Jim wrote:
> 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 find the Farias book irritating (well, I do, but for other reasons than are implied here). What I find irritating was the way it was received. You don't have to defend Heidegger to also recognize that this book sold itself as something it simply wasn't and couldn't be. Farias book didn't say anything that anyone didn't know, but was received as it it made groundbreaking factual revelations. But at the same time, Farias really wants to put Heidegger the philosopher, not Heidegger the citizen, on trial. (After all, if Heidegger weren't Heidegger, who would care . . .?) And on that score, the book is a joke. Farias can't even get the plain grammatical sense of _Being and Time_ right. He translates participles as past tense, doesn't understand the basics about German word order, etc. My sophomores can do better with that text.
None of that's to exonerate Heidegger, or Derrida. I think Derrida is mostly wrong in judging Heidegger's attachment to the Nazis, but I think he's right to insist that we should continue to read him. Bourdieu's take on Heidegger is more to the point, I think (and btw, his book was written 10 years before the whole Farias controversy). He takes Heidegger to always be constructing a _political_ ontology (rather than an existential one): Heidegger is always trying to talk about the political, but he doesn't want to do political or social science. He wants to retrieve the privilege of philosophical language without dirtying it with the empirical research or everyday perception. Bourdieu's conclusion is that, although Heidegger is complicit with the Nazis, he isn't simply an ideologue for them, since his conception of human being is never tied to race--it's tied to language.
>
> No, I'm sure that he wouldn't. But then a philosophy that makes
> stupidity equal to intelligence is just what the reactionaries ordered.
Or maybe it's a recognition that stupidity and intelligence are, let's guess, historically determined?
>
> 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.
Well, actually I do recognize this--although I don't simply call it stupid because I think it's much more pernicious than that. In what I've written about Derrida's _Specters of Marx_ I make exactly that argument: i.e. Derrida is an unreconstructed cold warrior. So, I agree with you. I just agree for different reasons.
Christian