Derrida: everywhere and nowhere baby, that's where you're at

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Sun Sep 5 19:21:42 PDT 1999


On Sun, 5 Sep 1999, Jacob Segal wrote:


> references. I haven't read Farias' book, but I have read Being and Time
> three times (o.k., two and a half) and of course there is not thing
> fascistic in it at all.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "fascistic". Heidegger wasn't a mere propaganda hack of the Nazi regime or a paid agent of the SS per se, but his work is part of what might be called the culture of Fascism, in the same sense as Leni Riefenstahl's movies or the novels of Celine and Wyndham Lewis. The best analysis of Heidegger is in Adorno's "Negative Dialectics", where Adorno takes a sledgehammer to fundamental ontology, by decoding the historical categories at work beneath the veneer of the jargon. In general, Heidegger's word-puns follow the same logic as the notorious acronym NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or literally, National Socialist German Workers' Party). Why do you think the Nazis put "socialist" and "worker" into their party name? Bogus populism, of course; Hitler was always going on about the evils of finance capital (Jewish moguls, etc.). The point was to canalize the Leftwing critique of capitalism and use it against the Left. The same is true of Heidegger, whose categories have this populist veneer to them: they're always simple amalgams of common German words, so they project a plebian moment, while at the same time they ruthlessly suppress *any* concept or cultural moment which has not signed over its content to the supremacy of Being. Heidegger's whole philosophy is the supreme effort of not permitting himself (or anyone else) to think.

-- Dennis



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