First, if the as structure were to remain functional, Ereignis in
sustaining Being and Time as Being and Time, in sustaining them
as gifts would retain the tension of the revelatory gifts, Being and
Time. Second, if this were the case, the sustaining-giving at this level
would have to be qualified more radically, expressive of this distinctive
structure not as a sending or extending-opening but, I suggest, in
terms of the emotional sphere of the person, and more specifically as
loving, as a unique Ereignis of difference, to play on Heideggers terms.
Eventful giving as loving in turn would qualify the impersonal It or
Ereignis now as Lover-Loving Movement, becoming in and through
loving; the gifts would be qualified as the beloveds.
We are not simply replacing terms here (loving for giving, Lover
for Ereignis, beloveds for gifts). There is a qualitative and decisive difference: Loving, by virtue of its very structure, cannot withdraw, deny,
or hold back, such that infinite Loving must boundlessly accompany
its free, creative revelation (which is also a self-revelation) as and
in the beloved.21 (For instance, in the movement of loving, I cannot
anticipate an end to loving, e.g., I will stop loving you in five years,
etc.22) The taking place of that Loving is not merely Being, or a mode
of being (Da-sein), but the beloved, which is precisely the be-loved
as retaining and creatively originating the revelation of loving as such.
Where human beings are concerned, the loving is qualified personally,
such that the Lover is revealed as Person, and the beloveds who love as
persons.
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68
The point here is that I am immediately and directly responsible
for the other person before I could choose to be responsible or not. This
is what Levinas calls election, not sending/extending. It is not a matter of quibbling over terms, but the meaning that infuses them. An
election before I could choose, which obligates me with responsibility
and a new kind of freedom as binding me to another; an ante-memorial
origin that accompanies His/Her revelation is not a sending/extending
whose origin withdraws or denies in favor of the gift, and for which
there is nothing to be responsible.31
If the giving accompanies the revelation in the gift, as the gift, then
the integrity of the person/loving is given in every personal presence.
There is a double demand and a double violation: moral and religious.
Rather than withdrawal and forgetfulness, it concerns murder on the
one hand, and idolatry, on the other; and they are intertwined.32 The
inextricable double violation would at least provoke guilt (for what we
have done), shame (for who we have become against who we most deeply
are), and the possibility of repentance (turning to our deeper selves with
others). Jaspers, accordingly, can describe both a metaphysical guilt that
is grounded in a solidarity among all persons such that each person is
co-responsible for every wrong and injustice in the world, and likewise
a moral guilt in which I am responsible as an individual for all that I
do, within a loving struggle between persons in solidarity.33
Heidegger purposefully distances himself from an individuation in
the moral-metaphysical sense of the person (my emphasis). Instead, for
him, it concerns the retrieval and taking over of the modal character
of the Da in the self from its ontological anonymity with things and
tools, as standing in the clearing.34 But for precisely this reason, in my
view, Heidegger is still too far this side of specificity to provoke guilt,
shame, repentance, and responsibility.35 We lack the direct interpersonal encounter: the face-to-face or the person-to-person in which the
other would be revealed and make us in awe, not of the source of Being
or as the harbinger of a new beginning, but of the unique other and the
unique Myself as beloved.
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The occurrence of six million Jews gassed and tortured could not
be an historical happening reducible to an anonymous Machenschaft;
the mass murders in the gulags, the persecution of gays and lesbians,
the institutionalization of racism and slavery is not an eventing for
which there is nothing to be responsible, nothing for which to be guilty
or shameful, nothing for which to repent. It is not particularly illuminating, to say the least, to assert as Heidegger does that there are slave
markets in which the slaves themselves are often the biggest slave handlers whether this be a veiled reference to our own place in machination, an insensitive or misguided allusion to responsibility, another way
of articulating his reprehensible contention (during the Shoah itself)
that the Jews are the principle of their own/our own destruction, or a
citation of some historical fact.36 Without the context and movement
of loving, and loving given irreducibly in the beloved, there is no
responsibility, no shame, no guilt, no repentance; we only have sheer
eventing, which can only be historicized.
This may seem unfair to Heidegger. Of course, for Heidegger, to
attempt to think such specificity beyond metaphysics is illusory at best,
because we are not there yet. Rather than reinforcing it by trying to get
beyond it, we have to let metaphysics be. For him, this cannot become
a new ground of morality or a basis for religion, etc., in part because
the latter are still determined within Western metaphysics. What they
would mean concretely beyond Western metaphysics is still open, and
thus for him still vague.
