7
The French Reception of Heidegger's Nazism

Heidegger's relation to Nazism raises questions on two distinct levels. On the one hand, there is the theme, analyzed in preceding chapters, of what Heidegger did and thought, and how that relates to his own thought, initially in his philosophical phase, to his fundamental ontology, and later in his so-called post-philosophical phase, to his new thinking. Heidegger's Nazism is obviously central for an appreciation of his position. One of the aims of this essay is to show that a distinction can no longer be clearly drawn between Heidegger's "philosophy" and his Nazism, for the two are deeply intertwined. On the other hand, there is a further theme—parasitic, so to speak, on the preceding one—concerning the reception of Heidegger's Nazism. Since the philosophical tradition consists in the ongoing effort to understand and to evaluate the available philosophical positions, it is important to address the manner in which scholars have attempted to come to grips with the complex series of problems posed by Heidegger's Nazism.

Reception of Heidegger's Nazism

The reception of Heidegger's Nazism is a part of the continuing reception of his thought in an enormous and rapidly growing literature. The reception of Heidegger's Nazism, although not always under that name, has been under way for several decades, at least since the 1930s^[1] Heidegger was sympathetic to Nazism before he became a member of the NSDAP. If we date Heidegger's Nazism from his official adherence to the Nazi party, then its reception began in the reaction in newspaper

reports and by his philosophical colleagues to his rectoral address in May 1933.^[2]

From the beginning, the reaction to Heidegger's Nazism was sharply divided between those who condemned the association of philosophy and Nazism and those who were able to perceive something good even in the turn to the clearest example of absolute evil in our time. Among the earliest reactions by colleagues, we have already noted Croce's complaint that Heidegger dishonored philosophy in the rectoral address^[3] and Jaspers's congratulatory note to Heidegger on receipt of the text of the speech.^[4] These were isolated reactions. The first philosophical debate between representatives of different views of Heidegger's Nazism began only about a decade and a half later, in the second half of the 1940s in the pages of the French intellectual journal Les Temps Modernes .^[5] In the main, the debate has often been as heated as it was uninformed. The uninformed nature of the debate is due to the successful efforts of determined Heidegger enthusiasts even now to exclude material, important for an informed judgment, from public and even scholarly access. The first study of the available information was provided in 1960 by Guido Schneeberger in a bibliography, whose appendixes attracted attention.^[6] Two years later Schneeberger published a reader of relevant materials.^[7] In both instances, he was forced to publish his works privately in order to escape the restrictions of German copyright law with respect to material for which he could not receive permission to publish.

Until recently the reception of Heidegger's Nazism developed in a largely desultory fashion, attracting little attention, with occasional bursts of activity. Significantly, as late as the mid-1970s, in a detailed study of Heidegger's political thought, an observer could state that only three books required mention.^[8] Although the reception of Heidegger's Nazism was never as tranquil as ordinary scholarly debate, it was burst asunder, literally transformed, by two publications in the late 1980s: Farias's resolute effort under difficult conditions finally to study Heidegger's Nazism in a wider historical context,^[9] and Ott's historically more careful but even more damning effort toward a Heidegger biography.^[10] Farias's book served as a catalyst for a strident debate virtually across western Europe, which now gives signs of spreading, in more scholarly, less virulent form, to the United States.^[11] It is a measure of the subversive character of Farias's assault on the Heideggerian establishment that although he lives and teaches in Germany, he was only finally able to publish his book in France.

In the multiple phases of the discussion of Heidegger and politics, the controversy in France stands out for several reasons, including its extension over some four decades, the passion with which it has been conducted, the sense of importance it has been accorded, and the degree of

attention it has aroused. It further stands out for the clear way in which the lines have been drawn, unusual in scholarly debate, for or against Heidegger. At present, the main defense of Heidegger, as well as the main attack, are both being waged within the limits of the French-language discussion of his thought. For this reason, the French discussion of Heidegger's Nazism provides the outstanding example of how later philosophers have confronted the multiple problems posed by the Nazism of one of the main philosophical thinkers of this century. Accordingly, the aim of this chapter is to come to grips, not with the French reception of Heidegger,^[12] but with the more limited topic of the French reception of Heidegger's Nazism.^[13] In view of the scope of the French discussion, major stress will be placed on an understanding of the significance of the main lines of the controversy as distinguished from an encyclopedic presentation of all the material.^[14]

The Master Thinker in French Philosophy

In order to understand the particular, indeed peculiar, nature of the French reception of Heidegger, it is helpful to provide a brief characterization of the French intellectual context, above all French philosophy. Philosophy in general is not given to rapid changes, since it often takes centuries for problems to be formulated, for ideas to attain wide appeal, for shifts in emphasis to occur. Just the opposite is the case in French thought as viewed on a certain level. In the last two decades, an exceedingly short period by philosophical standards, French philosophy has considered and later discarded options proposed by structuralism, post-structuralism, the nouveaux philosophes , hermeneutics, existentialism, semiology. postmodernism, and so on. There is obviously no guarantee that the latest mode on the scene, deconstruction, which is better known and more influential in the United States than in France, will survive, or survive more than the proverbial fifteen minutes during which each of us will supposedly be famous.^[15]

The rapid pace in which the various aspects of French thought come into being and pass away suggests that French philosophy—which gave rise to the postmodernist theory according to which there is no ground, no overarching single tale that locates all its variants—in itself is post-modernist.^[16] One could easily infer from what by philosophical standards seems to be the nearly instantaneous rise and fall of competing points of view that, to parody Yeats, things have indeed fallen apart since the center does not hold, in fact fails even to exist.^[17] But these appearances are indeed deceiving since to a perhaps unsuspected extent there is an intellectual center in French intellectual life, which underlies and makes

possible the profusion and confusion of swirling ideas only in its various manifestations.

France is not alone in possessing an intellectual noumenon . Another example is the increasingly precarious dominance of analytic thought in Anglo-American philosophical circles, which has begun now to loosen through the realization of some of its main practitioners that it was no longer possible, or even productive, to continue to exclude other forms of thought.^[18] For different reasons, a similar phenomenon can be observed in eastern Europe, where the long political hegemony of Marxist orthodoxy has clearly given way to philosophical perestroika , in Soviet philosophy and elsewhere in eastern Europe.^[19]

Although French thought may seem to be the philosophical analogue of the Maoist injunction to let a hundred flowers bloom, from a historical point of view it has long been dependent on a single main component. After the French Revolution, which in principle guaranteed fundamental rights, including religious rights, to all, France remained, and still remains, a mainly Roman Catholic country:^[20] to a scarcely lesser extent French thought has been dominated over several hundred years by forms of Cartesianism.^[21] It is hard to imagine and difficult to describe the extent of Descartes's influence on French intellectual life, which descends even to the level of a correctly written paper, the so-called dissertation , in the lycée . It is not without reason that Sartre has been called the last of the Cartesians and Merleau-Ponty, his younger colleague, has been hailed as the first non-Cartesian French philosopher. For in France over the course of several hundred years, Descartes has played the role of the master philosopher, le maitre penseur , whose thought furnished the central organizing principle of all intellectual life.

In the period since the 1930s the two main philosophical developments in French thought, namely the attention to Hegel and then to Heidegger, can both be explained with respect to the dominant Cartesian-ism. The introduction of Hegel in France has been aptly, although not entirely accurately, traced to the influence of Alexandre Kojève's famous seminar on the Phenomenology during the late 1930s.^[22] Although a brilliant thinker in his own right, a major star in the philosophical firmament, and indeed critical of Descartes, Hegel is also in numerous ways a neo-Cartesian, who perpetuates the well-known Cartesian concerns with certainty, truth in the traditional philosophical sense, metaphysics, first philosophy, and so on.^[23] The importance of Hegel's influence on French thought in this century should not hide the extent to which, in reacting against Hegel as the maítre du jeu , the master of the game, later French thinkers were reacting through Hegel to the continued influence of Descartes.^[24] This reaction is in part prolonged in the more recent turn to Heidegger, a notorious anti-Cartesian.

Roughly since 1945, and increasingly in recent years, French thought has been increasingly dominated by Heidegger.^[25] To understand the turn to Heidegger in French philosophy, two factors are important. First, there is Heidegger's well-known anti-Cartesianism, which conveniently meshes with the continued reaction against the father of French philosophy, in a form of conceptual parricide stretching over more than three centuries. Heidegger's thought is inseparable from its anti-Cartesian bias, which only grows deeper in his later turn away from Dasein in part in order to expunge any residual Cartesianism.^[26] Heidegger's attempt to dismantle modern metaphysics resembles French philosophy itself. The introduction of his thought within the French context as part of the reaction against Hegel, or rather the French form of Marxist Hegelianism, only showed the persistence of the difficult effort to throw off the Cartesian background.

Second, there is the more immediate antihumanist reaction to the prevailing left-wing Marxist, humanist form of French Marxism, associated with such writers as Kojève in the first place, as well as at various times Camus, Nizan, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Garaudy, Foucault, perhaps Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and others, which bothered, in fact offended, those concerned to maintain the traditional French value-system. Heidegger's self-proclaimed antihumanism, in fact an effort to found a new humanism surpassing the old variety, provided a convenient way to throw off the yoke of Hegel's influence, which to many seemed merely a stand-in for Marxism, including its political dimension.

Jean Beaufret later played a main rô1e, but at least initially Jean-Paul Sartre was mainly responsible for creating the French fascination with Heidegger. Sartre's Being and Nothingness , which was doubly dependent on both Hegel and Heidegger, focused attention on both thinkers during the Second World War, reinforcing the interest in Hegel and turning attention to Heidegger. Sartre's dual interest in Heidegger and Hegel was seen by many as problematic. The form of Hegelianism current in France, to which Sartre also subscribed, was a left-wing Marxist humanism pioneered by Kojève. Heidegger's own self-described antihumanism was, to begin with, perceived as humanism, particularly in the extensive discussion of Dasein in Being and Time . Heidegger's thought was in part seen as a necessary course correction to what, certainly from a Roman Catholic religious point of view, was perceived as a form of antihumanism associated with Sartre's atheistic form of existentialism.^[27] The point is that although Heidegger left the seminary and later the church, and his link to Nazism was not an expression of humanism in any ordinary sense, his thought was perceived as a moindre mal , a lesser evil, by those appalled by Sartre's own form of existentialist humanism.

What is the extent of Heidegger's influence in French philosophy?

