Once upon a time, Heidegger's thinking seemed to bear on everything and every philosopher, from the Pre-Socratics, such as Anaximander and Parmenides as well as Heraclitus, to Plato himself, to Aristotle as well as Plotinus and Augustine, Duns Scotus and Aquinas and all the modern names like Descartes and Leibniz. Kant, too, as well as Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Dilthey. If the Nietzscheans chafe at the association, Heidegger read more Nietzsche than any other philosopher: so completely that we have needed Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze in addition to Michel Haar and Jacques Taminiaux and many others, including the present author, to urge us to pay attention to this fact. And Heidegger read Husserl.

Heidegger's readings in the philosophy of history included philology, the past qua past, as Heidegger reflects on history and temporality in Being and Time, in addition to his earlier and later readings in biology and in physics (theory of knowledge) as well as politics (perhaps generically in place of moral philosophy as such, although with his Letter on Humanism, Heidegger claimed, already in Being and Time, to have articulated an ethics), and aesthetics, from painting and sculpture to architecture and poetics along with a number of Heideggerian thematic concerns with metaphysics, Daseinsanalyse, authenticity, worldhood, etc. Now in the wake of a recent editor's commentary on Heidegger's Black Notebooks,¹

1 See here: Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, pp. 31f.View all notes

in the wake of digital media reaction and furore and in the wake of the further commentary offered in book collections published, for the most part as a direct result of specific conference proceedings,²

2 Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Heidegger et «les juifs», the result of a conference held at the Bibliotheque National in Paris in January 2015 as well as the (forthcoming) volume consequent upon conference held in April 2015 in Siegen: Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer, Martin Heideggers »Schwarze Hefte” – Eine philosophisch-politische Debatte. A reflection on this last conference, beginning with the cautionary hyperbole, “Siegen is the most horrific city in the world”, has appeared authored by Hannah Lühmann: “Hier wird Heidegger der Prozess gemacht” in Die Welt, 27 April 2015 and, still more reflectively, if “walking dead” or zombie-style, a participant contribution by Dieter Thomä, “Eine Heidegger-Tagung in Siegen. Kann ein Untoter sterben?,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, 29 April 2015.View all notes

but also more scholarly projects,³

3 Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks: 1931–1941.View all notes

all of this seems increasingly bootless.

For his own part, the only question Heidegger had claimed for himself was the question of “Being,” more specifically the task of recalling this question as a question, and it is nearly impossible to understand Heidegger's “being question” apart from Heidegger's concern with what he called questioning. The question of being, posed and reflected upon as a question, always presupposed for Heidegger a reflection on philosophical reflection and on questioning as such.

Yet with the publication of the Black Notebooks, everything turns around. If Heidegger could remind us as he does precisely in his reflections on the very idea of the Nachlaß as such, reflections constituting a central focus beginning with the first volume of the Black Notebooks arguing that posthumous works work – this is their Wirkungsgeschichte – to invert the order of time,⁴

4 I develop this point in Babich, “Heidegger's Black Notebooks: The Nachlass and Its Wirkungsgeschichte”.View all notes

the effect effected in what I call the “black night” of the Black Notebooks, has to be a Kehre to beat them all. Sidonie Kellerer, Emmanuel Faye's former student, has even suggested that the turn itself was invented as a cover for a more insidious concern: anti-Semitism at the core.⁵

5 There are a number of such reports, given for the most part in reviews. See, for one example, Greta Lührs’ interview with Sidonie Kellerer, “Des Meisters neue Kleider,” 5 March 2015 in Hohe Luft.View all notes

Thus, it seems Heidegger was preoccupied less with the Seinsfrage than the Judenfrage, particularly in terms of what Peter Trawny characterizes as Heidegger's now ineliminable seinsgeschichtliche Anti semitismus,⁶

6 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, pp. 31f. Already made available in French, as if in time for the conference held at the start of 2015, an English translation is available as Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy.View all notes

an obsession with Weltjudentum, wherein Heidegger is also revealed as having been fatally one-sided in his naming of names in the history of philosophy, especially his contemporaries and students.

Association with Heidegger has become a risky business. Heideggerians, most conspicuously Günter Figal, have been taking cover, the better to distance themselves from Heidegger, which because of the allure of publicity hardly means that one eschew Heidegger altogether. Perhaps for this reason, Figal himself, who was formerly the head of the Heidegger-Gesellschaft until his resignation in protest over the revelations of Black Notebook anti-Semitism, found himself nevertheless drawn to organize a conference in Freiburg for the start of 2016 (which may be expected to produce yet another conference volume following the conference volume predictably forthcoming from the Freiburg conference that had already been organized by Figal's rival colleague in Freiburg, Hans-Helmuth Gander at the start of December 2015).

However, in France, ahead of the curve in most things Heideggerian, François Vézin, author of the preferred 1986 translation of Heidegger's Being and Time into French (trumping in respectable precision, as the French esteem such things, earlier versions offered by Henry Corbin in 1937, Rudolf Boehm with Alphonse de Waehlens in 1964 and Emmanuel Martineau just a year prior to Vézin in 1985),⁷

7 See Heidegger, Être et temps. Indeed, the challenges of translating Heidegger's Sein und Zeit have been compared to the challenges of translating Luther and thus to a reflection on translation as such. As Pierre Legrand observes, it is significant that the latter range of translations might be said to have “compelled the French language and French philosophy to undergo the kind of modification allowing for the narrativization of unfamiliar ideas”. Pierre Legrand, “Issues in the Translatability of Law”, p. 30.View all notes

has taken care to separate himself and his subject, pointing to nothing less than Heidegger's own failure to read, more accurately said, of giving no evidence himself of having read certain Jewish philosophers.

Vézin asks if Heidegger “had ever studied F. Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung)”?⁸

8 François Vézin, «L’étendue du désastre» (8 août 2014).View all notes

The answer is an obvious one, so Vézin writes. It is a simple “fact”⁹

9 Ibid.View all notes

that

It is not only Franz Rosenzweig that lacks a mention in Heidegger's writings. Heidegger, as Vézin emphasizes, likewise omits a host of others, including the names Vézin recounts, the famous ones such as “Kafka, and that of Chagall or of Gershom Scholem. For him, one might hear tell of Beckenbauer but not of Edith Stein.”¹¹

11 Ibid.View all notes

Heidegger prefers to talk football rather than Edith Stein, an intellectual saint in philosophy.¹²

12 If Heidegger did not ultimately support Stein, this matches his constant effort to keep his own work at a distance from what he felt to be a conflation with anthropology as this separated him from Stein, Husserl's student. This would also drive him to distance himself from Jaspers and other representatives of Lebensphilosophie and precisely the directions Stein sought to advance. Stein, whose work continued the direction of Max Scheler more than Heidegger, could not but follow another path, one that in fact would have, in a different world, taken her closer to Eugen Fink. See very generally, Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue and more specifically, Cordula Haderlein, Individuelles Mensch-Sein in Freiheit und Verantwortung: die Bildungsidee Edith Steins, as well as Hans Rainer Sepp, “Edith Steins Stellung innerhalb der phänomenologische Bewegung”.View all notes

The charge is grievous although, of course, most philosophers, not unlike Heidegger, do indeed turn out to be fairly enthusiastic about football (although Alasdair MacIntyre favours chess along with Hans-Georg Gadamer to name some philosophers who write about games). However, Vézin goes on in his letter to ask rather more saliently: “Did Heidegger ever know that Hannah Arendt had dedicated profound study to the case of Adolf Eichmann?”¹³

13 François Vézin, op. cit.View all notes

It's a pointed question. Elsewhere I argue that Heidegger had trouble paying attention to Arendt's work as he also had trouble paying attention to the work of Arendt's first husband Günther Stern – Günther Anders as we ought to know his name (but as most Anglophone philosophers do not), who studied with Heidegger from 1921 to 1924, and who himself similarly does not rate a mention from Vézin. Likewise unmentioned in Vézin's catalogue would be another of Heidegger's “other” students from his Marburg days, Elizabeth Feist Hirsch, to whom I shall return below.