Yet we can still pose one further question: Does overcoming metaphysics as not trying to overcome metaphysics, does getting beyond
machination, mean that we only need a different kind of thinking,
a thoughtful speaking of the abyss of Beyng (e.g., Hlderlin, as the
founder of decisive resoluteness)? Instead, do we not need to draw on
the sphere that is most intimate to persons, namely the emotions,
which are other than reason and sensibility? Do we not need, more
specifically, a deeper kind of loving? As important as they are, our only
exemplars cannot be the thinker or the poet, but the lover, or
the saint, the tzaddik, the friend of God.37
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n ot es
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Victor Faras, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
In Wuppertal, by the way, Peter Trawny, editor of the Schwarze
Hefte, was also a student at that time.
Klaus Held, Fundamental Moods and Heideggers Critique of
Contemporary Culture, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, in Read
ing Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 286303.
To date, the Schwarze Hefte or Black Notebooks make up four
volumes (GA 9497).
Thomas Assheuer, Die Zeit, N 12/2014, March 21, 2014.
See Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jdischen Welt
verschwrung, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2015).
Das Weltjudentum, aufgetauchelt durch die aus Deutschland
hinausgelassenen Emigranten, ist berall unfabar und braucht
sich bei aller Machtentfaltung nirgends an kriegerischen Handlungen zu beteiligen, wogegen uns nur bleibt, das beste Blut der
Besten des eigenen Volkes zu opfern (GA 96: 262).
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov (18761951) was a Soviet diplomat,
the Peoples Commissar of Foreign Affairs (19301939), and the
Soviet Ambassador to the United States (19411943). As a Jew,
Litvinov was unable to represent the USSR to Hitler, so was sent
to the US as an Ambassador, thus for Heidegger putatively contributing to the worldwide proliferation of Judaic machination. (I
would like to thank Peter Trawny for this latter observation.)
Und vielleicht siegt in diesem Kampf, in dem um die Ziellosigkiet schlechthin gekmpft wird und der daher nur das Zerr
bild des Kampfes sein kann, die grere Bodenlosigkeit, die an
nichts gebunden, alles sich dienstbar macht (das Judentum) (GA
95: 967). See also GA 95: 282 and GA 29/30: 261 ff. But such
a characterization of worldlessness also strikes at his conviction
that animals are world poor, and thus reducing Jews to what
he considers the world-poverty of animals.
72
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Die Frage nach der Rolle des Weltjudentums ist keine rassische,
sondern die metaphysische Frage nach der Art von Menschentmlichkeit, die schlechthin ungebunden die Entwurzelung alles Seienden aus dem Sein als weltgeschichtliche Aufgabe bernehmen
kann (GA 96: 243).
In a critical assessment of sociology, Heidegger asks why Jews
and the Catholics prefer doing sociology (i.e., rather than genuine
Beyng-historical thinking). Ist es Zufall, da der Nationalsozialismus die Soziologie als Name ausgemerzt hat? Warum wurde
die Soziologie mit Vorliebe von Juden und Katholiken betrieben?
(GA 95: 161). What is Catholic, he writes as an obvious criticism,
is absolutely un-Nordic, and completely un-German. Das
Katholische in diesem wesentlichen Sinne ist seiner geschicht
lichen Herkunft nach rmisch spanisch ; ganz und gar unnordisch und vollends undeutsch (GA 95: 326).
Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the
same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of
countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs (GA
79: 27/27). See Wolfgang Schirmacher,Technik und Gelassenheit:
Zeitkritik nach Heidegger(Munich: Alber, 1983), 25.
Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Ver
ticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007/2009), esp., ch. 6; Anthony J. Steinbock, Moral
Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2014); esp., ch. 3.
See my Moral Emotions, ch. 3.
Um vom Seyn als dem Ereignis er-eignet zu werden, mssen wir
der Seiendheit des Seienden und der Vormacht des Seienden ledig
sein (GA 96: 108).
