Your irritation at Farias' exposure of Heidegger's fascism speaks volumes. Far from being banal or tabloid research, Farias shows that Heidegger's ideas are just a philosophical working up of the everyday prejudices of the German far right. That is to say that this Chilean scholar investigated the link between Heidegger's thought and his political affiliations. By contrast, Derrida sought to isolate the two: his Of Spirit attempts, clumsily, to insist that Heideggerian deconstruction is the best way out of fascism, but that somehow Heidegger failed to keep faithful to his project. Most grotesquely, Derrida sees Heidegger's lingering _humanism_ (which he has to deceive himself to discover) as what draws him back to fascism. The vile conclusion, that Nazism is a humanistic philosophy stand the truth on its head. Nazism is a dehumanising philosophy. And that is what Derrida and Heidegger have in common with fascism - their deconstruction of humanism was acted out when the Nazis dissected real human beings in the concetration camps. Their deconstruction of reason was acted out by the Nazis when they burned books.
>I don't know whether you intend the stupidity remark as an insult, but I
>doubt Derrida would take it as one.
No, I'm sure that he wouldn't. But then a philosophy that makes stupidity equal to intelligence is just what the reactionaries ordered.
> his kind of
>interrogation isn't object specific--ie. it works as well on left pieties
>and stupidities as ones from the right.
Yes, you out it very well: his method is entirely unconnected and indifferent to its object. Like Buckminster Fuller said, a man wiht a hammer sees a world full of nails. This is a spanner with such a wide compass that it fits every nut - its just unfortunate that it does not get a grip on any of them. Whatever the claims of the argument it can be deconstructed whether it is right or wrong. Fascism and Socialism are equally revealed as grand narratives.
It is amazing that you do not recognise the mind-numbing stupidity of cold war liberal ideology that equates left and right as 'ideology' and disguises itself as 'the end of ideology'. Of course this intellectual project has its origins in Heidegger's own apologetic prejudice that Communism and Americanism are the same. Later he re-worked it with Hannah Arendt's assistance to mean that Communism and Fascism were the same. His purpose was to diminish his own guilt by pretending that he had not done anything worse than leftists had done.
-- Jim heartfield