So many metonymies of memory and influence: who is named and may thus be counted? Who must one mention? Who may be passed over without mention? With respect to Edith Stein and Günther Anders, the current author is especially grateful to Antonio Calcagno for a personal correspondence on the complexities of current acknowledgement and of current recognition to the extent that attention to this and related contexts can remind us of the close geographic trajectories that swirl around Heidegger. In this political geographic constellation that is also the trajectory of the politicized history of philosophy, Stern (already mentioned), i.e., Anders, was the son of William Stern, the famous psychologist, inventor of the Stern IQ test, which elder Stern was originally Edith Stein's teacher before Stein turned to Husserl for another approach to psychology.

It matters in the current chain of charges and associations that Anders is ignored by us today, but not because of a successful programme of anti-Semitism. Anders shared and radicalized Heidegger's critique of technology, but it is because Anders' critique so radicalized Heidegger's critique that we continue to fail to read Anders to this day. Thus Don Ihde, my teacher and an anti-Heidegger-minded philosopher of technology well before losing his taste for Heidegger had already consigned Anders to non-mention in his work and, by simply nixing a translation proposal, Ihde also excluded Anders from (Anglophone) philosophy of technology, seemingly to perpetuity. In this lineage, Ihde also silenced another forgotten Jewish phenomenologist of sound, F. Joseph Smith,¹⁴

14 The philosopher of music based in Nice, Daniel Charles writes on Smith and Husserl and Heidegger in his essay, “Singing Waves”. I discuss Smith in Babich, The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and Technology, and see too Smith himself, especially his “Cartesian Theory and Musical Science,” in his The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music, pp. 119–42.View all notes

expert on the musical philosophy of Jacques de Liege and the phenomenology of listening, founding member of the US Heidegger Circle. Heidegger, of course, never mentioned Smith and scarcely anyone in the Heidegger Circle remembers Smith today. But when Smith wrote on the occasion of a meeting held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook to formally retract his membership in the Heidegger Circle (and to withdraw his own name from the list of the names of the Circle's founders) his indignant letter drew no kind of acknowledgement, quite a difference from the sensation, well-merited, when Figal stepped down from the Heidegger-Gesellschaft or when Donatella di Cesare followed suit.

I never met Smith, but I could not but notice that his letter was announced to silence. How odd, such utter disinterest. And then I heard from him again in a letter he wrote to me at the end of his life to ask for more words in the voice in which I wrote about Jacob Taubes in my preface to a journal collection on Nietzsche and the Jews.¹⁵

15 Babich, “Ad Jacob Taubes”, v–x.View all notes

After his death, Smith would be forgotten save by those interested in the difference between phenomenon and Smith's word, which he coined as one of the key phenomenologists of sound, along with Adorno and Anders: akoumenon.¹⁶

16 Ihde himself is the source for this reference drawn from Smith's unpublished essay, “Heidegger and Insights Leading to a Phenomenology of Sound”, cited in Ihde as “Speech is a thing of sound, not a phenomenon but an akoumenon”. Ihde, Sense and Significance, p. 31. See too F. Joseph Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound: A Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music. There is a large if esoteric literature here and an even larger research project. See for one recent contribution, Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, and see too my own study, Babich, The Hallelujah Effect.View all notes

For his part, Anders is arguably most famous for being a divorced man as Hannah Arendt's first husband, back from when he himself was as beautiful as she was. Reading Anders and Heidegger together in terms of their politico-philosophical critique of media and technology opposes the reduction of Heidegger's thinking via petty political exclusions (and academia consists of almost nothing but petty political exclusions) to poetry, language, thought and a singularly single-minded animus to whatever might be supposed to be “metaphysics”. It is in the same spirit that Heidegger is now to be reduced to meaning (Sheehan) or anti-Semitism (Faye, Kellerer, etc.).

If the dust settles, and there is some doubt that it will, one might contend that had we been reading Anders all along, had we in the Anglophone world been concerned with technology (as in France for a long time Jacques Ellul was concerned with what Heidegger meant by the question of “technique”), we might be better able to parse Heidegger's long-standing indictment of technology, Machenschaft, and thoughtlessness, quite as much as Gelassenheit.¹⁷

17 Paul Virilio has his own line on this, as did Jean Baudrillard and in part, but in different ways, Friedrich Kittler and Sloterdijk too, among not too many others.View all notes

Perhaps had we collectively not “ignored” Anders, to use Vézin's word in a different context, we might have a very different philosophy of technology, not to mention a different philosophy of science. And that might have opened another way to read the Black Notebooks. This would not have ameliorated Heidegger's damning anti-Semitism, but might have freed us to a clearer sense of the context that otherwise threatens to go missing in the majority of today's readings.

The identity at stake is the question of the Jews. And yet, and this is already obvious, if I attempt to attend to difference by invoking Heidegger's Jews the invocation goes too far. Already we count off a list in our minds, and already we are culpable: guilty of a clear Semitism because we know who is who, just as Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his October 1944 essay, Réflexions sur la question juive, translated in 1948 as Anti-Semite and Jew, we count, as Sartre himself does towards his conclusion, a certain delisting, which we may set off here in parenthesis: “(Spinoza, Proust, Kafka, Darius Milhaud, Chagall, Einstein, Bergson – are they not Jews?)”¹⁸

18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 82. See also Samuel Fleischacker, Heidegger's Jewish Followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas.View all notes

We know who is who in a way that we may not know who is Catholic and who Protestant, say – and there are so many kinds of Protestants, Ricoeur was a Protestant, so too was Sartre, but of what confession? How many kinds of Protestants does one have in the same France that has always been worth a mass?

Sartre, in his psycho-phenomenological analysis of anti-Semitism, points out that Christianity defines all atheism. This extends, he writes, to Jewish atheists who do not turn out to be opposed to the faith of their fathers, their mothers, their family traditions: “Not for a moment are Jews atheistic contra the Talmud; a priest, to all of them, means the vicar, not the rabbi.”¹⁹

19 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 47. Translation modified.View all notes

Sartre's point reminds us that even “atheistic Judaism” corresponds to a

This is the “identity” problem of Christianity, the same Christianity Nietzsche finds so monotonous that he declares that he could count back by writing in epochs in his canonic reading of what it would have to be to be anti-anything in his analysis of the mechanism of ressentiment in On the Genealogy of Morals or his unpublished The Antichrist where Nietzsche could still complain at the end of his life, lamenting the unimaginably alien character of antiquity to all of us today, Christians and Jews, theists and atheists alike, writing: “Almost two thousand years, and not a single new god!” (AC §19).²¹

21 Cf., here, Babich, “Nietzsche's Antichrist: The Birth of Modern Science out of the Spirit of Religion”.View all notes

Explicating the reactionary reaction of reaction that is ressentiment, Nietzsche calls our attention to the irrelevance of distinctions or names or words (as we imagine them) where only the distinctions or names (as we imagine them) seem to matter when it comes to anti-Semitism. Nietzsche had already written on the “human, the all too human” quite apart from both Sartre's and Heidegger's (essentially allied) concerns with humanism after the war, even more distinct from our concerns today in other academic worlds as we pronounce the end of the human, the post- and the trans-, the entrepreneurial, almost trademark vision of humanity 2.0: cyborg man + machine. For Nietzsche:

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche seemingly articulates the ideological basis for what Adorno could have designated as Sartre's “ubiquity standard” of Christianity in Anti-Semite and Jew. Here Nietzsche's oppositional chiasm illuminates a bit, not a friendly bit by any means, but a bit of Heidegger's “world Jewry” in the fatal term Weltjudentum (GA 96, 262),²²

22 See again, Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. Trawny is explicit that there is a problem here even as he argues that one can be, as Richard Wolin cites him in his own review in the Jewish Review of Books, “constructive” and even as he argued for the value of continued Heidegger studies, for Trawny it remains the case, in a striking parallel with Habermas’ language with respect to the danger that once was attributed to the influence of Nietzsche: “The being-historical construction can lead to a contamination of Heidegger's thinking.” Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, p. 93.View all notes

invoked again and again and as Heidegger undertook to describe this phenomenon as “spurred [aufgestachelt] by those emigrants released from Germany.”²³

23 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. IV Abteilung: Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen, Vol. 96, Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941), p. 262.View all notes

The goading dimensionality for Heidegger corresponds to the nature of this political movement, which Heidegger characterizes as “omnipresent and impalpable and no matter its increase of power needing in nowise to participate in military action.”²⁴

