Interesting turn of events. I mentioned recently a post about eBook anxiety, which ended with the author Adam Robinson saying tongue-in-cheek he wanted to seclude himself in the Heimat of Heidegger somewhere online. As sometimes happens, he had a drive-by shot of lulz in the comments when someone asked why bother reading such a Nazi et al. This prompted an other post where the reasonable question was asked, should we read writers we find objectionable? How do you separate artist from their creations and influence? It’s the old problem of authorial intent, but the length and detail of the comments on that post are noteworthy.
When I was grad student we had Ortwin de Graef once visit our class to give a seminar about de Man on Schiller. It was very interesting, but he didn’t mention anything about the controversy. De Graef is famous as the young Flemish student who uncovered de Man’s anti-semitic writings in the Second World War in Belgium. This led to controversy with Derrida eventually issuing a critical response and condemnation of these views, but defending the need to still read de Man. The whole situation was an uncomfortable echo of Heidegger, whose war time activities still need to be better understood.
That problem for many continues. In the NYT two weeks ago there was mentioned that Emmanuel Faye’s much discussed 2005 book, Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie , which details unpublished lecture notes from the early 1930’s, argues according to the NYT, that:
fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”
This is more than an uncomfortable bit of posterity, and has rekindled some of the discussion about the legitimacy of reading Heidegger, and subsequently, so many of his descendants (notably Derrida, but also Arendt, Levinas and Caputo).
For me, I believe we must read Heidegger, but put in the context he deserves: an academic with sometimes delusional politics, sometimes obscurest texts, but hugely influential. Like some people on that thread were proposing, we should separate author from text from intent. And I don’t mean that glibly. There is a responsibility that comes with these texts and that author. And finally, maybe what people are today beginning to question is not the man or the body of work, but also the source of the legitimacy of that influence. That’s indeed an interesting question: how do new philosophical trends and projects become popular? I’m not sure, but that also should be asked.
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