>There are more major books out there than you and I together ever have
>or ever are going to read, and it is simply empty to say X raises
>important questions. It becomes especially empty in this case when
>"progress" is named as one of the "basic tenets" that we will supposedly
>not learn to question if we don't read Heidegger. I had dismissed that
>"tenet" before I had ever read Marx or even heard of Heidegger.
In the context of various threads here from Butler on, this is not about what books to read or not. It's about books people have read and grown from being rejected for a variety of reasons, the latest being that it all goes back to Heidegger and irrationalism and should therefore be dismissed out of hand.
An argument that rejects things based on going back to Heidegger would also have to dismiss Marcuse, and from there Mike Davis, Angela Davis etc. etc. Then, as andie mentioned, what about Sartre and then what about Sartre and Genet, who once said in reply to a question about some disturbingly flattering passages about Nazi style (this is from memory) : "you have to understand how much I hated France and what France had done to me. I would have liked anyone who trampled over France so easily."