24 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 262.View all notes

The question of Jewish calculation and power acquisition was obscenely of interest to Heidegger well beyond the typically anti-Semitic slander disseminated after World War I regarding the non-military inclination of Jewish citizenry and Heidegger continues here to contrast the growth of world Jewry by contrast with what then precisely world-historical ambitions of what we might call “World Germany”, that is the Reich. In this light, we can read Heidegger's denunciation, whereby what costs the Germans their very ontic, all-too-ontic blood, is consummated quite differently for this other, Semitic and supposedly world-historiale, movement. And if the constellation can also remind us not a little of Asterix's immortal characterization of the essential antinomy of the German spirit (one can be a barbarian and still love flowers), we appreciate Trawny's guidance as he points to the contaminating danger of this same “being-historical construction”.²⁵

25 Cf. Trawny, “The being-historical construction can lead to a contamination of Heidegger's thinking.” Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, p. 93.View all notes

The issue exceeds religious confession, comprising the erotic, just as Sartre suggests. And if Sartre originally makes the suggestion, it took Klaus Theweleit to write a two-volume study: Men's Fantasies.²⁶

26 Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 1 + 2: Band 1: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte.View all notes

If Theweleit's book in fact might have been better titled German Men's Fantasies, Sartre's point demonstrates that it describes the French as it also applies in the Anglophone world. Here we know that it is no fun to “be” a fantasy object, not for the subjugated subject, not for the human being subject to racial counting out, i.e. persecution, expulsion, under threat, realized in horrifying fact, of extermination. Along with an entire generation of political theorists, Foucault, to this extent, turns out to have been terribly, fatally wrong, and here we may include recent feminist scholars of pornography, most especially in philosophy. Fantasies always cost their victims: there is no power ‘traded’, that is a lie exacted by those in power. As the current context makes more than plain, as today's growing emigrant crisis foregrounds some of the reasons Michael Walzer two decades ago could issue a new edition of Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew with a new subtitle: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, this is no game.²⁷

27 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, with a new preface by Michael Walzer (New York: Schocken, 1995).View all notes

Here we are talking about blood and force: force because the theme is violence, blood because the theme is murder, inestimably heightened when the theme is war.

Finding Heidegger guilty of world-historical anti-Semitism is no lesser variety of anti-Semitism (were we minded here to rank anti-Semitic kinds in the context of a reflection on identity and difference and as philosophers are fond of making distinctions and ranking orders of rank) than the more vulgar anti-Semitism, the highly personalized anti-Semitism of the kind Sartre relates, physically, physiologically, viscerally, in his account of the Jewish question in Paris, October 1944. The kind of anti-Semitism we discern in Heidegger's Black Notebooks – especially the notebook he numbers XV²⁸

28 Heidegger, “Überlegungen XIV”, GA 96.View all notes

– is the anti-Semitic thinking that works on the level of world history itself, just as Hegelian as we please. It is this kind of anti-Semitism that leads to pogroms as it also leads to the conception of and physically protracted execution of “final solutions” as this corresponds to the technological question that is the Shoah on several levels on the world stage in Heidegger’s day and in our own. Above all, this is the kind of anti-Semitism that excludes people from the land of their birth, of their livelihood, their life's work. This last horrific point resides in Heidegger's indictment of “the emigrants allowed out of Germany.”²⁹

29 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 262.View all notes

World-historial, onto-historial anti-Semitism is no abstract notion. Heidegger himself gives us a hint regarding these remarks in the lectures given after his return to teaching in Freiburg (after the interdiction that withdrew his venia legendi was lifted) in 1951 and 1952. In What is Called Thinking?, Heidegger explains that

Crucial here, too, is the theme of the lectures Heidegger gave at Bremen, addressed to German business men (his audience makes all the difference, I have argued) and thus to the concern with technology as such and as a matter of culture. Heidegger's Insight Into That Which Is contends that “[t]he organizations of social life, rearmament in moral matters, the grease paint of the culture enterprise none of them any longer reach what is.”³¹

31 Ibid., p. 36.View all notes

Heidegger's point parallels Horkheimer's insight into the cinematic ideal of the Übermensch, the Overhuman, the ‘trans’-human, attributed to Nietzsche.³²

32 I discuss this, also with respect to Günther Anders, in Babich, “O, Superman! or Being Towards Transhumanism: Martin Heidegger, Günther Anders, and Media Aesthetics”.View all notes

And yet the Nietzschean Übermensch is not the transhuman, this must be said despite the current enthusiasm of today's philosophers and social theorists of the machine to show their support for entrepreneurial leaders and for the ongoing practice of vivisection needed for stem cell research and for cloning and above all for the use of transgenic, meaning transgenic mosaics, tessellations of the human and the pig (pigs as high as 30% human, this is why the transplants work, in production already underway for more than a decade now) or monkey or dog (but the pigs are ready-to-hand, stock available and being farmed).³³

33 See Jason Koebler, “Martine Rothblatt Wants to Grow Human Organs in Pigs at This Farm”, as well as Joachim Müller-Jung, “Das Schwein, dein Spender. Vermenschlicht: gentechnisch veränderte Ferkel aus München”, and Walter Weder, Jörg Seebach, and Ruth Baumann-Hölzle, „Ersatzteillager Mensch,”. Cf., Babich, “Körperoptimierung im digitalen Zeitalter, verwandelte Zauberlehrlinge, und künftige Übermenschsein”.View all notes

Transgenic pigs, again this is to say part-human, are raised to be used as a certain sort of factory part, to wit medical replacement parts, including organs such as kidneys. And if the whole of this ought to be a kind of macabre and bad joke, like the “singularity” which was supposed to have happened (by now) or like the sex robots we are told to expect on the market soon, such factory-bred pigs, unlike most techno-hype, are all too real and ready for deployment: a parallel version of the Island of Dr Moreau de-fictionalized, realized, and all of it without the slightest murmur. And why not? We pay no attention to the consciousness, that is, the suffering, the agony, the hell lived by the animals we slaughter for food and leather and wool and by-products as it is. So why should it matter whether the animals grown out of nearly one-third human tissue (again, the pigs are human mosaics developed from both foetal pig and foetal human tissue: they are not genetic tweaks or the result of a few gene splices). But talk about traife. Our acquiescence, and there has been astonishing silence about this from scholars over the past decade over which this research work–torture has been done, is largely because we want we would say, we need the eggs, as Woody Allen once joked of a relative who thought he was a chicken. There is a market for human organs “on demand”.³⁴

34 In addition to this, there is the ontic affair of it all as it is and has been for the largest part conducted in industrial laboratories across the world, and that includes the USA, all without regulation because all without report (Ag-gag laws keep much more than simple cruelty out of sight).View all notes

Horkheimer had argued that the fantasy of the Übermensch is not merely a Hollywood pastiche but a calculated product of the culture industry itself, manufacturing marketed desires, the consumer must be created:

Like Horkheimer in the above quote from his The Eclipse of Reason, Heidegger likewise argues that:

For us today, details of the “superman” or the overhuman (as opposed to the sought after because marketable product ideal of the transhuman) seem trivial distractions (what else could it be to bring up the today's ongoing if little debated development of spare body parts, in which pigs turn out to be human 2.0 literally, because genetically, part human, which reduces, nota bene: without to be sure eliminating, organ rejection).³⁷

37 For to be sure, practical hitches remain: the seamless fantasy of switchable, upgradable body components is hardly at hand but the market for pig-human hybrids, and a profitable side-market in drugs and anti-rejection drugs, will be there as long as there is aging and disease – and what Sartre called bad faith.View all notes

Here, it may help to track a parallel in the “one thought” that Heidegger says a thinker thinks, returning to his famous because notorious Introduction to Metaphysics, where in advance of the war just where he uses the same words he scandalously retains/repeats after the war (in an infamous locus where he equates industrial agriculture with the manufacture of corpses in internment camps), Heidegger writes:

It can be easy to overlook the insistent reference to media in Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics as he quickly counts off the influence of telephones and newsreels and film, of recordings and especially of radio, everything that is to say that Walter Benjamin characterizes with respect to “art” in the age of technological reproducibility today, everything that Adorno takes up, everything Anders also thematized in his still untranslated, The Obsolescence of Humanity:

This is not the confession of a typical fan of National Socialism. The “boxer” who “counts as the great man of a people” – what people is that if it is not the German people precisely under National Socialism, where “the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph”? What triumph is that if not for National Socialism? What “uproar” and what “specter” if not that of National Socialism?

