Being in France

Abstract

Between the mass graves of World War I and the ashes of Auschwitz, German existential-ontological thought embodied the hope of freeing European philosophy and politics from essentialism. The sheer fact of existing prevailed over what one was (French, German, Jewish). In principle, being born French, German, orJewish did not matter. What mattered was simply the irreversible, neutral, and universal fact of being thrown into the world and hanging in there, in the midst of one's possibilities. This free fall Heidegger called Geworfenheit, a concept that the French would import and adapt under the dramatic name of dreliction. The Third Reich put an end to the hopeful if dreadful freedom of Dasein. The philosophy of Being in Germany was rapidly and rabidly degenerating into racist essentialism. In the following, I wish to measure the impact of that degeneration upon the French politics of literature and philosophy in the early 1930s. It is neither my intention nor my ambition to engage in a discussion of Heidegger's philosophy of Being or to debate the relevance of the differentiation between existentia and essentia. I will