Das Seyn ist aus dem Seienden niemals zu erklren und das
Seiende ist auch nie die Wirkung des Seyns. Unerklrbar und
wirkungslos ist das Seyn dies zu wissen gehrt in den Anfang
des Denkens. Aber dieses Wissen bedeutet das Offenhalten der
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74
26
75
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76
rayman
78
79
rayman
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rayman
Husserl is not directed against him only and in general not essentially
... [but] against the neglect of the question of being (GA 96: 4647). Indeed, it is crucial to note that his trafficking in cultural generalizations
allows him to extend this very same critique of Machenschaft and an
alleged Jewish and Husserlian failure to come to a decision concerning
the meaning of being to modernity as such, as well as National Socialism, fascism, Bolshevism, England, and America. Thus, Heideggers critique of the historical uprooting enacted by modernity (GA 94: 36364)
is nothing specific to or primarily driven by Judaism; rather, it traces
back to Descartess construction of the subject: the modern, beginning.
Subjectivity and certitudo: Descartes (GA 50: 83).10
Even the most widely cited remark in the Reflections turns out to
be characteristically ambiguous. In the ninth of ten points that he sets
forth at the beginning of the third year of the planetary war, he
writes that World Jewry, incited by the emigrants allowed to leave
Germany, is everywhere elusive and nowhere needs to campaign in
military actions in its unfolding of power [Machtentfaltung], against
which it remains to us only to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our
own people (GA 96: 26162). In reports, this remark is understood as
self-evidently anti-Semitic, with no explanation, and certainly it does
assert the existence of a World Judaism, that it cannot be grasped, that
it is influential without possessing a military, that there is a distinction
between Heideggers people and World Jewry, that Germans somehow
have to sacrifice their best, that it is the best of the Germans that are
sacrificed, and that there is a blood tie in this sacrifice. Yet, both on its
own terms and especially in relation to his other notes, this claim can
be read quite differently to say that the Nazi racial mission cannot possibly succeed by going to war at all costs, whether to achieve influence or
to destroy a spectral World Judaism that cannot be seized through any
military force, and therefore, that this mission should be abandoned.
Thus, he often condemns the war catastrophe and catastrophic war
with its resultant devastation and decisionlessness (GA 96: 45), and
he criticizes Nazi Germanys imperialist ambitions, asking, is Germany
the land of the Germans, is its history borne through the grounding of
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Socialism is a genuine becoming power only when it still has something to be silent about behind all its doing and saying and has an
effect with a strong holding-back [Hinter-hltigkeit] effecting into the
future. But if the present were already the achieved and willed, then
only a horror of the fall is left (GA 94: 114). Its unsatisfactory form
is encapsulated in the phrase vulgar National Socialism, by which
he means the world and the measures and demands and attitudes of
the appointed, esteemed newspaper writers and culture-makers of the
time, as well as the ethical materialism of an entirely determinate
doctrine of history and human beings in the people that proceeds
from this by brainless appeal, naturally, to Hitlers Mein Kampf (GA
94: 142). Hence, if there is a non-vulgar National Socialism, then it
would appeal not to Hitlers own foundational National Socialist text,
but probably to Being and Time and the Rectoral Address, with its
own resistance to the Fhrerprinzip. Heidegger explicitly rejects any
National Socialism that accepts ethical materialism and biologism.
According to Trawny,
Heidegger at the latest in the Summer of 1936 finds a
distance from the really existing National Socialism in
which he can catch sight of and criticize the worldview of the desolate and coarse biologism. At the
same time, he places himself in opposition from the
beginning to the National Socialist critique of so-called
intellectualism, i.e. of an allegedly senseless extravagance in theoretical questioning. In the Reflections
from this time, we thus see how the thinker works his
way out of his early party participation for National
Socialism in a stepwise fashion [as evident in Heideggers works from the same time, GA 6566, 6971].
(Trawny, GA 94: 53334).
Heideggers criticism of Nazi biologism is that the subject character
... still experiences a particular hardening through the privileging of
the biological (i.e. in truth, unbiological) interpretation of the essence
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Machenschaft] (GA 94: 522). The proper rank consists not in manipulation, machinic operations, or machinations, but rather in an inconspicuous, grasping power which fosters in others the essential and brings
it to development. Radicalism of a movement can only be preserved
where it must be always newly created most clearly and deeply in the
spiritual. Divert the machinery, reconcile disputes, integrate and
validate institutions, administer transactions all that has nothing to
do with leading [Fhrung] (GA 94: 138). We must keep these qualifications in mind when we see Heidegger write of the inner demands
of German socialism (GA 94: 135) and validate a Fhrerwille (GA 94:
139). Fhren means: develop to independence and self-responsibility;
and spiritual Fhren means: awaken the creative forces and build up
to leadership [Fhrerschaft] (GA 94: 138). In other words, he interprets
Hitlers Fhrer principle not as dictating that all follow Hitler, but that
there be a creative rebirth of autonomous human spiritual powers, just
as it meant to him in the Rectoral Address a resistance to that will.