As Trawny has explained to us, after so many other scholars have also undertaken to explain to us, if Heidegger was a Nazi, as he was, Heidegger took his Nazism (this is my assessment not Trawny's) pretty much the way he took his Nietzsche.⁴⁰

40 And you can turn to your Nietzsche scholar friends and ask them what they think of Heidegger's Nietzsche (as it is quite popular to denounce it) or the way Heidegger read everyone else in the history of philosophy. Heidegger's Nazism is like Heidegger's reading of the history of philosophy, the history of metaphysics, the end of philosophy.View all notes

Although I am far from having reached a judgement on it, it may well be that quite contra the standard doctrine that Heidegger subscribed to the cliché anti-Semitism of his day, Heidegger would also seem to have had his own anti-Semitism as well, which is to be sure yet another way of speaking about Heidegger and his ‘Jews’.

We recall from The Black Notebooks (as indeed from his Contributions and also from What is Called Thinking?) that Heidegger may be said to “complain” (some complain that he “whines”) about mass gatherings, and mass shouting matches just as we see this above: as “screaming contests”⁴¹

41 Heidegger's word is noise Lärm and (the Latin is worth remarking upon for a Greek fetishist, as Heidegger was), it is the flatus vocus that echoes in his complaints.View all notes

which did not strike the Heidegger who judged idle talk as he did as an achievement. To this extent, when Heidegger says he resists National Socialism by the expedient of teaching Nietzsche, he can mean what he says. It makes all the difference, I have argued, that Heidegger's Nietzsche was as useless as it was, on the Nazis own judgement of this, for Nazi purposes.

The problem, as Heidegger teaches, is that we – meaning by that his students under National Socialism, and I would say, likewise, we ourselves today – take ourselves to know Nietzsche and to know that he might make biological arguments of a kind useful for the party. However, this is failure of reading for the Heidegger, whereby, so he argues, a certain amount of philosophical formation and care is required as prerequisite:

From Nietzsche to thinking – the subject matter of Heidegger's 1951/1952 Freiburg course – we suppose ourselves precisely as philosophers to know, if anyone knows, what it is to reflect and to think. In the process we also happen to suppose ourselves to know what “world historical” questions might be which we would need to know just in order to understand whatever Heidegger might be speaking about when he speaks of “Weltjudentum” (GA96, 262) in just the same world-historical context Trawny takes care to distinguish and to underline for us.

For Heidegger, reading Nietzsche and his last man as he did before, during, and again after the war, we do not think all the while maintaining that we do, protesting that we do. We hardly ask the question Heidegger asks: What is Called Thinking?, and someone who really does ask such a question tends to annoy us.

To follow Nietzsche's word in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Heidegger repeated this in his first university lecture after the war: “The wasteland grows. Woe to him who hides wastelands within!”⁴³

43 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 95.View all notes

Heidegger makes this assertion at the inception of what grew to become the “German miracle”, speaking of economic growth which remains wide and far the only kind of miracle that concerns us today. Reflections on the growing wasteland hardly concern us with the ongoing destruction of forest and mountain alike, the devastation of species on land and in the sea, the contamination of the air and the depletion of aquifers. What do we care?

Heidegger, as if anticipating all of this and more, writes that what is “Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking.”⁴⁴

44 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 4.View all notes

He italicizes the claim he makes, contextualized for students of philosophy who have learned from Aristotle and from Plato, that man (never woman) is defined as “the rational animal”. I emphasize the male pronoun, not that Heidegger was any kind of feminist, but because nothing in philosophy is about women. Nor to address today's neuroscientists and their dependency on the university practice of vivisection⁴⁵

45 However else would we know about the brain if it were not for the brains, thank you Claude Bernard, of dogs and the brains of the macaque monkeys we continue to capture, slave trade for our laboratories, in the wild? See for further discussion and references, Babich, “Mirror Neurons and the New Red Peter: On Laboratory Life”.View all notes

is it about animals as such, no matter whether they are or are not as Heidegger says, “world-poor”, as already indicated above, for if creating human–pig mosaics may be expected to produce a steady stream of harvestable organs for transplant rather than for eating, what on earth will anyone care?

Heidegger leaves both women and animals out of his lecture course just as he excludes Jews, and he offends everyone he seems to include, repeating throughout his What is Called Thinking? that we “still” do not think, reflecting on nothing less than this repetition: “Even so, it remains strange, and seems presumptuous, to assert that what is most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”⁴⁶

46 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, pp. 5–6.View all notes

And if that were not sufficient, Heidegger emphasizes scholarly ratiocination: science, he says, does not think.

Our collective scholarly ears bristle: Heidegger tells us that we are not thinking and in the Black Notebooks – notebooks that by the time of his lecture course on thinking at Freiburg, if we are to believe his brother Fritz, he already plans on publishing as the culminating section of his collected works—Heidegger insists on talking about “calculative thinking”, a principle by which, as he claims, the Jews happen to have lived “for the longest time” and which same principle so he claims, also dominates National Socialist race policy and which same principle continues to rule our most common endeavours. But for Heidegger, when it comes to thinking, we do not think.⁴⁷

47 And after science and technology about which we are sure we could be thinking if mentioning it here were not a distraction, there is the literary emphasis of most translators who usually work less as philosophers (that time is past) than in departments of German. This is not true in the USA, but only for exceptional reasons (I am speaking of recent translators of Heidegger's works) and it is the reason we do not have more translations and it is above all the reason we still do not have a complete translation of Nietzsche's posthumous works.View all notes

And yet for those of us who teach thinking, critical thinking no less, Heidegger had to be wrong.

For Heidegger, we are cast, as Jacques Ellul heard Heidegger here, writing of the wager played, “l'en-jeu” of the Ge-schick of Geschichte: the events of history, beyond our calculations, our planning. What is in play in la technique is not the latest device: it is not set to vibrate at a meeting.

However, the theme is Heidegger and not technology and not even Heidegger's questioning concerning technology. In France, Heidegger's name is a kind of philosophical given, so much so that a first reflection occupies two large volumes in Dominique Janicaud's last published study: Heidegger en France, the first volume, Récit,⁴⁸

48 Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France.View all notes

offering his reflections on Heidegger's influence in France. Janicaud's second volume of conversations and interviews offer the empirical justification beyond Janicaud himself in the interviews he conducted with everyone (everyone but Ricoeur, who declined to go on record, although he spoke to Janicaud about his reasons for declining).⁴⁹

49 Ricoeur, mindful of his own legacy, met Dominique for the interview, as Dominique mentioned when we met before his death, but as he regretted, opted for a dinner “off the record”.View all notes

The thematic of Heidegger and anti-Semitism will not make us read Janicaud more (a pity as Janicaud was also a philosopher of technology), the theme: Heidegger and the Jews still less.

By contrast, especially for those of us up on our Laruelle or our Stiegler or Meillassoux or our Simondon, and even in conjunction with the present theme, thinking of identities and differences, thinking of Heidegger and his Jews in a French context, who reads Pierre Duhem, author of the posthumous German Science?⁵⁰

50 See my discussion of Duhem and German/French science in Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science”.View all notes

Have we today – even those of us interested, as I am interested, in the history and philosophy and sociology of science – any political geography of theory in science in connection to or with hermeneutic reflection? In connection to Heidegger, ah, yes, but not with respect to questioning science much less technology? We leave to those in power their game plan, and we do so without remainder. Critical theory has thus managed not to be critical for years.

