I haven't been in academia for 10 years and never finished my dissertation, so I can't in fairness call myself a scholar. There is lots of material Heidegger's estate has released since then that I've never looked at. I've probably read almost everything he wrote that had been released by 2000 though. I'm probably one of the few people alive who aren't theologians who has actually read Heidegger's exegesis of Saint Paul.
By "radical" I suppose I mean the kind of person who thinks of him- or herself as a "radical leftwing thinker." Other people's opinions to the contrary, I just don't think you can ground politics (of any sort -- leftwing, rightwing, whatever) in Heidegger or Derrida. Heidegger, like Kant and Hume and Kierkegaard and some other people, is certainly extremely radical in the sense of causing you to reexamine your worldview. (Reading Kant's Prolegomena along with Fear and Trembling and then an Introduction to Metaphysics really changed my world back when I was about 20. Genet had a similar effect. Realization of the contingency of everything!)
I think one reason people have difficult reading Sein und Zeit is that the text is approached through the concerns of poststructuralism or existentialism, neither of which would have existed without Heidegger. But he wasn't interested in either of those problematics. Sein und Zeit is an attempt to reinterpret Aristotle through a Kantian framework (that is, Aristotelian ideas are understood through the lens of "what are the transcendental conditions for these ideas -- mainly time") using a Husserlian methodology and heavily mediated by Protestant theology. (So many people think they see Kierkegaard in SuZ -- because K and H are both supposed to be "existentialists" -- but really what they are seeing is Luther and Augustine as seen by Luther, not realizing that most "existentialist" themes figure in Protestant theology as well. They see Nietszche in there for the same reason -- Heidegger was not interested in Nietszche at this time.)
I don't think that Heidegger's reappraisal of fascism in its German variant was self-serving in the sense of consciously trying to exculpate himself, but it's not hard to see likely psychological reasons for such a move. "I was fooled by Being! It wasn't my fault!" Who hasn't done that? "I thought she/he was going to be special, but she/he turned out like all the others!"
--- On Fri, 4/10/09, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> From: ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] note of thanks
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, April 10, 2009, 5:00 PM
> On Apr 10, 2009, at 9:50 AM, Chris
> Doss wrote:
> >
> > I never really understood the appeal of Derrida for
> people who consider themselves radicals. Part of the whole
> point of Heidegger/Foucault/Derrida is that nothing ever
> really changes. The system of presence/power/signifiers
> always preserves itself. It's really rather quietist. On one
> level -- the basically deep metaphysical/theological one
> that Heidegger and Derrida were talking about* -- that's
> probably true, but it doesn't really lend itself to
> application on the political plane.
> >
>
> Hmm... I am not sure I consider myself a radical... usually
> that term is foisted on you, isn't it? Derrida holds no
> attraction for me (mostly because I cannot understand his
> stuff) but the little I understood of Heidegger was
> certainly radicalising. All the cheerful optimistic
> certainty thrown at me in school was beginning to feel
> pretty fake very early on. And the techno-utopianism of my
> generation (or 1/2 generation before) felt much the same,
> especially in light of the much broader struggle (in India)
> of the early 20th century. But so deep was the rot that
> coming out of school, my one great love was Artificial
> Intelligence. To read someone (later, in my 20s), who
> approached things and issues in opposition to the reigning
> triumphalist reductionism ("turning towards what is readily
> available"), was to be be given a framework to ground one's
> suspicions of the prevailing emperors of thought and finally
> stand up from under the collective boot of the footnote[r]s
> to Plato. Unlike you, I am no Heidegger scholar, and I might
> well be one of the many who romanticise Heidegger (to their
> needs), so this response should be read merely as a personal
> comment.
>
> You write in another post:
> > Later, when the bottom fell out of Nazism, Heidegger
> revised this so that capitalist liberal democracy,
> communism, and fascism, despite outward appearances, were
> really at bottom the same thing (technological thinking).
>
> That might be a later (and self-serving) turn in Heidegger,
> but fortunately for me, that is literally the only Heidegger
> I know (though I have attempted more than once to muddle
> through his Nietzsche volumes, Being and Time, etc, and even
> understood some of it). The Dreyfus/Winograd response to
> strong-AI that I mentioned in an earlier post is another
> example of tracing a point of differentiation (if not line
> of attack) to Heidegger, much more so than Penrose in this
> case (of AI).
>
> --ravi
>
> --
> Support something better than yourself ;-)
> PeTA => http://peta.org/
> Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
> If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>