Heideggers Nietzschean transformation of Nazi ideas here suggests what I believe is a far closer philosophical kinship, one easily mistaken for Nazism. Many of Heideggers explicit and implicit
remarks in the Reflections refer to Nietzsche and Nietzschean motifs
of power and the rejection of the rabble, herd, and commercial culture, as might be expected, considering the many lecture courses on
Nietzsche that Heidegger prepared in the latter half of the 1930s and
early 1940s and now collected in a range of volumes in the GA. As I
have argued elsewhere, Heideggers views of Nietzsche can credibly
be distinguished from the so-called official Nietzsche of the Nazis,
promulgated by Alfred Rosenberg and Alfred Bumler, and indeed,
these views constitute a critique of the metaphysics of that reading.
Thus, for instance, if Heidegger affirms a Nietzschean idea of power
and creation as breeding, he explicitly distinguishes this view from
the Nazi biologistic breeding campaign. Those wanting to breed the
people biologically by breeding [biologisch-zchterisch aufzchten
wollen], are in error in that this breeding and its demand are first
the consequence of the already posited unquestioned mastery [ fra
glosen Herrschaft] of the machinic in itself [Machenschaftlichen an
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of the will of Dasein to set into work the labor from innermost
necessity not to allow to rise a spiritual superstructure, but rather
to find the basic mode of popular being (GA 94: 144). That is not
Nazism. It is just Heideggerianism.
e n d n ot es
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
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Heideggers Mask:
Adam Knowles
i . i n t ro d u c t i o n
knowles
Heideggers Mask
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Heideggers Mask
Due to their banalizing force, the Black Notebooks are bad Heidegger and all too often they are bad Heidegger clothed in the costume
of a bad Nietzsche. As David Krell writes in what will most likely be
the first English-language book to appear addressing the Notebooks in
detail, one reads the Notebooks with a strong desire never to return to
them.18 Yet, as Figal stressed in an interview he gave to explain his
resignation as director of the Heidegger-Gesellschaft in January 2015,
essential work must still be done on the Notebooks, including a renewed
focus on archival research to document Heideggers activities in the
1930s.19 We must continue to read the Black Notebooks.
What, then, is to be made of these curious Notebooks, so pseudoNietzschean in intent, if not execution? Whatever response we have to the
Black Notebooks, we must equally be attentive to the event of the Black
Notebooks in the press, in the philosophical world, and especially in the
world of Heidegger scholarship. I will offer only tentative answers in this
essay, and I will offer them with all due distance from the notion that
we could or should be able to get to the bottom of the Black Notebooks.
In other words, I read them with a healthy skepticism about the value of
doing so, for every act of reading in this finite life, every act of engagement as a philosopher is a decision not to engage with other texts and,
no less, with other tasks. It is for this reason that I will take the occasion
of reading the Black Notebooks to formulate the preliminary sketch of
an ethics of not reading.
In order to address some of the issues I just raised, I have divided
this paper into four sections. Firstly, I will offer six observations that
I, in part, elaborate on in what follows, but in part also leave as open
questions. Secondly, I will introduce Peter Trawnys thesis of Heideggers
being-historical anti-Semitism and offer a critique of this thesis through
Arendts notion of banality. Thirdly, I will focus on the concept of the
mask and the closely related registers of silence associated with it within
the Black Notebooks. I will conclude by reflecting upon the impact of the
Black Notebooks on the future of Heidegger scholarship by developing
an ethics of not reading.
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i i . o bs e rvat i o n s o n t h e b l ac k n ot e b o o k s
i i i . p e t e r t r aw n y o n b e i n g - h i s to r i c a l a n t i - s e m i t i s m
Peter Trawnys short book Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Con
spiracy has set the tone for early responses to Heideggers Black Notebooks.