Where Duhem in 1916 criticizes the German turn of mind as it finds expression in Gustav Kirchoff, a theorist of mathematical physics, we could find Heidegger's words along with Duhem's critique: “We can and will posit [poser] … Wir können und wollen setzen … ”⁵¹

51 Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science”.View all notes

Note that this stipulative posing is by no means limited to a dogmatic and axiomatic controversy. The mathematician David Hilbert made this the watchword of the so-called Göttingen programme, which project included Husserl.⁵²

52 I discuss this with attention to the time that was the first few decades of the twentieth century in the philosophy of science (and mathematics) in Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science.View all notes

As Duhem continues to refute Heinrich Hertz's explicitly deductive construction of mechanics,⁵³

53 “Let us agree that this point – which is itself nothing but an algebraic expression, only a world of geometric consonance take to designate an ensemble of n numbers – changes, from one instant to another, by an algebraic formula. From this convention, so perfectly algebraic in nature, so completely arbitrary in appearance, we deduce, with perfect rigor, the consequences that calculation can draw from it, and we say that we are setting forth mechanics.” Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science”, p. 93View all notes

the problem is not that the postulate is arbitrary but rather that it is, out of context and history, thereby articulated, “imperiously”: “Sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. [I will it thus, I order it thus; let my will stand in the place of reason.]”⁵⁴

54 Ibid.View all notes

What Duhem ultimately sought, fierce as his gainsaying was, was only the inclusion of specifically French science—this would be the torch later taken up by Bachelard and Canguilhelm and today, if less and less, Serres—finally admitted to the table along with German science: “Scientia germanica ancilla scientiae gallicae.”⁵⁵

55 Ibid., p. 112.View all notes

In the published version we can read Duhem citing Nietzsche's contemporary and fellow philologist, Hermann Diels: “the German is, here and now, on this earth, the sanctuary in which the principle of order takes refuge.”⁵⁶

56 Duhem, “German Science and German Virtues”, here p. 122.View all notes

Yet it is Duhem's extended citation of Wilhelm Ostwald that is arguably the most disturbing, even using the language of a “great secret” with respect to the German:

When Duhem asks “[w]as Scholasticism not essentially, as German science is, a work of the mathematical mind”⁵⁸

58 Ibid., p. 123View all notes

he can seem to approximate Heidegger's standpoint in his Beiträge with respect to what Heidegger names Machenshaft, where Heidegger writes in GA 95 (Überlegungen VIII, 5) of the Black Notebooks currently under discussion. “One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the persistent skillfulness in calculating, pushing, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded.”⁵⁹

59 Heidegger, Überlegungen VIII, 5, GA 95, p. 97.View all notes

Or else and still more troublingly, when Heidegger writes:

This last is only a prelude to the most infamous of these quotes:

It can be argued that what Duhem calls “German science” corresponds to what would come to be called “Jewish science”.⁶²

62 That argument can be made, but for his part, Duhem is talking about “scholasticism”, that is what my old Jesuit teacher, the Canadian Thomist, Bernard Lonergan, author of the conspicuously named Method in Theology (1972) and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), with its famous listings of points to the seemingly nth degree, no mere sic et non, took the mid-twentieth century to an extraordinary pitch well beyond the tradition of generalized empirical method of “transcendental Thomism” inaugurated by the Belgian Jesuit philosopher, Joseph Maréchal. Indeed, Maréchal was probably one of the reasons Lonergan was able to answer my questions regarding the intersection of mysticism and empiricism as well as he did. Maréchal's initial main works included: Le point de départ de la métaphysique: leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance, 5 vols (Bruges-Louvain, 1922–47) and Études sur le psychologie des mystiques, 2 vols (1926, 1937).View all notes

Janicaud railed against the theological turn in Heidegger studies because it took one away from both an understanding of the history of theological moves in philosophy and in science as these had a specific genealogical nisus as Janicaud pointed out with respect to Bergson⁶³

63 Dominique Janicaud, Une Généalogie du spiritualisme français. Aux sources du bergsonisme: Ravaisson et la métaphysique.View all notes

and as we may see in connection with the above references to Duhem with respect to what Janicaud called La Puissance du rationnel.⁶⁴

64 Dominique Janicaud, La Puissance du rationnel. Janicaud published his own study of the darkness of Heidegger's thought, L'Ombre de cette pensée: Heidegger et la question politique together with Heidegger's insight into the more banal darkness of rationality itself.View all notes

For Janicaud, the impact of Heidegger in France had to be unpacked with the same genealogical sensitivity which Janicaud named in 1997 as a philosophical counter-pendant to Duhem: la spiritualisme français. ⁶⁵

65 This reflection is part of the history of ideas and indeed of books and publication. Thus Janicaud reissued his first book (réédition) and moved thereby as he did so from the scholastic provinces of Rome (La Haye) to Paris (Vrin), republishing his Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris, J. Vrin, 1997).View all notes

All of these things matter—not that I can unpack them all even if I am able to draw out some strands here and there, as the ancient Greeks decorated their statues and their columns with fur and garlands and not less captive, vanquished bodies, all the bits lost to us in history.

So who are they? Who are these Jews, doubly unfortunate: Heidegger's Jews? I have already named some of their names. And I've drawn the small conclusion in the old-fashioned way, the Kantian way that says to us that if something is actual or has happened as such it is perforce also possible. That means we can count Levinas’ name, as Janicaud also shows,⁶⁶

66 See Janicaud, Heidegger en France, p. 33.View all notes

along with Arendt's, along with Anders’ name. This actuality was the watchword for Heidegger's several studies of Kant; it is the key to the role of Dasein in Being and Time.

Jewish science, German science, how can we know to distinguish between the two? Must we do so? There is a politics of what we suppose to be le mot juste just as there is a lack of readerly conviviance (I am trying for a new word here, for the generosity of sympathy, that Ivan Illich called La convivialité), but there can be no such words. There is the slow reading we learned from Nietzsche and which slow reading Heidegger, in order to become Heidegger, applied in his work. Such and only such a reading is needed and we all know that today we read too quickly. At best we can be philologists or maybe we need a better word, because philologists must also, as Nietzsche said, be attuned to the slow, the fine grain, the subtleties of words and tones. But this does not interest us. It is by speed reading, searching and clicking, by “hunting” for the text, that we imagine that we will find the key to Heidegger's anti-Semitism.

If we start as we mean to do by speaking as Peter Trawny carefully asks us to do, of Heidegger's world-historical, onto-historial anti-Semitism, we end with his anti-Semitism tout court. We are all, as Adorno pointed out, as Sartre points out, anti-Semites in one way or another; we are all, as Heidegger points out in Being and Time, already guilty, implicated in advance. We know who these Jews are, we condemn them, Hannah Arendt in the first line but others too, when and if they themselves do not fall over themselves to distance themselves, denying, denouncing Heidegger. The kind of reading that would allow us to read the notebooks is lost to us, so I would argue, because we begin our reading as readers who have always already skipped the context.

It is a silencing of Jewish names. Hannah Arendt had far more cause to complain in the same measure and even to the degree, as I have argued,⁶⁷

67 See, for example, Babich, “Arendt's Radical Good and the Banality of Evil: Echoes of Scholem and Jaspers in Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt”.View all notes

so much so that many of her texts included coded (but hardly so coded that one cannot see them) references as if directed to and for Heidegger's eyes. Indeed, and our thoughts on this can be inspired in the wake of Margarethe von Trotta's 2012 film, Hannah Arendt, we can read the correspondence between Arendt and Jaspers as a surprising amount of this correspondence included reference to Heidegger; thus, we might ask if she did this to test or to see, as friends who are writers do with old friends who are writers and readers in the same or overlapping field, if one is read at all.

Heidegger certainly failed every love test Arendt ever set to him. And he would have failed, just as Vézin argues, every reading test as well. To which failure Arendt responded as lovers do, by loving him still, quand-même, as she argued in her dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine that that was what love did.

Does philosophy, named for love, still love? Is philosophy still love if we know that it is reduced to analytic triviality? If it is practiced by functionaries who have lost their love for both thinking and questioning, for the sake of the jobs they hold or (and this applies to the young more than they suppose) for the sake of the jobs they plan to hold?