There is a measure of truth in Heidegger's famous boutade that when the French begin to think, they think in German.^[28] To an important extent Heidegger's thought now forms the horizon of French philosophy. The dominance of Heidegger in French philosophy can be illustrated by the startling fact, certainly unprecedented in any other country with a major role in the Western philosophical tradition, that at the present time the three main younger scholars of Aristotle (Rémi Brague), Descartes (Jean-Luc Marion), and Hegel (Dominique Janicaud) in France can all be described either as Heideggerians or as basically influenced by Heidegger's thought. French Heideggerianism is a flourishing industry, perhaps the most important contemporary source of studies of Heidegger's thought in the world today. Within France, Heidegger's influence has in the meantime penetrated in other directions as well. It is no exaggeration to say that at present Heidegger and Heidegger alone is the dominant influence, the master thinker of French philosophy, and that his thought is the context in which it takes shape and which limits its extent. It is, then, no wonder that in the recent resurgence of controversy about Heidegger's link to Nazism, French philosophy has tended to equate the attack on Heidegger with an attack on French philosophy.

Origins of the French Discussion of Heidegger's Politics

This incomplete account of the source and extent of Heidegger's influence in French philosophy is intended to make possible a closer look at the French discussion of Heidegger's Nazism. This complex discussion, which is still under way, has so far unfolded in three separate moments, or waves. These include a short, initial debate (1946-1948) shortly after the end of the Second World War, in which the topic was examined in a cursory manner; a rapid revival of the same debate in the mid-1960s after, indeed partly as a result of, the publication of certain documents calling attention to Heidegger's Nazism; and more recently in the direct, ongoing reaction to the publication in French translation of the Spanish manuscript of Farias's already classic study.

Even before we examine the debate on Heidegger and Nazism in France, we can note in passing three significant features that distinguish it from other portions of a discussion that has by now largely exceeded the limits of a single country or language. First, there is a certain well-known parochialism, long characteristic of French thought of all kinds, which traditionally proceeds as if it formed the entire conceptual universe whose center and nearly sole focus was Paris. Just as, with selected exceptions, French thinkers are mainly, even cheerfully, unaware of non-French forms of thought, so the debate on Heidegger's relation to

National Socialism has largely occurred without consideration of the discussion under way elsewhere. To be sure, there are occasional references to Hugo Ott, the Freiburg historian, or to Otto Pöggeler, the author of an influential study of Heidegger's thought; but for the most part, to a degree unusual in the ever-smaller cultural world, the French debate concerns mainly, often only, itself.^[29]

Second, in contrast with the widespread French cultural and political xenophobia, we can note that a number of the most important participants in the French debate on Heidegger's relation to National Socialism are either foreign-born French, or not French at all, for example, Farias, Weil, Löwith, Tertulian, Lukács. This extra-French influence, which has throughout tended to calm and to refocus an often wildly passionate, occasionally irrational debate, was present even at the beginning.

Third, there is a particular philosophical focus due to the contingent fact that until several years ago, when a pirated translation of Being and Time was published, only the first half of the book was available in French. Even access to this part of the text was severely restricted by the dependence on a single, strategic Heideggerian essay as the way into fundamental ontology.^[30] The French reception of Heidegger has for many years been focused through Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism." This text is Heidegger's response to a letter addressed to him on 10 November 1946 by Jean Beaufret, the French philosopher, who later became the main figure in the introduction of Heidegger's thought in France, a tireless proselytizer for the Heideggerian point of view. Heidegger replied to Beaufret's letter in December 1946 and then reworked his response for publication.

The resultant text is both philosophical and strategic in character. Although this text is a serious philosophical study, it is also a masterly effort by Heidegger to attract attention to his thought in a neighboring country at a time when he was seriously beleaguered in his native Germany. As an open letter to a figure on the French philosophical scene at a time when Heidegger was in eclipse because of his association with the Nazi regime, there was an obvious strategic value to the claim that there had been a turning (Kehre ) in his position, by implication a turning away from his earlier view which was also a turning away from Nazism. Understood in this way, the concept of the turning appears as a tacit, even graceful admission of an earlier complicity, combined with a suggestion of a fresh start, untainted by earlier transgressions, and a suggestion to provide a reasonable alternative to Sartre, a perhaps objectionable French guru. These are all characteristics that quickly raised Heidegger's stock in French intellectual thought and may even have been calculated to do so. Significantly, although at the time Heidegger had already moved far from his original position, his "Letter on Humanism" has

been described by a French commentator as the best introduction to Being and Time .^[31]

In other texts from his later writings, Heidegger continues to insist on the uniqueness of the Germans; but not by accident in the "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger opposes nationalism of any kind as metaphysically anthropological and subjective.^[32] His stated opposition here to biologism, a doctrine to which Heidegger seems never to have subscribed, limits the dimensions of Heidegger's admitted political error.^[33] Heidegger's opposition here to Sartrean existentialism and humanism of all sorts as metaphysical^[34] is balanced by his careful description of his alternative as the only one able to think "the humanity of man," as an attempt to "think the essence of man more primordially" in order to restore its original sense, and as a view that "in no way implies a defense of the inhuman but rather opens other vistas."^[35] Heidegger's depiction of his form of nonmetaphysical humanism as more meaningful than its better-known alternative is clearly stated: "To think the truth of Being at the same time means to think the humanity of homo humanus . What counts is humanitas in the service of the truth of Being, but without humanism in the metaphysical sense."^[36]

The fact that, for contingent reasons, the French reading of Heidegger has largely proceeded from an antimetaphysical humanist focus explains the relative ease with which Heidegger displaced not only Sartre but Hegel as well in French thought and the violent reaction to the appearance of Farias's book. Beyond his status as an important thinker, Heidegger's implicit claim to be a true humanist smoothed the way for the displacement of views frequently regarded as either antihumanistic or associated with antihumanism. The shocking revelation that what many had long regarded as essentially humanism in the deepest sense was possibly no more than a false appearance is basic to the French reaction to recent revelations about Heidegger's politics. It is, then, not by chance, that the French discussion of Heidegger's political thought has been so heated since the debate revolves around the essentially political question of whether, as Heidegger and his followers claim, Heidegger's position is a new antimetaphysical humanism or whether, on the contrary, as others have held, it is a metaphysical form of racism, based on a durable commitment to the superiority of the German people.

In France, the intellectual debate on Heidegger's Nazism began in the pages of Les Temps Modernes , one of the best-known French intellectual journals. This journal was founded by Sartre and his colleagues when France was liberated from the Nazis and later edited by him for many years. The early existentialist Sartre is well-known as the author of the view, which to some, including the later Sartre, appeared to ignore the constraints of real life, that we are always and essentially radically

free. The initial phase of the debate, which includes texts by Karl Löwith, Alfred de Towarnicki, Eric Weil, Alphonse De Waelhens, and Maurice de Gandillac, is preceded by an editorial note. Here, immediately prior to the publication of the famous "Letter on Humanism," an unnamed editor, in all probability Sartre, draws a comparison between Heidegger and Hegel. Just as the latter's later thought led him to compromise with Prussia, so Heidegger the man and Heidegger the political actor are one and the same; and his political choice follows from his existential thought. In the same way as an analysis of Hegel's position removes any suspicion with respect to dialectical thought, the writer suggests that a similar analysis will do the same for Heidegger, in fact will demonstrate that an existential view of politics is at the antipodes of Nazism.^[37]

The First Wave

The initial phase of the French discussion comprises no fewer than three subphases, including articles by Karl Löwith, Maurice de Gandillac, and Alfred de Towarnicki, followed some time later by articles by Eric Well and Alphonse De Waehlens, and ending with responses by Löwith and De Waelhens. Gandillac, who was apparently the first French philosopher to come in contact with Heidegger after the war, went on to an important career as a professor at the Sorbonne. Löwith is a former student, later colleague of Heidegger, who spent the war in exile. He is well-known for his own work as well as for an interesting study of Heidegger which attempted to understand why and how Heidegger achieved such philosophical importance.^[38] Weil, a Jew who was the assistant of Cassirer, himself a Jew, early emigrated to France where he achieved prominence as an original thinker, above all for an important analysis of philosophical categories.^[39] De Waelhens was a well-known Belgian scholar of phenomenology and existentialism, the author of important studies of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Towarnicki is a journalist who is still active.

Here as in the later debate, it is instructive to regard the discussion as a series of dialectically interrelated analyses of the same phenomenon from diverse points of view. Both Gandillac and Towarnicki embroider various themes of the "official" view of Heidegger's Nazism, due finally to Heidegger himself. Gandillac provides a short account of a visit to Heidegger's home which from the present perspective makes two interesting points.^[40] On the one hand, he presents with sympathy Heidegger's view that Hitlerism was the historic manifestation of a so-called structural disease of human being as such. It is significant, since Heidegger later insists on the misunderstood essence of Nazism, that in Gandillac's

account he refuses to incriminate the fall of the Germanic community, whose true sense of liberty he still desires to awaken. On the other hand, several times in the article we are told that Heidegger was seduced like a child by the exterior aspects of Hitlerism, that he was induced to enroll in the Nazi party by his children, and so on. Taken together, these two points tend to indicate that Heidegger was unaware of the consequences of, and hence not responsible for, his political actions, while holding open the possibility, which he later never renounced, of the true gathering of the metaphysical Volk .

Towarnicki's version of the official view is at least partly false.^[41] He suggests that Heidegger was unanimously elected rector, although that is now known to be untrue. Towarnicki quotes Heidegger to the effect that the death of Röhm opened his eyes to the true nature of Nazism, which he later criticized in his courses on Nietzsche; but we know that Heidegger continued to affirm his belief in an authentic form of National Socialism. The article ends with an affirmation, in the form of a direct quotation, of Heidegger's emotional proclamation of the spiritual importance of France to the world. When we recall that Heidegger also justified his turn to Nazism through the concern with the spiritual welfare of the German people, this remark appears less uplifting.

Löwith's discussion, which was written outside Germany in 1939, hence at the beginning of the war that was to devastate Europe, is still surprisingly complete.^[42] It mentions topics that continue to occur and recur in the later debate, such as the link between Heidegger's turn toward Nazism and his famous description of resoluteness in paragraph 74 of Being and Time , an analysis of the Rektoratsrede , Heidegger's praise of Schlageter, Heidegger's relation to the students of Freiburg, the role of E. Jünger, and so on. Löwith's analysis can be summarized as follows: In the final analysis Being and Time represents a theory of historical existence. It was only possible for Heidegger to turn toward Nazism on this basis since an interpretation of his thought in this sense was possible. Further, Heidegger's turn to National Socialism follows from his prior philosophy, in fact is squarely based on a main principle of his thought: existence reduced to itself reposes only on itself in the face of nothing. Finally, this principle expresses the identification of Heidegger's thought with the radical political situation in which it arose.