As the editor of the entire series of Black Notebooks, which will eventually stretch from the 1930s to 1970s, Trawny published his short book
concurrent with the appearance of the second and third volumes. Since
then, Trawny has been the public voice of the Black Notebooks in both
Europe and North America, speaking with the authority gained from
an unmatched familiarity with these specific texts and an unmatched
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99
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100
Heideggers Mask
101
knowles
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Heideggers Mask
reject the second-hand defensive desire that comes along with following
the Heideggerian logic of the gesture, then we could say that Heidegger
brought to his philosophy a banal form of anti-Semitism and thereby
banalized his own thinking.
I would like to conclude my remarks about Trawnys book, which I
intend with all due respect to his philosophical labor, by remarking on
one final point. Trawny notes that Heidegger kept silent about his antiSemitism even during his period as Rector in the precise period, in
other words, when it would have furthered his career. Trawny explains
this by saying that Heidegger regarded his anti-Semitism as distinct
from the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists.30 Even if this is
the case, why does Heideggers anti-Semitism begin to appear in the
Notebooks in 1938? I would suggest a simple solution: Kristallnacht (Nov.
910th, 1938), the national pogrom that emboldened many Germans
to more overtly adopt and express anti-Semitism. With Kristallnacht,
Heidegger, like many other Germans, felt more leeway to express his
anti-Semitism, and even though he did not take it public, he did at least
embed it into a text that would have a certain public resonance. With
Kristallnacht, Heidegger took off his mask.
i v . he i d eg g e r s m a s k
In this section I would like to focus on a term that has been overlooked
in responses thus far to the Black Notebooks: the mask. In order to not
overwhelm the material and to trace the movement of the work, I will
limit my comments to the first volume of the Black Notebooks. I will
attempt to argue that the Black Notebooks are most important not for
what they reveal, but for what they occlude; not for what they say, but for
what they do not say. Heidegger characterizes this movement of the text
as occurring behind the mask, a term which is closely aligned with the
cognate set of terms silence (Schweigen), reticence (Schweigsamkeit)
and Heideggers neologism Erschweigen a transitivization of Schwei
gen. The importance of these terms is familiar to any reader of Heidegger, for if silence is not a central theme of Heideggers thinking, it
is nonetheless the medium of Heideggers thinking, especially in the
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knowles
1930s. That silence emerges already in the opening entry of the Black
Notebooks is not surprising given the prominence of silence from Being
and Time (1927) to the dialogue on silence in On the Way to Language
(1952). In that dialogue Heidegger poses a question which is echoed in
the Notebooks: Who is capable of simply keeping silent about silence?
[Wer vermchte es, einfach vom Schweigen zu schweigen]? (GA 12: 144/
OWL 133).34 In the Notebooks, Heidegger evidently is not, for he cannot
resist the urge to flag his silences, to remind us that he is wearing a
mask. In the Black Notebooks there is a persistent urge to vulgarize and
banalize silence. This occurs through a grand gesture of Selbstdarstel
lung invoked via the figure of the mask.
As Trawny points out in his esoteric reading of Heidegger, the Black
Notebooks have an addressee, that is to say they are written for a certain
set of readers, a group given a number of pseudo-Nietzschean names:
the most solitary ones (die Einzigsten), the most futural ones (die
Knftigsten) (GA 94: 338), the questioners (die Fragenden), the few
(die Wenigen), the invisible ones (die Unsichtbaren) (GA 94: 370), and
the race to follow (das bernchste Geschlecht) (GA 94: 346). This
solitary race of questioners are the ones who are capable of listening
to and in silence, all the while keeping silent about silence. Heidegger
addresses these listeners on the second page of the Black Notebooks
by raising the question: Must [the human] not have observed a long
silence in order to find the strength and power of language again and
to be borne along by language? (GA 94: 6). He builds upon this question on the following page: Must one take the great risk on ones own,
silently into Da-sein, where beings have more being? Without any
regard for the situation? (GA 94: 10). What does it mean that Heidegger
sets the stage of the Black Notebooks in this way?