Heidegger is infamous for what he does negatively with his non-support of Jews in letters he writes. And this is so. However, Heidegger was also supportive of Jews, those will be like Arendt the exception he admired or loved or else and simply like, as in the case of Werner Brock who wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1928 in Göttingen on Nietzsche⁶⁸

68 Werner Brock, Nietzsches Idee der Kultur.View all notes

and whom Heidegger helped to gain a position in Cambridge where he taught as of 1934.⁶⁹

69 Heike Delitz: „Brock, Werner Gottfried”. Martin Heidegger/Kurt Bauch, Briefausgabe: Briefwechsel 1932–1975, p. 51.View all notes

But support is not the way we are inclined to read Heidegger, inasmuch as we can find in his correspondence on Brock allusions to both his normative self-reference and the anti-English sentiment that is part of the concern here, such as we may read in Heidegger's letter to Kurt Bauch (4 January 1938), of Brock's troubles, encountered in sharing some of Heidegger's (and of course Husserl's) ideas at Cambridge, noting that most of Brock's interlocutors seemed to be mired in a fascination for “moraline thought” and a predilection for “mathematical tricks” as what the English “suppose” to be philosophy.⁷⁰

70 Ibid.View all notes

Brock represented the intersection between Jaspers and Heidegger that drew some of Heidegger's most intense negativity in many regards – Existenzphilosophie – and yet and this is the point with respect to Heidegger's Jews, not in Brock's case. Part of the reason had to do with Brock's ability to combine, as did Heidegger, the ability to read Nietzsche with a philosophical and critical conversance with the natural and modern technologically adumbrated sciences. Inasmuch as, and this ought to go without saying, Heidegger was a philosopher of technology and science, provided we may take, as Heidegger did take, “modern technology” to include both train and bus routes, streets and kiosks, passenger covers against the rain, overhead street lamps all in addition to fountain pens and plotters, as well as the intersected course of the trajectory of raw materials from harvested forest and field to the conditions of using cellulose in production for fabric and for manufacturing paper, including media dissemination of all kinds up to and including the recent tragic events of Charlie Hebdo (and so on and so on) along with the directing influence of civic opinion, a directing or framing that is routinely usually associated with Adorno's analysis and critique of the “culture industry” — , to all this. Heidegger adds the trees, the life of plants, the life of the mountain, including the technique of the forester who plots the path of what we today call “sustainable” forest “development”:⁷¹

71 Ibid.View all notes

manufacturing paper, i.e., “manufacturing consent”. What connected Heideggger and Brock was Nietzsche and science and what Heidegger, in his letter to Bauch, could call “our philosophy”.⁷²

72 Adorno «Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (1966), p. 92.View all notes

Beyond technical Machenschaft there is barbarism.

Elsewhere, I've sought to frame and to contextualize Adorno on this theme:

At issue for Adorno is what “drives” human beings, because the problem is that Nazis are human beings and what drove them still threatens us as it still drives us today. Neither Adorno nor Arendt ever lost sight of this. This same concern, the most significant fact of the insoluble cipher that was Nazism, echoes in a different spirit the trajectory of Heidegger's language of the throw (Wurf) that Eugen Fink took back to a better and more Greek image of the spirit child of eternity (Aeon) at play on the beach of the world. For Adorno this sheer, invisible horror remains: this “the unspeakable which culminated on a world-historical scale in Auschwitz”.⁷⁴

74 See Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship. Cf. Paul Rée, Basic Writings.View all notes

Why do we read Anders (if we do), or Duhem, or Brock (if we do), or even, henceforth, Heidegger? Do we not in our ever-accelerating day of ever-accelerating publications need to save time, trim our obligations, dispose of our libraries? To phrase the question from another direction: who reads Nietzsche's own favourite, if eschewed, moral psychologist, himself a Jew, Paul Rée? Today? Very few, maybe no one at all, but we have no excuse for this: Jonathan Ree recommends we read Nietzsche's contemporary, Paul Rée. Not only that, but we can read Rée: for Robin Small has translated Ree's writings along with an interpretive book on Ree in connection with Nietzsche himself. Still my point remains: who reads Rée?⁷⁵

75 Hirsch corroborates from a contemporary's perspective, as does, a bit earlier, Hans Georg-Gadamer, Hannah Arendt's report of Heidegger as the “hidden king”: “We were fascinated with Heidegger's new approach to philosophy which he developed in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), a book that was published during his years at Marburg. Instead of starting with man as the creator of his world, it was Being (das Sein) that in epochal events opens a world for man's consideration. I belonged to a small group of students who were invited by Heidegger for a discussion of phenomenology every two weeks at his house. The sessions always started with Mrs. Heidegger reading a poem. Following the meetings we would have long, animated discussions among ourselves” (Hirsch, “Autobiographical Sketches”, p. 296.View all notes

There were others we mentioned at the start, others who also tend to merit nary a mention – and this is relevant because what is at stake is the bid not to have to mention, that is to dismiss Heidegger himself, as Vézin argued, and, because this is how it works, because of his being-historical, world-historical anti-Semitism, evident in what he writes in the Black Notebooks, evident apart from that in his own failure to mention the Jews, even, as we have seen, his Jews. We all know Arendt and above I noted Anders and Brock. I also mentioned Elizabeth F. Hirsch as one of those scholars those other scholars who write on Heidegger tend to leave out, or mention only in passing.⁷⁶

76 Elisabeth F. Hirsch, 5 February 1988, Letter to the Editor, New York Times (March 2, 1988).View all notes

Decades ago now, Hirsch wrote to the New York Times on “Heidegger's Nazi past”⁷⁷

77 Ibid.View all notes

for the sake of clarification, not defence. In her letter, Hirsch details her visit to his house in Freiburg 1954, echoing, just as Arendt does, the opaque language Heidegger favoured with reference to himself, “Great thoughts, great errors” as Hirsch here translates Heidegger's phrase “Wer gross denkt, irrt gross”. She had urged him, she wrote, to

Hirsch, still close to the circumstance of the times, included a word in her letter on the stakes of renouncing party membership given the severity of the consequences for him and for his family. The final line of Hirsch's letter has the ring of everydayness and truth: “Not everybody is born for heroism.”⁷⁹

79 This is Gilbert Ryle's “bad man” apothegm as Robert Bernasconi cites it from The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No. 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12 in Bernasconi, “Habermas and Arendt on the Philosopher's ‘Error’: Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger”, p. 4. Michael André Bernstein assesses the statement which is parsed in the THES from a letter written by James Thrower as somehow merely “supposed” simply because it is a report of a direct communication. See Bernstein's footnote 18 in his Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-century German Writing, p. 132. To be sure, the present author can corroborate the difficulty to which Bernstein alludes: Bernasconi's original citation is minimalist, if, as I can say, quite accurate, as I have spent time tracking what seem to be comparatively archaic archaeologies of microfilm cassettes, loading and reading at the glacial pace of that same reproductive technology. See also Babich, “The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger's Linguistic Omega”.View all notes

Increasingly we demand nothing less than heroism. It is supposed that any decent philosopher, any “good man”, would have seen the light and risked everything to oppose it. The stakes were that great. If Heidegger was never without antagonists, things have changed such that it is likely that henceforth Heidegger can have no defenders. And to this extent perhaps, Heidegger, maybe we can uniformly agree on this, should be committed, along with (what was it that David Hume suggested?) any texts that bear on discredited creeds and the like, all of them, to the flames. Let us henceforth have and with good consciences, all the machination we like: we need no God but technology and rationality shall surely save us.

I think there can be no mistake: we are here to bury Heidegger. We've been doing that since Ryle, as Bernasconi once cited him.⁸⁰

80 Heidegger, GA 96, §138, p. 161.View all notes

After we are done with that, we, or some of us, or at least those few of us who get invited to a decent majority of the conferences on this theme, so as to be expert, plan to turn around and claim that we ought to be free to “err” with Heidegger. This surely means free to denounce him, to expose him again and again – by which we will mean that there should be jobs and funding for that as well as an audience for that, forever and ever. For what else do we have to do?

The wandering word, die Irre, erring, “errancy” as Bill Richardson writes, is Heidegger's own, arguably squarely Allemanic expression, one to be read in an aphorism composed under the title Die Vorlesung, i.e. an ABC of the scholarly interests that bring one either to visit or else to prepare a lecture course: where Heidegger concludes and no one knows the way or the passage; and no one dares a step. But wanderers wander and are.⁸¹

81 I have this from Jacques Taminiaux, and recommend that others start with Taminiaux to begin.View all notes

I argue as many others also observe that there were a number of Jewish students and scholars who worked with Heidegger around the time of, i.e. both before and after, Being and Time, including Arendt and Jonas as well as scholars influenced by the lectures on the “Origin of the Work of Art”,⁸²

82 The list is longer still if we add those with animus, against Heidegger, as this too propels a thinker, we can count Jean-Michel Salanskis.View all notes

Anders, Benjamin, Adorno. That would be the time of the cusp of the 1930s: up to the fatal third year of that same critically infamous decade in history. And to these names I add those more contemporary thinkers who derive their inspiration in part from Husserl with whom Heidegger must be associated because no Husserl, no Heidegger. The parallel must be emphasized to highlight Heidegger's dependence on Husserl, sine qua non, despite Heidegger's advantage as Husserl both recognized and deplored this.

