Simon Huxtable:
Zizek links Heidegger's Nazi engagement to Badiou's conception of the truth event and as something inherent to Heidegger's philosophy of being. ---
I think the "engagement" part is correct, in that Heidegger certainly had a strong desire to be engaged by something; but I don't there's anything specifically "Nazi" about it. Nationalist, yes, fascist, maybe, messianic, definitely -- but there's a big difference between Nazism, which is pathologically murderous on an unbelievable scale, and run-of-the-mill cult-of-the-leader fascism and nationalism. It is very hard, nay impossible, to read racism into Heidegger. In fact he speaks out forcefully against biologism in his first Nietzsche lectures (in 1935!), in which he quite pointledly says nice things about Spinoza, the Jew, one of the only times that he ever mentions Spinoza. The German Volk does have a special place in history, but this is because of its relationship to Being as expressed through language, not because of race or have coming out of the Himalayas or the loins of Thor. Actually the messianism/catastrophism was part of the intellectual atmosphere at the time and also appears in the Bolsheviks, in my opinion, certainly in Mayakovsky.
---
Heidegger's support for the Nazis would be something akin to the evil of staying faithful to a pseudo-event.
---
Not his support, I don't think -- but his refusal to categorically break with Nazism even after 1945, certainly. I think it was psychologically impossible for him to admit that he had been that catastrophically wrong. Come to think of it, I can only remember one place (in the very late lecture Zeit und Sein, not Sein und Zeit) where he ever admits to having made a mistake in anything, in having erroneously attempted to derive spatiality from temporality in SuZ.
BTW, contrary to complaints that Heidegger never condemned Nazism, he in fact did. People just don't like what he said in the Der Spiegel interview, namely, that the essence of Nazism (in his view, the confrontation between man and technology) was good, but that the German leadership had perverted it because they were too stupid.
Somehwre there is a telegram between two people pretty high up in the NSDAP: "We have to be careful of Herr Doktor Heidegger; he believes in a version of National Socialism existing only in his own mind." Heidegger wanted to be Aristotle to Hitler's Alexander, but, as Arendt pointed out, Nazis have no use for independent thinkers, even if they are fellow-travellers.