Löwith's analysis is a clear attempt to understand Heidegger's Nazism as following from Heidegger's position, and his position as the expression of the historical situation, in Hegelian terms as the times comprehended in thought. Löwith contradicts two points maintained by all subsequent defenders of Heidegger: Löwith denies that Heidegger's philosophy can be understood otherwise than through its social and political context. Accordingly, he contradicts in advance the well-known "tex-

tualist" approach, especially prevalent in French circles, to Heidegger's writings without reference to the wider social, political, and historical context in which they arose. He further denies the "official" view of Heidegger's National Socialism—most prominently represented in the French debate by Fédier and Aubenque, and from a different perspective by Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe—which tends to minimize, even to excuse, Heidegger's turn toward Nazism as unfortunate, temporary, and above all contingent with respect to Heidegger's thought.

At the outset of the French debate, the opposition between Löwith on the one hand and Gandillac and Towarnicki on the other already symbolizes the two basic alternatives in their respective readings of Heidegger's Nazism as either necessary or contingent. Every other, later debate both within and without the French context only varies, but does not fundamentally modify, these two main options. Obviously, these two extremes are incompatible. Since Löwith traces Heidegger's actions to his thought and Heidegger's thought to the historical context, Löwith disputes Towarnicki, who regards Heidegger's link to National Socialism as temporary, regrettable, and unmotivated by the underlying position; and Löwith disputes as well Gandillac's assertion that Heidegger was unaware of what he did.

The disagreement gave rise to a debate. In the debate Weil, who correctly qualifies Towarnicki's article as a plea for Heidegger, or as he says rather by Heidegger, intervenes against the necessitarian thesis, whereas De Waelhens defends the contingency view. Weil criticizes Heidegger for a supposed failure to assume the responsibility of his acts and as the sole important philosopher who took up Hitler's cause.^[43] But he denies the necessitarian thesis on the grounds that even by Heideggerian standards the link between Heidegger's thought and National Socialism is illegitimate. According to Weil, what he incorrectly calls Heideggerian existentialism is intrinsically defective since it leads to a decision in general, but not to any particular decision. From this perspective, Weil claims that Heidegger has falsified his own thought in merely pretending a contrario that a political decision could be derived from his apolitical thought. Although it is correct to point to the open-ended quality of Heidegger's view of resoluteness, this does not impede the derivation of a political consequence from another aspect of Heidegger's position, such as his conception of authenticity.

This effort to deconstruct the necessitarian reading is peculiar—not because of the amalgam between Heideggerian phenomenology and existentialism, which Heidegger took pains to deny in the "Letter on Humanism," nor in virtue of the denial that Heidegger is a privileged interpreter of his own thought, since there is no need to accord him this interpretative privilege—but because it fails to address the claim that a

clear political decision follows from Heidegger's view of authenticity. Now Alphonse De Waelhens—who also identifies Heidegger's thought as an existential phenomenology—suggests, through an attack on the necessitarian thesis, that the theme of Heidegger's fidelity to his own position is less significant than its possibly intrinsic relation to National Socialism.^[44]

De Waelhens's attack on the necessitarian thesis is remarkable for two reasons. On the one hand, he raises the issue of who really understands Heidegger as a precondition for the critique of the latter's thought. Later in the discussion, even when the defenders of Heidegger are led to acknowledge that Nazism is central to his position, Derrida and others, including numerous writers outside the French debate, continue to insist that only someone deeply steeped in Heidegger's thought, by inference an unconditional adherent, is possibly competent to measure its defects. On the other hand, De Waelhens formulates a kind of transcendental argument meant to demonstrate that Heidegger's political turning could not have followed from his philosophy. According to De Waelhens, who has obviously been contradicted by history, an analysis of Heidegger's conception of historicality shows that its author could not accept fascism, a doctrine incompatible with the ideas of Being and Time . And he disposes of Löwith's version of the necessitarian thesis through a rapid but unconvincing effort to demonstrate that Heidegger's former colleague did not always possess a sufficient grasp of the master's texts.

When we compare the views of Weil and De Waelhens, we see at once that since both deny that Heidegger's thought bears an intrinsic relation to Nazism, each is obliged to interpret what Heidegger thought and did as an instance of Heidegger's infidelity to Heidegger's own position. Yet since Heidegger rapidly abandoned an "inauthentic" type of Nazism in favor of an "authentic form" which he never forsook, the effort to defuse the necessitarian thesis undertaken by Weil and De Waelhens is insufficient to demonstrate that the relation in question is contingent. At best, their respective arguments could show only that Heidegger was mistaken on the basis of his thought in turning toward National Socialism as it in fact existed, which he himself later admitted, but not that he was mistaken on the basis of his thought in turning toward National Socialism as he desired it to exist, that is, from the futural perspective intrinsic to his position.

De Waehlens is more radical than Weil since he does not assert that Heidegger misunderstood his own thought, but rather claims—a point widely asserted in the later discussion—that the action of the individual Heidegger is without philosophical interest. Perhaps for that reason, he drew a response by Löwith, who does not take up the issue of who is capable of judging Heidegger.^[45] This omission is important, since it is always possible

to claim that a criticism, any criticism at all, is based on an insufficient awareness of the position. Rather, Löwith restates his own conviction that Heidegger's relation to Nazism is a necessary consequence of Heidegger's philosophy of existence. He further affirms that it is curious to defend Heidegger against Heidegger's own voluntary political engagement. In his rejoinder^[46] De Waelhens insists that his attempt to show that Heidegger's political action did not, and cannot, follow from the latter's philosophy is only a specific instance of the more general claim that one cannot deduce a particular political stance from a philosophy.

De Waelhens's rejoinder invokes a principle, which, if followed, would effectively suppress the possibility of analyzing the relation between thought and action. His principle, which contradicts the entire ethical tradition, whose unexpressed premise is that reasons can be causes, is false for at least two reasons: First, throughout history, at present in eastern Europe, millions of people have been motivated to political action on behalf of ideas. This is a point De Waehlens can accommodate only on pain of denying that such ideas are philosophical. Second, De Waelhens calls on us to abandon the political act of an analysis of the link between Heidegger's philosophy and politics, which precisely assumes the political efficacy of philosophy he is concerned to deny.

The initial phase of the French discussion of Heidegger's relation to Nazism records a calm, scholarly exchange. In retrospect, this exchange is interesting as a clear statement of the necessitarian and contingent analyses, and for the anticipation of later variants of the effort to "deconstruct" the necessitarian thesis on a priori grounds. These include the effort to construct an a priori impossibility argument and the related claim—from the perspective of conceptual orthodoxy—that whoever criticizes is uninformed. It is notable that the two attempts to deconstruct the necessitarian thesis canvassed here, due to Weil and De Waelhens, avoid a direct analysis of the relevant passages in Heidegger's texts in favor of more general statements. This is specifically the case for the arguments advanced by De Waehlens—including his a priori argument against the very possibility of an intrinsic link between philosophy and politics as well as his assertion that any possible criticism is impossible because based on insufficient knowledge—each of which responds to any and all criticism in general without engaging the criticism on its merits.

The Second Wave

The initial phase of the debate sets the stage for all later discussion of this theme in France and elsewhere. The second phase of the French debate differed in numerous ways from its predecessor. To begin with, it

is less compact, and for that reason more difficult to delimit. It occurred over a number of years, roughly from 1948, when the French first edition of Lukács's book appeared, to the publication of Jean-Michel Palmier's study in 1968, the year of the French student uprising. It further includes articles by François Fédier, Jean-Pierre Faye, François Bondy, Alfred Grosser, Robert Minder, Aimé Patri, and others, and journals such as Médiations and Critique . Another difference is the increasingly international character of the second phase of the debate, which makes greater reference to materials published in languages other than French. Further, the discussion now takes on an increasingly heated, often overheated, on occasion even strident character, which surpasses the generally polite nature of traditional scholarly discussion. One can speculate that the excited character of the debate indicates the political stakes of the critique or defense of Heidegger's form of National Socialism.

The remarkable change in tone is arguably due to a variety of factors. On the one hand, in the inital phase of the discussion a number of those who took part, including Löwith and Weil, were not native French, but those who intervene in the next stage of the debate are mainly of French origin. It is a fact that debate in French intellectual circles tends to be noisier and more strident than elsewhere. On the other hand, in the meantime the full effect of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" had begun to be felt. As a result, Heidegger had already begun to acquire a commanding presence in French intellectual life, whose horizon was increasingly constituted by his thought. The greater identification of French thought with Heidegger even as his position displaced Hegel's in the role of the master thinker meant that French scholars on occasion acted as if they were as much engaged in defending French thought as in defending Heidegger's position. Further, the appearance in the meantime of Guido Schneeberger's collection of relevant documents, as well as other studies, such as those due to Adorno and Hühnerfeld, meant that Heidegger's philosophy, and not only his personal reputation, was now at risk. Finally, France was then approaching a political crisis that would nearly paralyze the country for a number of months beginning in March 1968.

Although in his "Letter" Heidegger implicitly admits his culpability in his stated desire to turn over a new leaf, Beaufret took a more extreme line, which developed only slowly. As early as 1945, when he was close to Marxism, he described Heidegger's adherence to National Socialism as the result of a naïveté linked to a bourgeois character.^[47] But Beaufret rapidly abandoned his youthful flirt, common in France at least until 1968, with revolutionary thought. In his letter to Heidegger, he mentions his concern with the relation of ontology to the possibility of an ethics. Beaufret later provided a curious answer to his own concern in

two ways: through the denial of a more than casual relation between Heidegger and National Socialism, itself a form of the contingency thesis,^[48] but above all in his own later turn to a form of revisionist history in which he simply denied that anyone was murdered in Nazi gas chambers, in effect by denying the very existence of Nazi extermination camps!^[49] Taken to its extremes, the result is to deny that there could be a problem in the link between Heidegger and National Socialism, which, on Beaufret's demonstrably false reading of history, was intrinsically unproblematic. In a word, Nazism was not Nazism! This is surely the most extreme possible form of the deconstruction of the necessitarian thesis, since from this angle of vision it is fully possible to accept that Heidegger was led by his thought to Nazism but to deny that the acceptance of Nazism is problematic.