There are thus many names: Lévinas and Marcuse, Strauss, and if Adorno must be counted negatively, so too in more complex ways Derrida, most notably, but also Taubes, both Jacob and Susan, and we can hardly claim to be done with any such listing.⁸³

83 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 56.View all notes

Now, however, after years of complaining that Heidegger ignored the Jews, as Vézin tells us is a fact, there is also the too little or less than nothing that Heidegger said about the Jews or the Holocaust as such, the suffering, the pain, the crime as such, and it is the criminal element, the death that needs to be spoken out when we speak of the Holocaust, the death that, as Heidegger says in the scattering of public words that he has on the topic, that the victims do not die in the internment-, concentration-, death-camps (and he has to be mad to say this). And worse than claiming that victims in such camps do not die their deaths (but this is complicated), Heidegger also says, and this takes our breath away as we read and count off every cliché and insult, “The Jews with their marked talent for calculation, ‘live’ more than anyone else by the principle of race.”⁸⁴

84 NB: it remains a bit misleading to speak of the black notebooks in the plural here, not because the notebooks are not plural, they are, but the passages in question are limited to those to be found in the collective volume including the notebooks dating from 1939 to 1941. The next volume, which should have been published by the end of this past year (but manifestly was not: it should appear any moment now at the start of 2015), lacks any such references, inconvenient as that is, as the years of the war go on. Yet as the above citation from Trawny's reflections make clear, what is at stake is a concern to read Heidegger's entire philosophy under the lens of these notebooks and the concerns that appear in them. What Heidegger had wished to say, as he spoke of Nietzsche, as appropriate to philosophy per se, via the exemplary name of Aristotle, and following the fleurit vision of the doxographers of antiquity, he was born, he worked, he died, will not be said of Heidegger. Nor has it been said of Nietzsche. But Heidegger's point, that our concern with biography keeps us from the work, could not be more evidently confirmed. See Babich, “Heidegger's Black Notebooks: The Nachlass and Its Wirkungsgeschichte.”View all notes

Thus Heidegger writes one of the most infamous of the inflammatory passages in the Black Notebooks,⁸⁵

85 Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger's Black Notebooks”. Wolin also details the parallel Heidegger makes with Americanism and all the other negative associations of Machenschaft.View all notes

and we understand Peter Trawny's choice of the language of “world historial” anti-Semitism and add, as American commentators do, his Anti-Zionism.⁸⁶

86 Heidegger, GA 95, p. 194.View all notes

Heidegger writes,

Heidegger speaks against barbarism here and we recall that the only thing essential in education, qua formation is instruction contra barbarism. Thus Adorno explains that all education must entail teaching an absolute, unswerving horror in the face of any and all violence, especially against girls, as Adorno highlights this as essential in all education, and contra all terrorism and contra all counter-terrorism, including torture, including all violence against individuals and including violence against animals.⁸⁸

88 Derrida, Fichus: (Discours de Francfort), p. 56. I discuss Adorno on this note which he includes in his Beethoven book in Babich, “Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals, and Jews”.View all notes

On 22 September 2001, Derrida closed his own Adorno Prize lecture with Adorno's strikingly astonishing words, requiring immense courage to quote: “for an idealist system, animals play virtually the same role as the Jews in a fascist system”.⁸⁹

89 «[à] insulter l'animal dans l'homme ou à traiter l'homme d'animal.” Derrida, Fichus, 56. For a discussion, see Marie Berne, Derrida, Eloge de l'idiotie: pour une nouvelle rhetorique chez Breton, Faulkner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 185f.View all notes

Derrida carefully gathers the twofold point Adorno himself took pains to make, Adorno's idealist system always ends as Derrida expresses the point by “insulting the animal in the human being where one treats the human being as an animal”.⁹⁰

90 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz”, p. 92. (“Er treibt die Menschen zu dem Unsäglichen, das in Auschwitz nach weltgeschichtlichem Maß kulminierte”.)View all notes

It is Adorno even more than Hannah Arendt or Edith Stein who is Heidegger's Jew: the most Jewish – in Derrida's “least” sense here – of Heidegger's Jews. Contra Heidegger and the Jews, contra Heidegger's own animus contra the Jews, always and obviously still to this day, considering that animals continue to play the role played by Jews, still in our obliviousness, in what goes unsaid, without mention. We may not see the urgency, the word Adorno uses is the same Heidegger uses, the same Nietzsche uses, he speaks of Not, i.e., desperate need, necessity. This drives to the same “unspeakable that culminated in Auschwitz to such a world-historical level, measure”, that is also the same grave “heavyweight” of which Nietzsche speaks in his thought experiment regarding the eternal return of the same.⁹¹

91 Ibid.View all notes

However, and this is why I argue that we need a slow reading to read Heidegger, if we look only for segments on anti-Semitism, reading too quickly, as digital hunters (maybe we need a more accurate term) “googling” works well here for the best phrase, the one word that would reveal the key to Heidegger's anti-Semitism, we are not reading Heidegger. The reason is not only as many commentators have noted that these phrases, despite the claims that they contaminate the whole of his work, are relatively few in number but because reading Heidegger remains a challenge.

Sheer garden variety, associative rhetoric is also an obstacle here. If we begin by speaking as exigently as Trawny suggests that we speak of Heidegger's world-historical anti-Semitism, it always transpires, as said above, that we end up by talking of Heidegger's anti-Semitism without qualification. If we are all, as Adorno pointed out, as Sartre points out, anti-Semites in one way or another, we are also, as likewise said above, and as Heidegger points out in Being and Time, already guilty, implicated in advance. This is the identity we share.

What does this mean? I ask this knowing that the reader has already excluded him or herself from Adorno's indictment as from Sartre's indictment. And surely I cannot be right when I suggest along with Adorno and Sartre that speaking against anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism once again and by other means. Thus it will be protested that this cannot be so. There is, there must be a right and wrong way to go about writing on Heidegger's anti-Semitism and Adorno must be excluded and some will be at pains to exclude Derrida too, and of course, Arendt.

Thus we abandon the kind of reading that might permit us to read the Black Notebooks. And in addition we have in advance excluded the context of Heidegger's concern with technology and science as so much distraction – this again is also the reason we do not read Anders. Thus we begin as we end, as readers who have always already skipped the context, readers who have not read the entire text: stuff, petty stuff, political stuff, dated stuff, untimely stuff.

The problem, singulare tantum, as Adorno emphasizes, is the fact of barbarism. Thus Adorno writes that Auschwitz is not a threat that might/might not come to pass, a terrible prospect awaiting us if we do, or if we do not, conduct affairs as we should. For Adorno, Auschwitz was. This having been, this that we as human beings have done is the stone fact.

The problem is more than that Heidegger managed not to name the names of the Jews we would say that he should have named, nor indeed that for the most part his constant reference was a narcissist preoccupation – most professors, pacé Vézin, do this, indeed everyone who does not care to “do” footnotes, does this (with or without meaning to do so). Scholars are careful who they mention because mentioning names takes the focus off their own and only their own ideas, which they are sure they are the only ones ever to have advanced and not having footnotes helps to underwrite that conviction. Alain de Botton does not do footnotes as a popular author; Bruno Latour yes, yes but he is judicious about who he names and Slavoj Žižek has other people to do his research (or to fail to do his research for him, and hence and collectively he has other problems). In France, one can also pretend that an educated reader already knows the references by heart.