A possible answer to this question can be found some one hundred
pages later in the strange, troubling and disjointed section in which
Heidegger narrates his entry into, participation in and retreat from
party politics his entry into the situation, so to speak. In contrast to
the drudgery and repetition of much of what follows in the Black Note
books, Heideggers narration replete with historical inaccuracies of
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Heideggers Mask
his time as Rector is almost a page-turner. The entries are short, angry,
disturbing, and at times oracular. Heidegger describes his entry into
the Rectorate as follows: Forced into taking over the Rectorate, I act
for the first time against my innermost voice (GA 94: 110). As readers
of Division II of Being and Time will recall, this innermost voice, the
voice of the call of conscience, is silent, saying nothing saying, in fact,
the nothing. At this moment we see Heidegger put on the mask which
does not mean to say that he was not already wearing another mask.
He may have switched masks, or he may be wearing layers of them in
any case there is no real Heidegger to be gotten to by pulling off these
masks. To phrase this differently, under Heideggers layers of silence
and this applies no less to his purported postwar silence there is no
real Heidegger to be found, certainly not in the Black Notebooks. With
the mask of the Rector we hear Heidegger make the following platitudinous pronouncements: Relentless in the firm goal, malleable and
transforming in the ways and weapons. And on the same page: To
emerge from every struggle more tractable and more certain. Whatever
fails is a lesson; hold the reins tighter in the face of resistance (GA 94:
111). Under the mask of the Rector, Heidegger descends from the mount
like Zarathustra to be among the people; there he is loquacious, there he
translates his thought.31 It is for this reason that he must, in Heideggers
words, be ready, with a generous will, to fail in humdrum everyday
affairs (GA 94: 112).
The overall effect of this section is to remind the reader that this
thinker does not belong in this realm of the everyday, in the situation,
and that he has descended down in the name of knowledge, and that
he is saying something that the broad masses are incapable of hearing.
Heideggers remarks in this period argue that the university, though
it has been degraded to a boarding house (GA 94: 116) and a trade
school (GA 94: 193) and has been enslaved to the natural sciences (GA
94: 303), has an essential role in the revolution he regards himself as
working toward the metapolitics of the historical people (GA 94:
124). The university would play an essential part in this metapolitics to
the extent that it could inculcate knowledge through what Heidegger
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106
Heideggers Mask
107
knowles
108
Heideggers Mask
co n c l u d i n g
r e m a r k s : a n e t h i c s o f n ot r e a d i n g ?
I wish that Derrida were here to help us read the Black Notebooks. Or,
perhaps more precisely, I wish that Derrida were here to help us not
read the Black Notebooks. Of course, I do not mean this in the vulgar
form of Heidegger rejection defended by Emmanuel Faye or in the form
of Richard Wolins one-drop theory.35 Instead, I turn to Derrida as a
reader and non-reader of Heidegger, who harbored a suspicion against
what he called the machine of Heidegger scholarship. In a 2001 response to Catharine Malabous commentary on his co-authored book
Circumfessions, Derrida asks the following question about whether or
not Heidegger would have read his book:
we must ask, why it is that Heidegger could not read
such a text, or would simply dismiss it as just so much
exhibition, literature, narcissism? ... So I constantly try
to counter him, to try to write what hes against, what is
counter to or irreducible to Heideggers machinery. Because there is a machinery interpretation of Heidegger.
