>First, Derrida didn't defend Heidegger against the charge of Nazism.<
no, he didn't. and, as if derrida speaks just for this occassion, he says: "The surplus of responsibility...will never authorise any silence. I repeat: responsibility is excessive or it is not responsibility. A limited, measured, calculable, rationally distributed responsibility is already the becoming-right of morality; it is at times also, in the best hypothesis, the dream of every good conscience, in the worst hypothesis, of the small of grand inquisitors. I suppose, i hope you are not expecting me simply to say 'I condemn Auschwitz' or 'I condemn every silence on Auschwitz.' ...Of course, silence on Auschwitz will never be justifiable; nor is speaking about it in such an instrumental fashion and in order to say nothing, to give oneself a good conscience, so as not to be the last to accuse, to teach lessons, to take positions, to grandstand." - from "'Eating well': an interview" [the rest of the intereview deals quite specifically with the relation between Heidegger's critique of being, of life, and its relation to a "noncriminal[ised] putting to death", of the exceptions that stand quite openly on the ground of definitions of being and their critique, as has much of his work on heidegger.]
but that response, is hardly a sufficient response, for many reasons, not least because of a refusal to enter into the precise question of the sense in which being for heidegger is not contingency (as it was for husserl, for instance), but the facticity of fallen-ness that is elevated to an ontology. and that, has much more to do with certain judeo-christian ethics than with any distinction between reason and emotion, according to which we might easily (and comfortably) situate nazism on the side of the latter, as if there indeed there was no way in which nazism was also a rationalist and humanist endeavour (seeking to render void the antagonisms of capitalism and to accomplish an end to history through a homogenous state (which is where kojeve really should get a mention), both affectively and through their subsumption under the strict sovereignty of the fuhrer, through the abolition of 'inefficiency' and however else that antagonism was deemed to be able to be figured as an external obstacle to reconciliation and homogeneity which needed to be eliminated -- obstacles who were not least figured as jews, gypsies, communists...)
Angela _________