The Right of Reply to Professor Sheehan

Abstract

In his derogatory article, published in 2015 summer issue of Philosophy Today,1 Thomas Sheehan resorted to an insult,2 a vilification, reporting conversations that only he and Emmanuel Faye were privy to (pp. 370-72), and deliberately violated privacy of correspondence.3 If he is prudent enough to keep question mark in his title and to specify in his abstract that the question of Faye is a fraud or simply incompetent is left to reader's judgment, he hardly leaves any doubts regarding his own conclusions. With term fraud, designating both in French and English cheating and thus an act subject to court, Sheehan avoids a possible defamation trial by introducing a rhetorical question mark that fools no one, especially if alternative is simple incompetence of an internationally renowned scholar-and one who is more translated than Professor Sheehan.41. HOW TO ATTRIBUTE AN ORGANIZED FRAUDIf Emmanuel Faye has a right to a polite rhetorical questioning, it is not case for me. Thomas Sheehan refers to one my articles, note 74, p. 390: See also his edited collection, where his disciples continue Deckname at 238, note 1 and 270.1. With term scam referring more casually to a rip-off or cheating, this time without rhetorical questioning but also without any justification, I have honor of defamed and insulted on pages of an academic journal-something that has become unusual in a very civilized academic life,5 but perhaps it is symptom of deterioration of academic manners. My name is cited explicitly in note 91, p. 396:Francois Rastier's essay at 298.24-27 repeats same false claims that Faye's book had made about Bauch letter. Gaetan Pegny's essay, at 238n1, reiterates same misconstrual of Deckname in letter to Bauch, while providing two additional references, both of them ludicrous: GA 36/37: 227.11 = 173.4-5; and Heidegger's letter to Jaspers, November 10, 1928, 110.3-4.But this is to reduce me, with Francois Rastier, to mechanical repetition with regard to Emmanuel Faye, thus p. 396, where F. Rastier and myself are transformed into parrots, although it is true that all that's lacking is animalization after whether Faye is a fraud:When we search through that collection for further elucidations ofDeckname, we find that in his edited collection Faye merely repeats-without any further development-the same false rewriting as in his earlier book, namely, 'etre' comme d'un mot couvert ou prete-nom (Deckname). And when he refers reader to two essays by other contributors in collection, we find that they merely parrot same mistranslation that Faye himself advanced nine years earlier in his book. Does Faye think that if he and his acolytes repeat same misreadings enough times, someone might come to believe them?However, on page 71 of Beauchesne collection that Sheehan mentions in note 90, p. 396, Emmanuel Faye speaks of Heideggerian description of as a or concealed word in letters to Kurt Bauch, which came out in 2010. If Faye was able to cite excerpts from these letters in a 2007 lecture, published as an article in 2009,6 it is because they had been published in catalogue of antiquarian Stargardt in March 2004 (p. 194),7 and because I gave him a copy upon request in 2005, when Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy was already in print. From where does Mr. Sheehan get notion that Mr. Faye merely reformulated thesis of his 2005 book using a new source? On page 71, which Sheehan cites explicitly, Faye says rather clearly:Drawing, for first time, on an unpublished letter to Kurt Bauch, I indicated necessity of taking seriously Heidegger's use of word being as a code-word or concealed word (Deckname), and, furthermore, showed that Heidegger's critique of global technology understood as en-framing (Ge-stell) does not call into question his glowing approval, stated three times in publications after 1945, of satisfying relationship, instituted, in his view, by National Socialism, between human and the essence of technology. …