We can deal separately with the works by Georg Lukács and Jean-Michel Palmier. Lukács, the important Marxist philosopher and literary critic, is the author of History and Class Consciousness , a celebrated book that almost alone created the Hegelian approach to Marxism widely influential in later Marxist discussion.^[50] His study of Marxism and existentialism, written during his Stalinist phase, was a consciously polemical intervention in the debate, intended to dismiss existentialism, from an orthodox Marxist perspective.^[51] Here, he applied Engels's depiction of the relation between thought and being as the watershed question of all philosophy to oppose the possibility of a putative third way supposedly sought by existentialism between idealism and materialism. According to Lukács, existentialism is merely a form of subjective idealism linked to the defense of bourgeois class interests. In passing, he specifically attacks Heidegger's position as pre-fascist. He developed this criticism at length in an appendix, "Anhang: Heidegger Redivivus"—in direct response to the publication of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," the same document that cemented Heidegger's relation to French philosophy—added to the German edition of his book.^[52]

Lukács's book seems to have affected the French discussion of Heidegger only marginally, mainly through its influence on Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Lukács was in part later answered by Merleau-Ponty, who, in a famous discussion, identified Lukács as the founder of so-called Western Marxism.^[53] And Lukács clearly influenced Sartre's later turn to Marxism. Writing two decades later, Palmier, a careful student of Heidegger, casts himself in the role of a defender of the master against the various attacks which, for perhaps the first time in the French discussion, he attempts to parry through detailed textual analysis. Palmier's study, which appeared at the close of the sharp exchange between Fédier and Faye, is intended by its author as an initial approach to Heidegger's

writings from April 1933 to February 1934, that is, during his period as rector.^[54] But by casting his net so narrowly, Palmier perhaps unintentionally takes this period, which he recognizes as belonging to Heidegger's oeuvre, out of context, since he renders it exceedingly difficult to grasp the degree of continuity between it and the later evolution of Heidegger's thought. Perhaps for this reason, despite the serious nature of Palmier's study, it seems not to have attracted attention in the later debate.^[55]

In order to characterize the second phase of the discussion, whose conceptual and chronological limits fall between the books by Lukács and Palmier, we do well to turn to the polemic between Fédier and Faye. Unlike the initial phase of the discussion, which began with a defense of Heidegger, the opening shot was fired by an attacker who was met after a short interval by a committed defender, determined to repulse any assault on the house of Being. This phase of the attack, in fact the second battle of the conceptual war concerning Heidegger, was launched by Jean-Pierre Faye in 1961^[56] through the publication of the French translation of certain Heideggerian texts, notably the Rektoratsrede and the homage to Schlageter. In a short presentation preceding the texts, Faye notes the violence of Heidegger's revolutionary language, particularly in the rectoral speech, and its link to Nazi terminology. In a further article^[57] in the same journal, Faye reproduces the famous passage on the essence of authentic Nazism from An Introduction to Metaphysics , as well as Heidegger's endorsement—in a letter to Die Zeit dated 24 September 1953—of the effort by Christian E. Lewalter to explain away Heidegger's apparent concern with Nazism—published in the same journal on 13 August. Here, Faye develops his earlier discussion by insisting on the relation between Heidegger's views and those of Ernst Krieck. Faye also took the occasion, prodded by Aimé Patri, to correct his earlier translation of Heideggerian texts.

In retrospect, Faye's articles did not break new ground. His main contribution was to make available material that tended to cast doubt on the contingency analysis. The initial intervention by François Fédier, Heidegger's most ardent defender in the French philosophical discussion after Beaufret's death, occurred only some five years after Faye's articles. Even then, Fédier's ire was mainly directed toward other targets. Fédier turns to Faye only when the latter dared to respond to his impassioned defense of Heidegger against all comers. Since that time, Fédier has maintained his visible role—which now after the death of Beaufret, his former teacher, is nearly his alone—as the self-appointed official spokesman for the contingency thesis, determined to deconstruct any and all forms of the necessitarian analysis. With the exception of

Aubenque, at present no other prominent French defender of Heidegger argues that the link between Heidegger's philosophy and politics is merely contingent.

Fédier's initial article^[58] was prompted by his perception of attacks on Heidegger by Guido Schneeberger, Theodor Adorno, and Paul Hühnerfeld. Instead of a response to a polemic, the author describes his intent as an examination of the presuppositions of so-called hostile arguments. In each case, Fédier shows to his satisfaction that the writer in question is methodologically incapable of comprehending Heidegger's Nazism before describing what he calls reality through a simple statement of the "main facts" of the case. According to Fédier, who does not examine other, later evidence, with the exception of the Spiegel interview, an analysis of Heidegger's courses between 1934 and 1944 suffices to perceive the exact meaning of Heidegger's opposition to Nazism and, for the same reason, to understand why he desired in 1933 to contribute to the realization of something other than what Nazism became.

It is noteworthy that none of the works to which Fédier responds here is due to a French author or published in French. Fédier's discussion, which is a form of the contingency thesis, specifically a further version of the claim that the critics of Heidegger are insufficiently familiar with the object of their criticism, is innovative only as an early attempt within the French context to respond to foreign criticism of Heidegger. Although Fédier's défense tous azimuts did not even consider the nascent French effort to come to grips with the problem, it is not surprising that he was quickly answered by three French writers, including Patri, Minder, and Faye, which in turn evoked a rapid rejoinder from Fédier.

Fédier is defended by Patti. In his short paper, he argues in support of Fédier and against Faye that—on linguistic grounds alone—one cannot identify a relation between Heidegger and Nazism, since the adjective "völkisch " was already used by Fichte, who was not a member of the SS.^[59] This version of the attack on the necessitarian thesis because the critic is allegedly misinformed was immediately contradicted in another short paper by Minder, who asserts that even a cursory examination of Heidegger's language supposes an acceptance of some fundamental principles of the Third Reich.^[60] He further notes, as Farias and especially Ott later argue in detail, that Heidegger was strongly influenced by a certain rustic but politically reactionary form of Roman Catholicism.

The latter point is a form of the necessitarian thesis interpreted in a historicist manner directly counter to the evolution of Heidegger's thought after the famous turning. For the claim that anyone, including the author of fundamental ontology, is not in part a product of the surrounding environment precisely contradicts Heidegger's own claim that we are all determined by the modern world, by technology, ulti-

mately by metaphysics, even by Being. In his response, Faye returns to the attack with a perceptive comment on nascent right-wing Heideggerianism.^[61] He notes in an ironic remark that there is at present a Parisian sect devoted to protecting its masters in the way that the ASPCA is devoted to protecting animals! He provides a discussion of the history of the term "völkisch " and its relation to racism, in particular anti-Semitism, later developed by Bourdieu, before turning his critical gaze on the difference, crucial in his eyes, between being in the world and transforming it.

Faye's article could only have been perceived as it was in part intended: as a provocation. In his article, Faye commits a strategic error, since he attempts to show that he has the appropriate knowledge which Fédier accuses him of lacking. The argument cannot be won on such terms, since it is always possible to maintain that the critic knew some things but not others, and the other things are relevant, indeed crucial. In short, it is always possible to claim and in effect to make out the claim that one who opposes a doctrine, any doctrine, is not sufficiently informed. This insight was not lost on Fédier, who quickly responded in this way in order to show that après tout Faye was uninformed, in any case not sufficiently informed to criticize such a difficult thinker as Heidegger, since he did not know German sufficiently well. This is a technique which Fédier has continued to employ with frequency in his now numerous attempts to defend the "sacred" cause.^[62]

In his response, Fédier concedes that Heidegger did use certain incriminating expressions over a ten-month period, but he denies that as a result Heidegger's thought is compromised in any way. In the course of a veritable demonstration of why no translation is safe from "deconstruction," which anticipates Derrida's use of this method in his best days, Fédier goes so far as to say that a "real" translation of the rectoral address will remove the vestiges of Nazism which Faye has "injected" into it. He further advances a claim—which he later developed at length in a book—that although Heidegger was mistaken in 1933 in his allegiance to Hitler, it was impossible to understand at the time what Hitler would become. He closes with a triple criticism of Heidegger's failure: to foresee the consequences of Nazism, to measure the powerlessness of thought with respect to Nazism, and to grasp that thought could not modify what was under way. The latter two points are different versions of the same idea of the weakness of thought, which represent an application of Heidegger's own later view, in the "Letter on Humanism" and elsewhere, of thought as different from and opposed to philosophy.

For present purposes, Fédier's argument is interesting as the basic statement of the contingentist attack on the necessitarian analysis. More than twenty years later, one can no longer doubt in good faith the

existence of a form of right-wing Heideggerianism determined to save Heidegger at all costs, even if to do so on occasion requires one to deny the clearly evident. At this early stage, with the exception of Beaufret, Gandillac, and De Waelhens, and to a lesser extent such secondary figures as Patri, Fédier was virtually isolated as the keeper of the grail of Being. But as early as his first skirmish, he identified the basic form of his response to any form of the necessitarian argument.

Fédier's strategy is obviously dependent on that of such pioneer defenders of Heidegger in the French-language discussion as De Waelhens, who formulated the initial version of the attack on the necessitarian thesis for insufficient evidence. Now De Waelhens's version of this gambit was unconvincing since it was no more than the claim, which can always be made, that the critic is uninformed. But this claim was unconvincing, or at least not sufficiently convincing to be acceptable to such a truly knowledgeable observer as Löwith. Yet if he does not perfect this strategy, Fédier at least takes it much further by developing it into a coherent defense, much as in chess the difference between an isolated move and a viable defense consists in the articulation of the various elements. Fédier's counter consists in the following elements, all calculated to make it difficult, even impossible, to make out a claim for a durable, or even a transitory, link between Heidegger and Nazism: the assertion that Heidegger was naive, but not culpable since he did not, or could not, know the nature of Nazism; the intimation that the critic is inadequately informed, for instance about Heidegger, as concerns the German language, and so on; and the pretension that a simple statement of the "facts," including a look at the statements of others who were there and hence by implication know the "real" story is sufficient to separate the "real" Heidegger from the mythic figure who is the target of his critics. Combined in different ways, all of these elements later return in the third phase of the French debate on Heidegger and National Socialism.

The Onset of the Third Wave

The third, most recent phase of the French debate began when Farias's study burst onto the intellectual scene in the fall of 1987. Any account of this phase needs to distinguish between the immediate reaction to Farias's book in French circles and the more measured but often still heated discussion that followed and at the present time is still under way. The immediate French reaction to Farias's book was part of a rapid response which, it is fair to say, swept over western Europe. The major newspapers and many magazines in all the major European countries

carried articles concerning this study, often with a kind of concealed amusement directed at the French reception of the work.

Two examples from the West German press and one from an Italian newspaper are typical. In an article in a well-known liberal German daily, the author, apparently unaware of the preceding discussion, comments that the question of the negative influence on Heidegger's thought will henceforth be raised in France as well as in Germany.^[63] In a respected intellectual German weekly, another writer concludes that Heidegger's letter to Jean Beaufret did not remain without a response, since it led to French postmodernism, although none of the postmodernists, who are all staunchly antitotalitarian, can be simply assimilated to Heidegger in a political manner.^[64] Both of these articles are cautious and, in the best German sense, sachlich , concerned more to report than to pass judgment.

