Betraying the own-most: Heidegger and pitfalls of being-there

Abstract

The kind invitation of Benedikt Korf to make a contribution to the Heidegger debate, which once again burst out after the publication of the “Black Notebooks”, was at the same time welcome and challenging. The debate had already ignited a discussion among us, the ones co-authoring this commentary, as most of the reactions to Heidegger’s scandalous politics seemed to follow quite familiar paths. Ever since the book of Victor Farias Heidegger and Nazism (1989) came out in the end of the 1980s, Heidegger’s political engagement, its relation to his philosophical corpus in particular, has been one of the long-running disputes in the fields of philosophy, social sciences and beyond. Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism has been revealed to be much more profound than Heidegger himself had led us to believe, as evidenced by the posthumously published Der Spiegel interview (Heidegger, 1981). The amount of commentaries is overwhelming. On the one hand, are the scandalous readings poorly engaging with Heidegger’s philosophical thinking, while on the other, the philosophical commentaries separating “Heidegger the man” solely from the “Heidegger the philosopher”. It hardly comes as a surprise that this ambiguity can be found also in the reception of Heidegger in the geographical literature (See Harvey, 1996:299–302; Massey, 2004; cf. Elden, 2005; Paddock, 2004; Rose, 2012). The critiques in particular have presented confusing readings from time to time, that have framed Heidegger’s political engagement during the 1930s as an outcome of the concepts Heidegger actually developed much later on (Malpas, 2006:17–27; Joronen, 2013a:629). More nuanced readings have thus been a welcome contribution that, by focusing on the contexts where Heidegger developed his philosophical thoughts, have been able, at least to some extent, to explain Heidegger’s philosophical turns as reactions to the political climate of his time (and place). In particular, these writings have helped us to understand what was behind Heidegger’s engagement, but more importantly, what do Heidegger’s own views tell about National Socialism itself (See Elden, 2006; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1990)? An entirely different debate, concerned more with Heidegger’s omissions than his actions, has been formed around Heidegger’s profound silence about his political engagement (Derrida, 1991). Heidegger’s silence of course did bother thinkers already during Heidegger’s lifetime. Herbert Marcuse, a student of Heidegger, for instance insisted on a personal exchange of letters in 1947 that Heidegger should more clearly and categorically resign himself from National Socialism (Marcuse et al., 1991). In every way Heidegger’s response was unsatisfactory, seeking excuses such as how hard it was to live in Germany, or even worse (for Heidegger at least), making calculative references to the amount of suffering East Germans had experienced, as if there was some utilitarian measure we could use to make Nazi politics weigh less, to be “less evil” (Weizman, 2011). Although the reaction to the recently published the Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte 2014–2015), which date back to the periods of 1931–1938 (Uberlegungen II–VI), 1938/1939 (Uberlegungen VII-XV), 1939–1941 (Uberlegungen XII–XV) and 1942–1948 (Gesaumtausgabe 97, Anmerkungen I–V), seems quite overblown in relation to the overall novelty of the content, their publication has without doubt brought to our attention disturbing material, which one cannot easily put aside when engaging with the works of Heidegger (see Babich, 2016; Di Cesare, 2015; Fried, 2014; Gordon, 2014; Korf, 2014; Polt, 2015; Strohmayer, 2015). Although the discussion of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism has been around for a long time, Heidegger’s claim that Jews, who according to him had become one of the central figures of the mod-