Aftereffect and Scandal: Martin Heidegger in France

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1960 that case of Martin Heidegger was too complex for him to explain at time. Sartre did not--could not? would not?-address some thirty years ago returns today as aftereffect and scandal. Until recently, reception of Heidegger's writings in France bordered on reverential. As a cultural figure, he came to personify philosopher-poet whose conception of language and practice of writing inspired a generation of artists and writers including Georges Braque, Maurice Blanchot, and Rene Char. This portrayal is meaningful when it is set against an alternative view of Heidegger more prevalent among British and American philosophers as the best comic example of philosophical quack.' Reference at level of national practice often borders on caricature. But it also asserts that philosophy is not merely a tradition of texts and issues made up of great and/or great ideas. Philosophy is undeniably this, but it is also a set of practices, discourses, and institutions that regulate how ideas and books circulate in public sphere. The pages that follow study specifically French setting of debate over Heidegger. Despite my misgivings over validity of reference at level of national practice, my inquiry derives from a strong sense that fate of a German philosopher in France points with particular urgency to questions related to philosophy as discourse and institution. National practice is thus a point of departure and a self-imposed constraint. To my knowledge, first of Martin Heidegger's writings published in France was a 1931 translation of What is Metaphysics? that appeared in Bifur alongside La Legende de la verit' (The Legend of Truth), an early fiction--a philosopher's tale-by young Jean-Paul Sartre! After World War II, divergence between Sartre's 1946 Existentialism is a and Heidegger's 1947 Letter on Humanism revised a tutelage Sartre had