[lbo-talk] Conversation with Derrida

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Thu Nov 5 01:58:49 PST 2009


Chris writes:

'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. '

But that is exactly how he passes himself off as a profound thinker, by translating those bierkeller prejudices into the ponderous sounding language of deep metaphysics (as Adorno explains in The Jargon of Authenticity). As for Heidegger the dissident, he does not look too uncomfortable here: http://www.callihan.com/philo/heidegger.jpg

Nor was Heidegger averse to denouncing colleagues, like Eduard Baumgarten ('closely tied to the Jew Frankel') or Hermann Staudinger, Nobel prize laureate but pacifist in the first world war ('I would have thought this was a case for outright dismissal rather than early retirement').



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