The French Heidegger Debate

Abstract

Few events in recent memory have shaken the world of French letters as much as the appearance last fall of Victor Farias's book, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Trans. Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset [Paris: Editions Verdier, 1987]). Through an extremely thorough and painstaking (and for French Heideggerians, clearly painful) labor of documentation, Farias has single-handedly given the lie to four decades of inventive rationalizations concocted by Heideggerians as well as by Heidegger himself on several occasions trivializing the Master's alacritous participation in the National Awakening of 1933. It is no secret that since the collapse of the previous two dominant intellectual paradigms of the post-war era existentialism and structuralism Heideggerianism, as a philosophy of difference, has enjoyed unquestionable pride of place. It is no small irony that Farias's book, while far from a theoretical tour de force, may well have paved the way for a new epistemological break in the volatile Parisian cultural world. Given the enormity of the debate his expose has unleashed, a significant intellectual shift would seem to be in the offing. Yet, there is one definitive outcome of the tumultuous events surrounding Farias's book that may already be discerned: from now on, French intellectuals in all walks of life will never be able to relate to Heidegger's philosophy naively, that is, without taking into consideration the philosopher's odious political allegiances. In this respect, the debate spawned by Heidegger et le Nazisme is destined to become an inescapable reference point for all future discussions of Heideggerianism and its merits. If the relationship between the philosopher and his politics were not integral, if one could make a neat separation between the