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Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics , livre ebook

Fordham University Press - Jacques Derrida , Hans-Georg Gadamer , Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ,
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In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought? Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher?In 1988, in the wake of the recent publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger's readers, improvised in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and a complex sense of the questions at issue that have been often lacking in the press. Ranging over two days and including exchanges with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by these major thinkers remain highly relevant today, especially following the publication of Heidegger's already notorious "Black Notebooks," which have added another chapter to the ongoing debates over this contested figure. The present volume recalls a highly charged moment in this history, while also drawing the debate toward its most essential questions.

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Western philosophy

Literary theory

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Publié par	Fordham University Press
Date de parution	20 septembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780823273690
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1100€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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HEIDEGGER, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITICS

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HEIDEGGER, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITICS

THE HEIDELBERG CONFERENCE

JACQUES DERRIDA, HANSGEORG GADAMER, AND PHILIPPE LACOUELABARTHE

Edited byMIREILLE CALLEGRUBER

Translated byJEFF FORT

Fordham University Press

New York 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book was originally published in French as Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,La conférence de Heidelberg (1988): Heidegger; Portée philosophique et politique de sa pensée, Copyright © Lignes, 2014.

Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la Culture–Centre National du Livre.

This work has been published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture– National Center for the Book.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog .loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Forewordby Jean-Luc Nancy

Prefaceby Reiner Wiehl

Event of the Archiveby Mireille Calle-Gruber

Conference of February 5, 1988

Meeting of February 6, 1988

Appendix: “Like Plato in Syracuse,”by Hans-Georg Gadamer

Notes

vii

xiii

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FOREWORD Jean-Luc Nancy

The document published here is already equipped with an entire apparatus of presentation and commentary, and it might appear in-decent to add to them. But it is with good reason that Michel Surya, coeditor of this volume with the Institut Mémoires de l’édition con-temporaine (IMEC), has taken care to situate this publication within the context of its appearance now, in 2014, twenty-six years after the Heidelberg conference took place. He has asked me to write a note to this effect. Although I did not participate in the encounter in Heidelberg, it happens that the three participants who engaged in that debate are no longer with us. My links with two of them, and my relation in general with the work of Heidegger, permit me to risk a response to this request. The length of time that separates us from 1988 is now much greater than the twelve years that separated that encounter from the death of Heidegger. This time has brought with it a history more and more freighted with profound mutations and with sequels that are less foreseeable than ever; the requirements thus placed on thought are continually changing. At the same time, Heidegger’s posthumous publications have progressed considerably and have continued to stoke debates that, for their part, are not always mak-ing progress. It is inevitable that, in 2014, a reading of these exchanges from 1988 reveals a certain dislocation. I will not attempt to analyze this. But one might well assume that, at a moment when Heidegger’s

viii

JEANLUC NANCY

Schwarze Hefteare being published, some readers will not fail to cast judgments on the relative candor of the arguments of 1988 in light of the anti-Semitic statements that we can now read in those notebooks (at the same time as we read there a declaration against anti-Semitism). In fact, I believe it is necessary to distinguish two things:

— on the one hand, it is certain that the absence, in Heidegger’s pub-lished work, of any explicit argument in favor of what Peter Trawny calls “historial anti-Semitism” indeed reveals a disparity or a distor-1 tion that must be interrogated; —on the other hand, it is no less certain that this revelation does not alter the essential point in what was already discussed in 1988—namely, Heidegger’s very nearly total silence on “Auschwitz.” To speak of this silence was already to speak of what is therefore not a “revelation” that could be compared to that of an unpunished crime.

There are therefore two distinct tasks today: one is to under-stand why Heidegger reserved this “historial anti-Semitism” for his personal notes, which, however, he himself wished to have pub-lished posthumously; the other is to examine further the separation between what Heidegger was prepared to think—or to indicate in thought—from what he was incapable of discerning. What he was prepared to thînk inds îtsef condensed here în Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phrase when he says that “l’être” (being), 2 wîth the deinîte artîce, “îs aready a fasîicatîon.”This is a perfect way to designate the essential resource of this thought. It was not brought back into the discussion because this was not the immedi-ate objective, but it should always be recalled whenever it is a ques-tion of discussing Heidegger. For if one’s point of departure is “être” (being), without an article, one can no longer proceed—at least not in the same way—down the path of that “forgetting of being [oubli de l’être]” that so obsessed and clouded Heidegger’s thinking that it led him to lump together in that “forgetting” the most banaldoxa

FOREW ORD

regarding capitalism and technics, the exhaustion of the West and the designation of a pernicious agent called “Jew,” thus following a culture that had forged for itself the scapegoat demanded by its secret self-repulsion. That is what one can read in particular in the remarks made by Gadamer and Lacoue-Labarthe, and Derrida’s in-terrogation of the very idea of “responsibility” is related to this. At the same time, the absence of anti-Semitism in the published texts remains to be analyzed. Everything happened as if Heidegger were aware of the secondary character—the simply “categorial” or empirical but somehow not “existential” character—of something that ony conigured the devastatîng power of “forgettîng” în a tran-sitory way. But by this very fact he perhaps also had a form of hu-mility or of shame in interrogating publicly the reasons for this con-iguratîon: why “the Jews” as bearers of “forgettîng”? (Somewhat as for Hegel, they were the people reserved for the testimony of the “unhappy consciousness”; but Hegel wrote this in his public philo-sophical texts.) One can only conclude the following: Heidegger was not capabe of takîng account of the hîstorîca coniguratîon of anti-Semitism because its “historiality” (its “destinality”) prevented him from doing so.

This is indeed attested by the fact that, in the published texts (or in the courses), “historial anti-Semitism” is designated in a way that is visible only in its absence—that is, in the exclusive domination of the Greek origin. In this regard, as well, the Heidelberg debate does not lack indications, although obviously the elements to which we now have access were not available. But if we follow throughout this debate the insistence on the motifs of “destiny” and “history,” we recognîze the eements of a relectîon that henceforth fas to us: how it is that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism—and everything related to it—depends profoundly on a “historial” vision that, despite every-thîng, we must resove to ca more laty “hîstorîcîst” (and for whîch he had no exclusive privilege—far from it!); further, how it is that such a vision (which perhaps remains a “world picture,” aWeltbild)