We find a much sharper, less journalistic reaction in an Italian daily newspaper which counterposes articles by two well-known Italian philosophers: Roberto Maggiori, an anti-Heideggerian; and Gianni Vattimo, a well-known Heideggerian. Responding to an earlier review by Vattimo of the Farias book, Maggiori criticizes Vattimo's view that the whole "affaire Heidegger " is an operation directed against certain Parisian thinkers. In a sharp response, which recalls Beaufret's estimate of Heidegger as a conceptual giant among pygmies, Vattimo dismisses Farias's work as of little historical consequence.^[65]

The sharp exchange between Maggiori and Vattimo is similar in content, but not in tone, to the often much sharper character of the French discussion. The immediate reaction, what in French is aptly called the réaction à chaud , was precisely that, namely heated, in fact overheated to a degree unusual even in French intellectual circles. This phase of the controversy, which was more symptomatic of the depth of feeling than of insight into the problem, was uncharacteristically played out in the pages of the daily papers, the weekly magazines, in art and literary journals, on television, and so on—in short, through forms of communication not often associated with the measured tread of philosophical debate. It involved such well-known figures on the French intellectual scene as Derrida, Finkielkraut, E. de Fontenay, Baudrillard, Levinas, Aubenque, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Renaut, Ferry, Daix, and so on, as well as a large number of less well known figures, all of whom felt called upon to comment on the situation; it involved as well foreign scholars imported for the occasion such as Gadamer. What had earlier been a philosophical debate, a disagreement between scholars on a theme concerning a famous but obscure German thinker, quickly became a kind of intellectual free-for-all in which opinions, even frank accusations, were voiced in rapid fashion. The result was to guarantee a succès de scandale for a book that rapidly became a cause célèbre .

One way to indicate the amplitude of the immediate reaction, which lasted for weeks in certain cases, is by a simple list, in no particular order, of some of the newspapers and journals that ran articles, sometimes numerous articles, on the topic: Art Press, La Quinzaine Lit-téraire, Le Monde, Le Matin, Libération, La Croix, Le Quotidien de Paris, Le Figaro, Le Magazine Littéraire, Le Canard Enchainé , and so on. The tone of the debate to follow was given by the opening shot, fired by Christian Jambet, a former nouveau philosophe , in his preface to the French edition of Farias's work. His sharply worded preface begins with a reference to the traditional belief in the virtue of philosophy for life, before building to remarks on the manner in which Heidegger allegedly identifies authentic existence with a mere semblance, itself representative of the politics of extermination. Jambet ends with a statement intended to sum up Heidegger's thought in a reference to a well-known film, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard ) on the Nazi concentration camps: "Heidegger has the merit of making ontology the question of our time. But how can we accept that philosophy, born of Socrates' trial for leading a just life, ends in the twilight where Heidegger wanted to see the end of the gods, but which was only the time of Night and Fog ?"^[66]

In his preface, Jambet raises the question of the specific difference that opposes, or seems to oppose, Heidegger to the entire philosophical tradition through the relation between his own thought and absolute evil. Yet Jambet does not raise the other theme, highly relevant in the French context, of the specific link between Heidegger's philosophy and French thought. Certainly, the latter topic is partially responsible for the inflamed, passionate character of the immediate French reaction. Perhaps Hugo Ott, the Freiburg historian, caught the mood best in the opening comment of his review of Farias's book: "In France a sky has fallen in—the sky of the philosophers ."^[67]

Even a small selection will communicate the sheer breadth of opinion in the immediate response to Farias's study in French circles. In a sober article, Roger-Pol Droit states that as a result of his study Farias has dismantled the "official" view of Heidegger's merely contingent relation with National Socialism, long maintained by Beaufret and other friends.^[68] According to Droit, who clearly denies De Waelhens's claim, in the future it will be impossible to separate Heidegger the philosopher from Heidegger the man, and it will be necessary to think the link that unites them. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, a French refugee from German Nazism, welcomes Farias's study for swelling the meager ranks of those bothered by Heidegger's Nazi past; he regards Farias's book as a means to impede the normal business of the Parisian Heideggerians, henceforth obliged to confront the issues.^[69] In a response, Emmanuel Martineau, the author of the pirated translation of Being and Time, a

friend and student of Beaufret, admits that the latter became part of Heideggerian fascism, which he regards as matched by a hystericial anti-Heideggerian fascism. He accuses Goldschmidt of falling prey, not to the hate of Nazi cruelty, but purely and simply to the hatred of thought.^[70]

Alain Finkielkraut complains that in noting the connection between Being and Time and Mein Kampf , there is a concealed risk of promoting a kind of fascist reaction against philosophy.^[71] In a response to Finkielkraut, Goldschmidt suggests that in France there is little real knowledge of Nazism; there is further an incapacity to see that a kind of Nazism rooted in German thought since Fichte is central to Heidegger's thought.^[72] Jean Baudrillard observes that the so-called necrological discussion concerning Heidegger has no intrinsic philosophical meaning. He maintains that this discussion only betrays a transition from the stage of history to the stage of myth in which events, which we cannot grasp on the plane of reality, give rise to a convulsion indicative of a loss of reality.^[73]

Martineau's version of the lack of critical competence, already in evidence in earlier discussions, is further developed by Jacques Derrida in an interview.^[74] According to Derrida, then on the point of publishing a book coincidentally concerned with Heidegger and politics, the so-called facts discovered by Farias are not new for anyone seriously interested in Heidegger; and the interpretation of their relation to the master's thought is so insufficient as to raise the question of whether Farias has devoted more than an hour to reading Heidegger. Yet Derrida also concedes the need to show the deep link between Heidegger's thought and actions to the possibility and reality of what he calls all the Nazisms.

In the face of Derrida's claim that Farias is not a competent reader of Heidegger's texts, Farias's enumeration, in his response, of a list of facts, supposedly brought to the attention of scholars for the first time, seems vaguely unsatisfactory.^[75] A still more radical response is furnished by Pierre Aubenque, the well-known Aristotle scholar, who in a bitter article^[76] simply denies all the relevant points, including the relevance of Farias's book, the intellectual honesty of his analysis, the need for a study of this kind, and the lack of a significant connection between Heidegger's thought and Nazism. Aubenque's analysis is supported by Pascal David, who ends a review of Farias's study with a quotation from Abraham a Santa Clara—the Augustinian anti-Semite whom Farias regards as influential on Heidegger—to the effect that God loves fools, not foolishness.^[77]

In his article, Aubenque refers approvingly to Derrida, but the difference between their respective readings of Heidegger's Nazism places them in different camps. Although infinitely more clever than Fédier, in his avowal of a version of the contingency thesis Aubenque is finally

close to Fédier's wholly unyielding defense, which simply denies that there is a problem worthy of consideration. In comparison, Derrida's response is more innovative in "deconstructing" the opposition between representatives of the necessitarian and contingentist analyses. In essence, Derrida proposes that we can acknowledge the intrinsic link between Heidegger and Nazism, although he continues to insist that only the anointed few can comprehend it in the correct manner.

The result is to concede the main point of the necessitarian approach but to restrict its development by continuing to insist, as the contingentists have all along, that only the "orthodox," or more precisely the "orthodox" critic of Heidegger, can measure the problem. An appropriate analogy is the claim made by a former Stalinist that only Stalin's victims can legitimately judge his crimes. This new standard of criticism, which couples an admission of the problem—which can no longer be denied, and is in fact no longer denied in any straightforward fashion by any observer with the clear exception of Fédier and Aubenque, who continue to represent the original form of the contingentist view—with the insistence on expert knowledge of Heidegger's thought as a precondition for valid discussion of Heidegger's Nazism, represents a significant evolution in the scholarly French discussion of this theme. As a result, the gap between the discussants has narrowed considerably since the point at issue is no longer whether there was a real and durable link between Heidegger and Nazism—something perhaps only Aubenque among the more significant French intellectuals still denies—but rather how to understand this link, in particular how to understand its significance for his philosophy.

In philosophy, because of the length of the gestation period the debate normally unfolds rather slowly, over a period measured at best in years and more often in decades or centuries. Now in French circles, where the half-life of a theory is very short, the debate usually unfolds more quickly since to publish slowly would be to run the risk of being able to comment on a topic only as it was in the process of disappearing from the intellectual scene. Until recently, that is, until the publication of Farias's work, with the exception of Palmier's study, no books wholly, or even mainly, centered on the theme of Heidegger and Nazism had appeared. This lacuna, if it is one, was now rapidly corrected, at a speed extraordinary even by the standards of the French intellectual discussion. Farias's book was published in October 1987. From that period until the following May, even as a steady, but steadily diminishing, stream of articles devoted to the topic continued to pour out, in an extraordinary burst of scholarly creativity no fewer than six studies devoted to this theme appeared.^[78] Not surprisingly, in most cases they

reflected the new consensus that there was a problem, although they differed widely on its description and analysis.

The Third Wave

Let us discuss these books in the order in which they appeared, which corresponds at least roughly to the order of their composition. We can begin with three rather different studies by Pierre Bourdieu, by Jean-François Lyotard, one of the main representatives of the postmodern tendency in French philosophy, and by Fédier. Bourdieu's discussion of what he, following Heidegger's concern with Being, calls Heidegger's political ontology, is the second edition of a text originally published in 1975, rewritten and adapted to recent revelations about Heidegger. Lyotard's study is the apparent result of the desire, or at least the felt need, of every well-known Parisian intellectual who desires to avoid regression to the state of mere anonymity to comment rapidly on any major topic. Fédier's work is a further example of his continued effort, which in the meantime has lost any semblance of scholarly credibility, to maintain the contingentist thesis in its original but now outmoded form. These three disparate works nicely illustrate the range of the next strand in the scholarly discussion by those whose relation to Heidegger is either tangential or, if the relation is on the contrary close, at least tangential to the further evolution of the Heidegger debate.

