Martin Heidegger and the Political: New Fronts in the Heidegger Wars

Abstract

More than fifteen years after Victor Farfas's Heidegger and Nazism provoked latest round in Heidegger wars', is there anything new worth saying about Heidegger's politics? Are there any new fronts to be opened in debate about Heidegger and political? The appearance of new works by Richard Wolin,2 Christopher Rickey3, and Gregory Fried4, provides us with opportunity to reexamine question of whether Heidegger's Denken contains a political philosophy, an ontological politics, and ways in which such a political philosophy may be connected to Nazism. The appearance of previously unpublished lecture courses and texts in Heidegger's collected works, still unavailable when current round in Heidegger wars first began, has made available new sources for an examination of place of political in Heidegger's thinking. Thus, Wolin has explored meaning of meditation on work (Arbeit), which he believes is the defining feature of his political worldview (p. 189), in Heidegger's recently published 1934 lecture course on Logik. Rickey, meanwhile focuses on just published early Freiburg lecture courses on phenomenology of religious life, as central