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110
Heideggers Mask
I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, and Greg Fried
for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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n ot es
2
3
112
Heideggers Mask
113
knowles
10
11
12
114
Heideggers Mask
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
115
knowles
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Heideggers Mask
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34
35
36
37
38
39
117
ELECTRONIC CONTENT
Andrzej Serafin
December 5, 2013
December 7, 2013
December 7, 2013
December 8, 2013
Reception History
January 7, 2014
S E RAF I N
Reception History
March 2014
March 4, 2014
March 6, 2014
March 6, 2014
March 8, 2014
March 10, 2014
March 10, 2014
S E RAF I N
Reception History
S E RAF I N
April 1, 2014
April 4, 2014
April 6, 2014
April 7, 2014
April 8, 2014
April 8, 2014
Reception History
May 7, 2014
May 8, 2014
S E RAF I N
Reception History
July 7, 2014
September 6, 2014
S E RAF I N
Reception History
October 9, 2014
October 9, 2014
October 9, 2014
October 10, 2014
S E RAF I N
November 7, 2014
November 8, 2014
Heidegger-Levinas Colloque
International at cole Normale
Suprieure
Adle Van Reeth's Les Nouveaux
chemins de la connaissance: Heidegger
et lantismitisme: les cahiers noirs
Eggert Blum in Die Zeit: Die Marke
Heidegger. Wie die Familie des
Philosophen jahrzehntelang versuchte,
das Image des umstrittenen Denkers zu
kontrollieren und kritische Stimmen klein
zu halten
Heidegger und die Juden conference in
Wuppertal with Peter Trawny, Jean-Luc
Nancy, Nicolas Fernando de Warren,
Andrew J. Mitchell, Franoise Dastur,
Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Florian Grosser,
Donatella Di Cesare, Marcia Cavalcante,
Angel Xolocotzi, Christian Sommer,
Alain David
Gregory Fried in Los Angeles Review of
Books: Not Dead Yet? A Response to
Critics
Interview with Jrgen Habermas in Le
Monde: L'Europe, entre paralysie et
distraction
Ulrich von Blow, Deutsches
Literaturarchiv Marbach ber die
eingeschrnkte Zugnglichkeit des
Heidegger-Nachlasses
Adriano Fabris (ed.): Metafisica e
antisemitismo. I Quaderni neri di
Heidegger tra filosofia e politica. with
articles by Peter Trawny, Jess Adrin
Reception History
December 2014
December 4, 2014
December 5, 2014
December 7, 2014
December 8, 2014
S E RAF I N
January 2015
January 2015
January 9, 2015
Reception History
S E RAF I N
February 2, 2015
February 8, 2015
Reception History
February 9, 2015
Jews Self-destructed)
Donatella Di Cesare in Corriere della
Sera: Shoah, ecco lanno zero di
Heidegger
Adriano Fabris in Avvenire: Quell'odiosa
"cecit" di Heidegger
Donatella Di Cesare interviewed by Hohe
Luft Magazin: Heidegger-Enthllung
Donatella Di Cesare in Corriere della
Sera: Perch giusto introdurre il reato
di negazionismo
Donatella Di Cesare in Mimesis Scenari: I
Quaderni neri e letica della lettura
SWR Fernsehen: Antisemit und
Ehrenbrger. Streit um Martin
Heidegger in Mekirch
Donatella Di Cesare in SWR2: Nach
Gnter Figals Rcktritt
Benjamin Weinthal in Jerusalem Post:
German philosopher blamed Jews for
self-destructing in Holocaust
Jean-Luc Nancy in Faust Kultur:
Tatsachen aus Heften
Michael Inwood in Los Angeles Review
of Books: Was Heidegger a Semitic
Nomad?
Peter Trawny in Hohe Luft: Moralische
Schuld ist in Heideggers Philosophie
nicht mglich
Alfred Denker's seminar in Messkirch:
Martin Heidegger, berlegungen II-XV
(Schwarze Hefte). Versuch einer
Annherung
S E RAF I N
March 2015
March 2015
Reception History
March 1, 2015
March 2, 2015
March 3, 2015
March 3, 2015
March 5, 2015
March 6, 2015
March 7, 2015
March 8, 2015
S E RAF I N
Reception History
S E RAF I N
April 1, 2015
Reception History
April 2, 2015
April 2, 2015
April 2, 2015
April 4, 2015
April 4, 2015
April 5, 2015
April 5, 2015
April 9, 2015
April 9, 2015
April 17, 2015
Apr 22-25, 2015
S E RAF I N
2015-2018
t e x t s o f h e i d eg g e r c i t e d a n d a b b r e v i at i o n s us e d
References to the works of Martin Heidegger are provided parenthetically in the text by the volume of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1975, abbreviated GA), followed by the German pagination, a slash, and the English pagination of published translations where extant. The relevant translations are listed following the
information for the corresponding GA volume. There is one exception
to this practice. No references to the pages of English translations are
provided in the case of Being and Time (GA 2); instead the GA pagination is followed by SZ, referring to the single edition, re-issued several times: Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. (Tbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
1967), since the pagination of SZ is contained in all three of the English
translations of Sein und Zeit. Modifications to published translations are
noted by tm; modifications to emphasis by em.
from the gesamtausgabe
GA 2
GA 3
GA 4
GA 5
143
GA 6.1
GA 6.2
GA 9
144
GA 40
GA 50
GA 54
GA 65
GA 66
GA 69
GA 70
GA 71
GA 73.1
GA 77
GA 79
GA 86
145
GA 94
GA 95
GA 96
GA 97
N3
OWL
146