In a short introduction to his short study, Bourdieu, a well-known Marxist sociologist, indicates that his analysis of methodology has been updated in the footnotes and by placing at the end three chapters concerning the analysis of Heideggerian language.^[79] In an evident reference to the first edition of his book, he remarks—with a certain self-approval—that, despite the image of sociology, a close reading of Heidegger's work already revealed such themes as anti-Semitism, his refusal to break with Nazism, his ultrarevolutionary conservative tendencies, as well as his disappointment in the lack of recognition of his revolutionary aspirations as the philosophical Führer .^[80] In a clear allusion to the prior debate on Heidegger and politics, Bourdieu states that the failure to understand what has occurred was aided by Heidegger's erection of a wall between anthropology and ontology,^[81] although we need now to examine the intrinsic blindness of these "professionals of lucidity."^[82]

Bourdieu is prescient in his allusion to Heidegger's anti-Semitism, which has only recently been established.^[83] His comments are significant in raising the second-order question of how so-called professionals of lucidity are able to respond to a situation of this kind. He provides an answer as to how one ought to proceed in a manner that reveals the

politically conservative thrust of purely textual analysis, favored most prominently in the current French discussion by Derrida and other so-called deconstructionists. According to Bourdieu, even the most determined adversaries of Heidegger have missed some of the signs concerning his Nazism since they unfortunately accept the form of immanent textual hermeneutics on which others, that is, Heidegger's epigones, insist. An approach of this kind, even its most radical form, can at best be only partially successful since it concerns certain presuppositions only.^[84] In fact, this sort of approach is dangerous since when rigorously applied it has the effect not only of sanitizing what is unsavory but of turning attention away from the political dimension to which the texts in question, even by their failure to state their aim, nonetheless refer. A striking example provided by Bourdieu concerns the manner in which a variety of participants in the French discussion, for example Beaufret, Lefebvre, Châtelet, and Axelos—in fact those who accept Heidegger's own effort in the "Letter on Humanism" to measure his thought in terms of Marx's—see a convergence between Heidegger and Marx.^[85]

Bourdieu insists that we must abandon the separation between a political and a philosophical interpretation in order to institute a double reading (lecture double ) that is both political and philosophical for Heideggerian texts characterized by an intrinsic ambiguity.^[86] His aim is to break out of the circle formed by an exclusively immanent reading of the text, doubly confined within the text and to professionals, such as professional philosophers, or even confined to those philosophers who profess allegiance to Heidegger.^[87] He regards Heidegger as representative of extremely conservative revolutionary tendencies that arose in Germany between the two world wars. And he agrees in part with the tendency of French defenders of Heidegger to discern two basically different stages in his thought. According to Bourdieu, Heidegger II constitutes a series of commentaries on Heidegger I in which, as the master himself notes, nothing is abandoned but, in Bourdieu's words, the celebrated author now absolutizes his practical choices in philosophical language.^[88] He regards Heidegger's denial of a relation between his and any other position as an exercise in negative political ontology.^[89] In Bourdieu's view, only those sensitive to the situation beyond the internal approach to the reading of the text can finally decode it.^[90]

Bourdieu is in part correct that Heidegger refused to explain his relation to Nazism since to do so would have been to admit that the essential thought never thought the essential, since Heidegger did not and could not grasp Nazism on the basis of his thought of Being. Bourdieu's error, which reveals a problem in his methodology, is to trivialize Heidegger's position by reducing it merely to an unconscious

component which it supposedly later erects as a philosophical standard. Yet when we consider Heidegger's texts, not only in the context of his position but against the social and political background, we clearly have access to a dimension not accessible if we limit ourselves to a more immanent textual approach. Bourdieu's point tends to undermine various forms of immanent hermeneutics, including the celebrated view of intertextuality. It further reveals a conscious or unconscious strategy on the part of some right-wing Heideggerians, the reason for its relative success, and the way in which, as Bourdieu's own essay demonstrates, one can surpass its limits.

Bourdieu's book is a significant effort, altogether too rare in the discussion, to come to grips with the political dimension of Heidegger's thought against the historical background. The limitation of his account is that he mainly relies on an essay already in hand with only minor changes to react to more recent discussion. Although both Lyotard and Fédier make greater efforts to confront the latest research, their books are less impressive. Like Bourdieu, Lyotard also refuses to amalgamate Heidegger's thought and his politics.^[91] Yet in comparison with Bourdieu's book and his own earlier writing, Lyotard's essay appears hasty and unsatisfactory. Bourdieu's work is saturated with references to English and German discussion and is particularly rich in allusions to the constitution of the Weimar ethos against the nineteenth-century German background. Bourdieu's analysis of the relation between Heidegger's thought and the historical, cultural, and political background is still unsurpassed in the French discussion. With the exception of the obligatory tipping of the hat to Freud and Kant, Lyotard is exclusively concerned with French sources, something unsurprising since he holds that the "problem" is essentially French.

Despite Habermas's effort^[92] to portray him and his colleagues as cryptoconservatives, Lyotard's approach reveals a fashionable, postmodernist form of liberalism. The term "Jews" ("les juifs") in the title refers not only to the Jews but to all those who in Europe have always been assimilated to them. This slight volume is divided into two chapters, respectively titled "The 'Jews'" and "Heidegger." According to Lyotard, who seems to like quotation marks, what he refers to as the Heidegger problem is a "French" problem.^[93] He holds that "the Jews," those outcasts of society, demonstrate that man's misery is constitutive of his being.^[94] Lyotard insists on the need to think the Heidegger problem^[95] without accepting the modish view that Nazism can either be deduced from Being and Time or that this book arose from an ethos that was already Nazi or pre-Nazi.^[96] After stating that both Farias and Derrida are correct, Lyotard asserts that there is, however, something unforgettable

but still forgotten that constitutes the real problem—that is, that Heidegger could possibly have thought that in and through his collaboration with the Nazi party a real opportunity existed.^[97]

Lyotard is close to Bourdieu with respect to the famous turning, which he describes in difficult language as "the amnesiac meditation of what will occur in Heideggerian 'politics.' "^[98] He suggests that Being and Time makes possible, but does not require, Heidegger's political engagement,^[99] as witness the political reading Heideggger gave of his own thought during the rectoral episode.^[100] The remainder of the book consists in a serial critique of the views of other French commentators, including Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy. For Lyotard, all of them fail to grasp that—as Lyotard notes in a comment on Heidegger's "Essence of Truth"—in Heidegger's turn toward Being and, by inference, away from the Jews, or "Jews," Heidegger's thought commits a cardinal "fault" since it is still the hostage of the Law (la Loi ).^[101]

This discussion is perhaps most enlightening as an undeveloped but correct suggestion: although not an overtly political book, Being and Time could be and in fact was read by Heidegger in a political sense as the basis of his turn toward Nazism.^[102] The suggestion that the basic flaw in Heidegger's thought resides in its relation to the Law, perhaps by extension in its dependency on the nondifferentiated other, or other than itself, calls attention to a possible relation to the German idealist tradition; but it is unfortunately too vague to state clearly, much less to evaluate. This is not the defect of Fédier's work, which could hardly be clearer in its intent or weaker in its arguments.

Fédier's book^[103] is the latest—and final, one hopes—expression of his unremitting faith as an orthodox Heideggerian not swayed, or even chastened, by new information or the intervening debate. He displays this point of view in his study with increased ardor even as he becomes the most prominent and certainly most persistent representative of this angle of vision, a sort of living dinosaur. Like the mythical author in Camus's La Peste , the entire bibliography of certain writers is wholly composed of multiple versions of a single text, which they write again and again in different forms. Fédier's scenario follows in detail the meanders of his initial defense of the master in articles published more than two decades ago. The relevant difference is that here the rappel des faits , meant to exonerate Heidegger, is not due to Fédier and does not follow but precedes the discussion. In a "biographical essay" ("essai biographique ") that begins the work, and which opens and closes with comments on the tranquil little city of Messkirch where Heidegger was born and is buried, François Vezin declares that the period of the rector-ate is no more than a parenthesis in Heidegger's life.^[104]

Like the earliest forms of the contingentist analysis, Fédier's book is

intended to defend Heidegger by attacking his detractors, in particular Farias. In the course of a difficult defense, the author is compelled to take extreme measures. Two examples worth noting are the tortured distinction introduced between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism,^[105] and the defense of the German bishops for their 1933 decision to remove the interdiction that prevented Roman Catholics from adhering to National Socialism. In his introduction, Fédier indicates that his book is meant as an apology in a supposed Socratic sense in order to dispose of the charges.^[106] Like a good defense lawyer, he begins by exaggerating the "crime" in order to show that his client could not possibly be guilty of it. According to Fédier, who perhaps had Adorno in mind, Farias holds that Heidegger never said nor thought essentially anything other than Nazism, a charge which Fédier affirms to be a calumny.^[107]

This attempted defense is problematic, since neither Farias nor anyone else has ever criticized Heidegger as broadly as Fédier pretends. Although he is concerned to refute all the charges brought against Heidegger, Fédier mainly concentrates on the rectoral period. He claims that whereas it is permissible to accuse Heidegger of adherence to Nazism in 1933-1934, it is slanderous to describe the adherence as total, since he never adhered to biological racism and so on.^[108] But, then, by this standard there never were many total adherents of Nazism, especially among German academics, since few wholly accepted all aspects of the doctrine. Fédier's main argument consists in a perverse form of skepticism, according to which in 1933 it was not possible to foresee the future of National Socialism.^[109] He even asserts that the definitive form of Nazism was not known prior to 1 September 1939.^[110] But although many aspects of what would occur were indeed unclear in 1933, and by definition the future is what has not yet happened, the situation was already sufficiently clear then, well before the outbreak of the war, for many, including numerous Jewish philosophers, such as Cassirer, Marcuse, Weil, Benjamin, Löwith, Arendt, and others, to choose exile. For instance, as early as the Nazi party program, formulated in July 1920, the fledgling political party insisted that a Jew could not be a member of the German community,^[111] and Hitler left no doubt of his intentions toward Jews in Mein Kampf . In fact, even Fédier is not convinced by his argument, since he also concedes that when Heidegger took up the cause of a National Socialism it already carried with it the signs of an essential perversity.^[112]

The first part of Fédier's discussion, entitled "Un pseudo-événement," is a long attack on Farias's book because of what Fédier alleges to be its inquisitorial tone,^[113] obfuscation,^[114] unconscious appeal to Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement,^[115] failure to respect the rules of honest scientific procedure,^[116] and so on. Alone at this late

date, when so much is known, indeed when even such croyants as Derrida claim incorrectly that everything is known, Fédier explains Farias's study as a sheer invention (montage ) of which almost no page can withstand serious study.^[117] In the second part of the discussion, entitled "Heidegger et la politique," having disposed of Farias to his satisfaction, Fédier provides his own analysis of the problem raised by the rectoral period, which he attributes to Heidegger's impatience.^[118]

In the course of his defense, Fédier makes the following controversial points: the rectoral address does not show an acceptance of Nazism but only a concern to defend academic science in the university,^[119] Heidegger later distinguished himself in his opposition to Nazism,^[120] the source of his action lies in a philosophical error leading to a need to modify the position,^[121] and Heidegger's later silence is to be respected after the martyrdom he endured.^[122] Yet unfortunately the rectoral address shows not only an interest in the defense of science but an explicit concern, which Heidegger underlines here and specifically admits in the article on the rectorate, to utilize the university to attain a common goal shared with the Nazis: the destiny of the German people; and Heidegger's silence is neither honorable nor acceptable. And examination of Heidegger's texts refutes Heidegger's own claim to have confronted Nazism in his later writings.

