[lbo-talk] Conversation with Derrida

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 5 01:28:15 PST 2009


I just reread the first two Nietzsche lecture courses (the first time I've read Heidegger in about 8 years), and his reading is quite a bit more nuanced. "Subjective" here means "posited as a value by the will to power," not "existing solely in the mind" (I don't endorse this reading of N and have no real serious interest in N.)

Anyway be that as it may, if H's work were deliberate support for the Nazi project, you would expect it to contain those features that were important to Nazi ideology -- notions of race and racial hierarchy, glorification of the (biologically) strong individual over the weak individual, need for Lebensraum, mentions of a Thousand-Year Reich, racially-specific science, and so forth -- none of which it actually contains, ever. One could speculate that Heidegger's work contains these notions in some kind of "coded form" (a quasi-Straussian reading of Heidegger I suppose) and so "the authentic subject' really means "the healthy German" and "the They" means "Jews" or something, but one wonders why he wouldn't have bothered to say "the healthy German" and "Jews" in the first place, considering he was living in Nazi Germany where you got props for that kind of thing.

There was official Nazi philosophy. That was stuff like Rosenberg. Not Heidegger, who was watched by the Gestapo specifically because he did not mention any of the above things. Really, nobody who publicly praises Spinoza is going to be covered in hugs and kisses by the Nazi leadership.

----- Original Message ---- From: "wrobert at uci.edu" <wrobert at uci.edu>     In addition, I think that it would be a mistake to see Heidegger's work as some sort of epistemological support for the Nazi project, which seemed to be a sort of bricolage of what happened to be available at the time... (not that having a beautiful philosophy would have really made all that much of a difference.)

                  robert wood

(Incidentally, what a terrible reading of Nietzsche...)



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