Fédier's most interesting point is his claim in passing that a philosophical error necessitates a modification of the position, which suggests, reasoning by modus tollens , that if a position leads to an incorrect form of action there is something mistaken in its very heart. In different ways this theme is developed in three further books on Heidegger and politics, due to Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. Derrida requires no introduction. Lacoue-Labarthe, Derrida's former student, is a well-known Heidegger specialist who has worked closely in the past with Jean-Luc Nancy, another of Derrida's close associates.^[123] Ferry and Renaut are two young antiestablishment philosophers who have collaborated on several other works. Derrida's book, which coincidentally appeared almost immediately after Farias's study, caused a stir in Heideggerian circles. Lacoue-Labarthe's work is an effort to think through the problem in a manner related to, but also significantly different from, Derrida's analysis, itself apparently dependent on Lacoue-Labarthe's earlier writing. The study by Ferry and Renaut is an attack on French right-wing Heideggerianism as a form of antihumanism due ultimately to Heidegger.

Derrida is an important thinker as well as presently the leading Heideggerian in France. His thought is deeply marked by, in fact inconceivable without, the encounter with Heidegger; he has also commented on Heidegger's position in numerous writings.^[124] His influential but unortho-

dox Heideggerianism is itself an important form of Heideggerian "orthodoxy," especially in France.^[125] Derrida's study, which can be viewed as a long meditation on Heidegger, is thoroughly Heideggerian since it proposes to thematize the concept of spirit, something Heidegger never does, in fact avoids. It can be read from at least two perspectives: as a Heideggerian analysis of Heidegger; and as an indirect, but pointed response to the theme of Heidegger and politics.^[126]

Derrida's defense of Heidegger, like so much of the French discussion of Heidegger, rests on a creative use of the "Letter on Humanism." Derrida applies Heidegger's remark that humanism is metaphysical to characterize Heidegger's own Nazism as a metaphysical humanism which, in his later writings, he supposedly overcomes in a nonmetaphysical, deeper form of humanism announced in this text. This analysis presupposes on the one hand that the later Heidegger, but not the early Heidegger, is antimetaphysical, or more precisely beyond metaphysics in any ordinary sense—precisely what Heidegger himself claimed in his later writings, such as the Beiträge —and on the other hand that there is a break between the early and later phases of Heidegger's thought.

As a defense of the importance of Heidegger's thought while acknowledging the clear, undeniable link to Nazism, Derrida's strategy is reminiscent of a form of "orthodox" Marxism, most clearly represented by Althusser and his associates, which argued for a break situated within Marx's thought. On this reading—already foreshadowed in Marx's view of the break between prehistory and human history in the transition from capitalism to communism—Marx's thought allegedly decomposes into two chronologically separable positions, the first of which can be described as philosophy but not yet as science, and the second of which breaks with philosophy in order to assume the form of science that is supposedly beyond philosophy. Althusser, who was obliged by the tardy publication of Marx's early writings to acknowledge the philosophical tenor of the early position, sought to defend the nonphilosophical, allegedly scientific character of the later theory, that is, the supposedly mature form taken by Marx's theory after it broke with philosophy. In a similar manner, apparently relying on the concept of the turning in Heidegger's thought, which he does not, however, discuss, Derrida correlates the initial Heideggerian critique of metaphysics with Heidegger's supposedly still metaphysical philosophy, which then later gives way to what Heidegger later describes as an antimetaphysical view of thinking beyond philosophy. According to Derrida, in his still metaphysical phase Heidegger turned to Nazism, which he renounced in his later move away from metaphysics and beyond philosophy.

Derrida's Heidegger interpretation takes shape as a meditation on the terms "Geist," "geistig ," and "geistlich " in Heidegger's thought.^[127]

His defense of Heidegger includes a reading of Heidegger's supposed deconstruction of spirit (Geist ) and its significance for an appreciation of Heidegger's relation to National Socialism.^[128] Derrida points out that in Being and Time Heidegger warns against the use of Geist , which he puts in quotation marks; but twenty-five years later in an essay on Trakl^[129] he speaks freely of the same term, which he now employs without quotation marks.^[130] Derrida's hypothesis is that for Heidegger this term refers to such supposedly metaphysical concepts as unity (l'Un ) and gathering (Versammlung ).^[131] According to Derrida, for Heidegger spirit is neither pneuma nor spiritus , but finally a flame more originary than either the Christian or the Platonico-metaphysical concepts.^[132] He maintains that even in 1933, for instance in the rectoral address, Heidegger rejected the reduction of spirit to reason^[133] in order to spiritualize Nazism,^[134] as can be seen in the role of spirit in the rectoral address.^[135] It follows, then, that Heidegger's Nazism was metaphysical, and that he overcame it when he overcame the metaphysical element in his own thought.

This attempted defense is problematic for various reasons. To begin with, in his self-described Heideggerian effort to think the unthought, Derrida exaggerates the importance of a concept which Heidegger never thematizes precisely because it is not fundamental but ancillary to or even insignificant in his position. Derrida is unconvincing in his claim that spirit is central to Heidegger's thought, in which this concept seems at best a minor concern. Derrida unfortunately trivializes Heidegger's commitment to Nazism as following from a residually metaphysical turn of mind, in effect by reducing a practical political engagement to a philosophical commitment from which it apparently followed but with which it cannot reasonably be equated. A form of thought that makes it possible to accept a particular political approach, no matter of what kind, must not be confused with its consequence. Obviously, metaphysics as such does not necessarily lead to Nazism, since there are many metaphysicians who did not become Nazis. Yet when Heidegger renounced metaphysics after the turning in his thought, he did not give up Nazism. Further, Derrida is obviously incorrect if he means to suggest that when Heidegger employs the term "Geist " without quotation marks in the 1953 article on Trakl, Heidegger has overcome both metaphysics and Nazism. For in the same year he republished An Introduction to Metaphysics in which he publicly reaffirmed his commitment to a form of Nazism present, in Heideggerian terminology, under the mode of absence. At most, Heidegger turned away from Nazism as it was, although there is no evidence that he ever accepted it without reservations, but he never turned away from it as he still desired it to be. Finally, the interpretation of the turning in Heidegger's thought, on which Derrida's defense of Heidegger rests, is basically mistaken if

judged by Heidegger's texts. As the Beiträge zur Philosophie shows in detail, the turning is not intended to indicate a break or discontinuity between phases of Heidegger's thought; rather, it is intended to point to further progress from a first beginning to another, deeper beginning more originary than, and a condition of, his initial but more superficial starting point. Since there is, then, no break in Heidegger's thought, his position cannot fairly be defended in this way.

Lacoue-Labarthe presents a clearer, even more extreme, less acceptable form of a similar argument. Lacoue-Labarthe's consideration of "la question " antedated Farias's book. In a recent collection^[136] he includes two earlier papers concerning Heidegger and politics which preceded and obviously influenced both his and Derrida's later discussions of Heidegger and politics: "La transcendance finie/t dans la politique" from 1981, and "Poétique et politique" from 1984. In the former, he poses the question of the possibility of a politics that takes into account Heidegger's thought. Here, he examines the rectoral speech in order to show its link to the destruction of the history of ontology and, by extension, to the effort to rethink the problem of the meaning of Being. In this paper, he makes two points: the rectoral speech is not an occasional document but a reflection on science, which is metaphysics as such; and this speech is intended as a philosophical foundation of the political. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger's political engagement in 1933 was metaphysical and its basic result is the collapse of Heidegger's fundamental ontology. In the latter paper, in an examination of the question why the poetical dimension arose within political discourse, he argues that Heidegger's effort at the leadership (Führung ) of National Socialism was essentially spiritual.^[137]

There is an obvious, striking continuity between the views of Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe in their joint insistence on the metaphysical nature of Heidegger's turning toward Nazism and the spiritual component of Heidgger's view of politics. But there is an even more important difference in Lacoue-Labarthe's stress on the link between the political and the philosophical in Heidegger's thought, in virtue of which Heidegger's original philosophical project is compromised by the political action to which it led. The assertion that Heidegger's effort at fundamental ontology was irreparably compromised by his turn to Nazism derives from the recognition—now rarely denied, and explicitly affirmed by Heidegger—that at least his initial enthusiasm for National Socialism followed from his position. This insight is significant for an understanding of the link between Heidegger's thought and Nazism. It leads to a conclusion which Lacoue-Labarthe does not draw, and which Heidegger means to deny in his description of the rectoral episode as meaningless (beudeutungslos ): the later evolution of the Heideggerian position, per-

haps even the famous turning in his thought, must be understood, in fact cannot be understood otherwise than, in relation to Heidegger's Nazism.

I stress this unstated but important consequence of Lacoue-Labarthe's article since he mainly develops other themes from his earlier analysis of the relation of poetry and politics, less menacing for the faith of a Heideggerian, in his later treatment of the political as fiction.^[138] Unlike some others in the French discussion, who are concerned mainly, or even solely, to defend Heidegger at all costs, and hence unconcerned to present a full record, Lacoue-Labarthe does not hesitate to mention items rarely evoked in the French debate, such as the problem of anti-Semitism, the comments by Löwith and Jaspers, Heidegger's denunciation of Baumgarten, Heidegger's meditation on the nature of the Holocaust, and so on. It is especially significant, in view of the author's obvious identification with Heidegger as incontestably the best thinker of our time,^[139] that he does not hesitate clearly to denounce Heidegger's failure to decry the Holocaust, which, from Heidegger's conception of history as the unfolding of metaphysics, supposedly constitutes a metaphysical event.^[140]

In his book, Lacoue-Labarthe modifes his earlier analysis. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger's political engagement in 1933 was based on the idea of the hegemony of the spiritual and the philosophical over the political^[141] —a stance in obvious continuity with Being and Time^[142] and coherent with all his earlier thought^[143] —which cannot be explained as an error^[144] but must be viewed as a consequence.^[145] Now abandoning his earlier insistence on the significance of the rectoral speech, Lacoue-Labarthe argues for a caesura (césure ) in the sense of Hölderlin.^[146] Heidegger's understanding of the political does not lie in his texts from 1933, including the rectoral address, but in writings after the break with Nazism, specifically those on technology. In this respect, Lacoue-Labarthe makes two important points: On the one hand, he suggests that there is a beginning of the Verwindung of nihilism in the poet's thought,^[147] since for Heidegger art opens the possibility of the historicity of Dasein;^[148] on the other hand, he maintains that Heidegger's discourse on art throws light on the essence of Nazism as a national-estheticism.^[149]

These suggestions are independent of each other and must be discussed separately. Lacoue-Labarthe is certainly correct that Heidegger never abandoned his concern to seize the destiny of the German people, and that he later linked this possibility to an interest in the alethic qualities of poetry. Yet this point is inconsistent in two ways with his own analysis. For whereas he insists on a break in Heidegger's position, this point requires an acknowledgment of the essential continuity of Heidegger's thought over time as concerns the destiny of the Dasein. And as a

further, direct consequence, it requires an acknowledgment of a conceptual kinship with Nazism, which Lacoue-Labarthe strongly denies in his critique of Adorno's well-known claim that Heidegger's thought was Nazi to its core.^[150] It is further inaccurate to regard Heidegger's discussion of art or technology as illuminating the essence of Nazism. One can concede a certain perverse aestheticism in Nazi ideology, for instance in the writings of Albert Speer, the Nazi architect. But one must resist the idea that the massive political phenomenon of German fascism is solely, or even mainly, or essentially, aesthetic.

The usefulness of Lacoue-Labarthe's book is limited by the depth of his own commitment to Heidegger's thought. As a result of his basic acceptance of Heidegger's position, Lacoue-Labarthe is unable to draw the consequences of his own critique of it. For instance, Lacoue-Labarthe cites a passage from an unpublished conference on technology, already cited above, where Heidegger likens agricultural technology to the Nazi gas chambers.^[151] Despite his criticism of the patent inadequacy of Heidegger's dreadful comparison, Lacoue-Labarthe, the Heideggerian, is unable to perceive the full implication of Heidegger's statement in at least two ways: in his quasi-Heideggerian claim that this phenomenon somehow reveals the essence of the West,^[152] which Heidegger allegedly failed to perceive, which in turn supposes the Heideggerian view that technology is the extension of metaphysics; and in his inability to draw the obvious consequence of his own indictment of Heidegger's failure, due to the inadequacy of fundamental ontology, to grasp the essence of the Nazi phenomenon.

Lacoue-Labarthe's analysis—patient, sober, careful, informed, considerate of other points of view—exhibits virtues unsurpassed in the present French Heidegger debate. This comprehension and tolerance gives way in Ferry and Renaut's work to an accusatory, pamphletary, confrontational style, more characteristic of recent French philosophy. In their attack on the separations between various forms of French Heideggerianism as in effect distinctions without a difference—which they paradoxically represent as an effort to surpass mere polemics^[153] —they deny the shared assumption, common to Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe, of a break in Heidegger's thought. Their book is the successor of their earlier work on contemporary antihumanism, centered mainly on French varieties of Heideggerianism.^[154]

Ferry and Renaut are most original in their effort to develop Lyotard's suggestion of the link between the defense of Heidegger and French philosophy. They draw attention to the parallel between the French controversy about Marxist antihumanism in the 1970s and the current Heidegger controversy.^[155] Their aim is to diagnose a link between Heidegger's antihumanism, which they comprehend as the rejection of

modernity^[156] and the supposed erreur par excellence of contemporary French philosophy.^[157] They illustrate this error by Lacoue-Labarthe's strange, even wild comment, in the course of his attempt to differentiate the later Heidegger from the earlier Nazi enthusiast, that "Nazism is a humanism."^[158]

After some remarks on the significance of Farias's book in the context of the French debate, Ferry and Renaut develop their indictment of contemporary French philosophy through the identification of the common thread of various forms of French Heideggerianism. They isolate three variants: the so-called zero degree, represented by Beaufret, which simply denies any relation between Heidegger and Nazism; Heideggerian orthodoxy, which admits, by playing Heidegger II off against Heidegger I, that in 1933 the master was not yet free of the metaphysics of subjectivity; and Derridian, or unorthodox, Heideggerianism, which relies on Heidegger's purported later deconstruction of the concept of spirit. According to Ferry and Renaut, in the final analysis there is no difference between Derridian and orthodox Heideggerianism since at best the Derridian approach innovates on a strategic plane only.^[159]

Apart from their remarks on Farias's work, the main contribution of Ferry and Renault lies in their survey of various factions of the French debate about Heidegger's politics. They are most helpful in their suggestion of a relation between French postmodernism, or antihumanism, and Heidegger's own Nazi proclivities. They usefully relate Heidegger's well-known reading of modernity as the reign of technology to his view that democracy and totalitarianism are similar in their domination by subjectivity, and his further adherence to the possibility of a good form of National Socialism^[160] as by inference postmodernist and anti-modernist.^[161] They criticize Heidegger's general incapacity to think subjectivity^[162] because of an inability to think humanism in a nonmetaphysical manner,^[163] an inattention to the plural character of modernity,^[164] and the inconsistency in his rejection of a humanist vision of man in his view of Dasein in terms of Being. And they invoke a certain humanism in his view of man as transcendental in order to criticize Nazi biologism and racism.^[165]

These criticisms are well taken in virtue of Heidegger's identification of humanism with metaphysics. The relation of postmodernism and "antihumanism" in the work of recent French thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss among others is too well-known to require detailed commentary. The most original point is insistence on Heidegger's supposed inability to differentiate the various forms of modernity while implying the point, clearly articulated only by Lacoue-Labarthe among Heidegger's French disciples, that Nazism is humanism of a different, supposedly acceptable kind. Beyond its indictment of the

French identification with the Heideggerian rejection of Cartesian subjectivity—manifest in the ongoing effort to decenter the subject— the most important result of this work is to question Heidegger's conception of the subject as transcendence, a theme present throughout his writings from his dissertation on Duns Scotus onwards.^[166]

After the Third Wave

The French discussion of Heidegger's relation to politics is still under way. Its most recent phases include a continuing debate that has most recently opposed Fédier to Nicolas Tertulian, the well-known Lukàcs specialist,^[167] Janicaud's sober, insightful discussion of the intrinsic link between Heidegger's conception of Being and Heidegger's Nazism,^[168] and aspects of Meschonnic's discussion of Heidegger's language.^[169] The primary lesson of this review of the French debate on Heidegger's Nazism concerns the delicate relation between thought and the context in which it arises. We do not know how a philosophical theory takes shape; but we do know that it can be neither reduced to nor separated from the context in which it emerges, including the social and political context on the one hand and the network of competing views against which it strives on the other. Heidegger's position—despite his repeated but apparently strategic claims, clearly meant to create his own legend, by stressing a positive relation of his position to pre-Socratic thought only—needs to be understood against the complex background of theology, Kant's thought, German neo-Kantianism, particularly Lask, and medieval Aristotelianism, as well as the social, political and historical situation in Germany between the two world wars.

The French debate offers a particularly interesting example of the delicate relation between thought and its context. With the exceptions noted, it is distinguished by its concern even now to defuse the problematic relation between Heidegger's thought and politics by arguing for a discontinuity between Heidegger's early and later position in order to "save" his thought and—insofar as the French discussion is dependent on Heidegger's theory—itself. Yet Heidegger only turned against one form of Nazism, not Nazism as such. To fail to see this point, to confuse his withdrawal from the historical form of National Socialism with an unproven rejection of the essence of a movement Heidegger continued to embrace, is to fall victim to the problem of the emperor's new clothes.

Now French philosophers are not less intelligent or well informed than those elsewhere. How can we explain their reluctance to see that the emperor has no clothes on? I believe that the reason lies in a persistent, unhealthy degree of identification of contemporary French philosophy with Heidegger's position, which literally forms its horizon. We can

formulate what is clearly an existential predicament in the form of a paradox: to the extent that the horizon of contemporary French philosophy is constituted by Heidegger's thought, it cannot examine Heidegger's link to Nazism without putting itself in question, that is, without simultaneously criticizing the Heideggerian position. In a word, Heidegger's French connection prevents, or impedes, the French thinkers from perceiving that the emperor has no clothes.

The French example is unusual for the extent to which Heidegger's thought dominates French philosophy. The result of this domination is to remain attentive to the unthought in Heidegger's position, at the cost of obstructing any attempt to place the Heideggerian horizon into question. This consequence is useful to the extent that French philosophy remains within the Heideggerian orbit, but it is also philosophically dangerous. For at least since Plato philosophy has consisted in the refusal to accept undemonstrated assumptions, in the constant effort to examine itself in order to clarify, demonstrate, or eliminate what it merely presupposed, in order to move forward by moving backward through an examination of its presuppositions.

The recent effort of some dissident French thinkers, especially Bourdieu, Janicaud, Tertulian, and from another angle of vision Ferry and Renaut, to examine the roots of French Heideggerianism, to reflect on the so-called French problem, is a healthy sign. Despite Heidegger's oft-cited claim that when French philosophers begin to think they think in German—or by implication think about Heidegger, or even within the ambit of Heidegger's thought—it indicates that French thought will be even more robust, and accordingly able to grow in new and different ways, when it has finally examined its own Heideggerianism. For to the extent that Heidegger still forms the horizon of French philosophy, to appreciate the limits of his thought is to go beyond Heidegger and hence beyond French philosophy. But this move beyond Heidegger is, however, necessary if French thought is to advance beyond its present level.

The French discussion is an extreme example of the problem posed by the reception of Heidegger's Nazism. For a variety of reasons, philosophers in general, not just Heideggerians, have been slow in confronting Heidegger's Nazism. Now the process of the understanding of the thought of any important thinker, of someone who breaks new ground in a significant sense, cannot be immediate since new ways must be found to comprehend the genuinely novel aspects of the position. But Heidegger's Nazism is deeply rooted in, indeed basic to, his philosophy, which cannot be comprehended in isolation from his political turning. At least since De Waelhens, a number of Heideggerians, particularly in France, although elsewhere as well, have insisted that the link between Heidegger's philosophy and politics can be understood only by someone so

deeply versed in Heidegger's thought as to be a follower of the master. If we accept this claim, then the result is still another paradox, which can be formulated as follows: only a Heideggerian can grasp Heidegger's thought, including the relation between Heidegger's Nazism and his philosophy; but as our discussion of the French debate illustrates, the link between Heidegger's Nazism and his philosophy can only be grasped from a vantage point located outside of Heidegger's position. It follows, then, on this Heideggerian hypothesis for the understanding of Heidegger's thought, that Heidegger's political engagement is literally beyond criticism: for either it can only be understood by Heideggerians, who cannot confront the problem within the framework of Heidegger's own theory, to which they are committed; or it must be understood by non-Heideggerians who, according to the Heideggerian claim about understanding Heidegger, also cannot understand it. The result, then, of the Heideggerian view of Heidegger is to render this aspect of Heidegger's thought strictly unknowable, a kind of thing in itself, a theory about which anything can be believed but nothing can be known.

This result, which follows from the Heideggerian approach to Heidegger, is obviously unsatisfactory, since it suggests that in the final analysis a careful, responsible, but critical reception of the complex issues raised by Heidegger's turning on the basis of his thought to National Socialism is impossible. On the contrary, I believe that we can best, and perhaps only, understand Heidegger's position, including his Nazism, if we are informed about it but also not committed to it as in principle correct. The preceding discussion has shown that Heidegger's thought cannot be understood apart from his Nazism, but that his Nazism cannot be comprehended by those unconditionally committed to the truth of his thought. If Heidegger's Nazism cannot be grasped by someone already committed to his thought and if his Nazism is integral to his philosophy, then his philosophy, including his Nazism, can finally best be understood, and perhaps only grasped at all, by someone prepared, without presuppositions or prior commitments, to let the conceptual chips fall where they may, but not by someone whose main investment is in the defense of Heidegger's thought.