We each of us live the reasons why we might not care to cite others (those would be our own Jews, excluded from our discourse) and Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of academic distinction and intellectual capital tells us why. But the problem as Adorno underlines it, in ways that echo Heidegger, is far from the failure to name Jewish philosophers by name: the problem is Kristallnacht in Freiberg and everywhere else; the problem is the Shoah, the Holocaust. It is “genocide” as Adorno speaks of it as the loss of a people, the loss, if we bother to read Heidegger in addition to Adorno here, of even “the death” of these living beings, as it was this, their death, that was taken from them along with everything else expropriated: their possessions, neither accident, nor mistake, to quote Lacoue-Labarthe out of context, precisely en pointe.

Thus Heidegger writes “Many never manage to die their death, others die it frequently.”⁹³

93 Ibid., p. 54.View all notes

We can turn what Heidegger says here into an argument on behalf of the calculative principle he otherwise denounces, in this case via Schmitt: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. When Heidegger defines “The power of machination” as he does by explication here as “the destruction indeed, the godlessness, the dehumanisation of the human into the animal, the using up of the earth, the calculation of the world,”⁹⁴

94 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz”, p. 92.View all notes

Heidegger's argument parallels Adorno as the problem of reducing the human to animal as Derrida underscores this double flattening, and Adorno echoes Heidegger's own invocation of military administrative slang (“liquidation”, “polishing off”) to speak of the deaths of those whose elimination justifies their own militaristic existence:

Adorno has not forgotten the wartime context which allowed this, the context of the exception of the exception, here again as Schmitt would say, the authority of military law, justifying every means, and with that every justification as Heidegger outlines in his account of Machenschaft in the Beiträge.

What we condemn in Heidegger in the awful quote from the Bremen lectures is also appropriated by Adorno, who speaks of the same victims of the concentration camps as those who die a death that is not their own. Thus for Adorno as for Heidegger, “they do not die”. What these victims lose as they lose their life is their own death: the death they once might have died is removed such that that they only die in the order of mechanized extermination. This machinal, organized, ordered death is the force of Heidegger's analogy with mechanized agriculture, an analogy brought to the level of animal life by Heidegger with a force of compulsion, repeated again and again in the Überlegungen, the Black Notebooks. What is taken from an animal “put down” – even for the sake of kindness – is the animal's life and the animal's death. This we call (and we lie when we say this) euthanasia. And in philosophical and medical ethics it is purported to be: a good death as deaths go for animals but also for the old, for the sick, and some would say, for the handicapped.

1 See here: Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, pp. 31f.

2 Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Heidegger et «les juifs», the result of a conference held at the Bibliotheque National in Paris in January 2015 as well as the (forthcoming) volume consequent upon conference held in April 2015 in Siegen: Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer, Martin Heideggers »Schwarze Hefte” – Eine philosophisch-politische Debatte. A reflection on this last conference, beginning with the cautionary hyperbole, “Siegen is the most horrific city in the world”, has appeared authored by Hannah Lühmann: “Hier wird Heidegger der Prozess gemacht” in Die Welt, 27 April 2015 and, still more reflectively, if “walking dead” or zombie-style, a participant contribution by Dieter Thomä, “Eine Heidegger-Tagung in Siegen. Kann ein Untoter sterben?,” Neue Züricher Zeitung, 29 April 2015.

3 Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks: 1931–1941.

4 I develop this point in Babich, “Heidegger's Black Notebooks: The Nachlass and Its Wirkungsgeschichte”.

5 There are a number of such reports, given for the most part in reviews. See, for one example, Greta Lührs’ interview with Sidonie Kellerer, “Des Meisters neue Kleider,” 5 March 2015 in Hohe Luft.

6 Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, pp. 31f. Already made available in French, as if in time for the conference held at the start of 2015, an English translation is available as Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy.

7 See Heidegger, Être et temps. Indeed, the challenges of translating Heidegger's Sein und Zeit have been compared to the challenges of translating Luther and thus to a reflection on translation as such. As Pierre Legrand observes, it is significant that the latter range of translations might be said to have “compelled the French language and French philosophy to undergo the kind of modification allowing for the narrativization of unfamiliar ideas”. Pierre Legrand, “Issues in the Translatability of Law”, p. 30.

8 François Vézin, «L’étendue du désastre» (8 août 2014).

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 If Heidegger did not ultimately support Stein, this matches his constant effort to keep his own work at a distance from what he felt to be a conflation with anthropology as this separated him from Stein, Husserl's student. This would also drive him to distance himself from Jaspers and other representatives of Lebensphilosophie and precisely the directions Stein sought to advance. Stein, whose work continued the direction of Max Scheler more than Heidegger, could not but follow another path, one that in fact would have, in a different world, taken her closer to Eugen Fink. See very generally, Alasdair MacIntyre, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue and more specifically, Cordula Haderlein, Individuelles Mensch-Sein in Freiheit und Verantwortung: die Bildungsidee Edith Steins, as well as Hans Rainer Sepp, “Edith Steins Stellung innerhalb der phänomenologische Bewegung”.

13 François Vézin, op. cit.

14 The philosopher of music based in Nice, Daniel Charles writes on Smith and Husserl and Heidegger in his essay, “Singing Waves”. I discuss Smith in Babich, The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and Technology, and see too Smith himself, especially his “Cartesian Theory and Musical Science,” in his The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music, pp. 119–42.

15 Babich, “Ad Jacob Taubes”, v–x.

16 Ihde himself is the source for this reference drawn from Smith's unpublished essay, “Heidegger and Insights Leading to a Phenomenology of Sound”, cited in Ihde as “Speech is a thing of sound, not a phenomenon but an akoumenon”. Ihde, Sense and Significance, p. 31. See too F. Joseph Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound: A Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music. There is a large if esoteric literature here and an even larger research project. See for one recent contribution, Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, and see too my own study, Babich, The Hallelujah Effect.

17 Paul Virilio has his own line on this, as did Jean Baudrillard and in part, but in different ways, Friedrich Kittler and Sloterdijk too, among not too many others.

18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 82. See also Samuel Fleischacker, Heidegger's Jewish Followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas.

19 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 47. Translation modified.

20 Sartre writes even more explicitly: “their atheism differs in no wise from that of a Roger Martin du Gard, who says he disengaged himself from the Catholic faith.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 47.

21 Cf., here, Babich, “Nietzsche's Antichrist: The Birth of Modern Science out of the Spirit of Religion”.

22 See again, Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. Trawny is explicit that there is a problem here even as he argues that one can be, as Richard Wolin cites him in his own review in the Jewish Review of Books, “constructive” and even as he argued for the value of continued Heidegger studies, for Trawny it remains the case, in a striking parallel with Habermas’ language with respect to the danger that once was attributed to the influence of Nietzsche: “The being-historical construction can lead to a contamination of Heidegger's thinking.” Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, p. 93.

23 Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. IV Abteilung: Hinweise und Aufzeichnungen, Vol. 96, Überlegungen XII–XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941), p. 262.

24 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 262.

25 Cf. Trawny, “The being-historical construction can lead to a contamination of Heidegger's thinking.” Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung, p. 93.

26 Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 1 + 2: Band 1: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte.

27 Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, with a new preface by Michael Walzer (New York: Schocken, 1995).

28 Heidegger, “Überlegungen XIV”, GA 96.

29 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 262.

30 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 136.

31 Ibid., p. 36.

32 I discuss this, also with respect to Günther Anders, in Babich, “O, Superman! or Being Towards Transhumanism: Martin Heidegger, Günther Anders, and Media Aesthetics”.

33 See Jason Koebler, “Martine Rothblatt Wants to Grow Human Organs in Pigs at This Farm”, as well as Joachim Müller-Jung, “Das Schwein, dein Spender. Vermenschlicht: gentechnisch veränderte Ferkel aus München”, and Walter Weder, Jörg Seebach, and Ruth Baumann-Hölzle, „Ersatzteillager Mensch,”. Cf., Babich, “Körperoptimierung im digitalen Zeitalter, verwandelte Zauberlehrlinge, und künftige Übermenschsein”.

34 In addition to this, there is the ontic affair of it all as it is and has been for the largest part conducted in industrial laboratories across the world, and that includes the USA, all without regulation because all without report (Ag-gag laws keep much more than simple cruelty out of sight).

35 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 113.

36 Ibid., p. 72. For Heidegger this assessment is simply an “idle” projection. Earlier, Heidegger, notes “The superman constitutes a transformation and thus a rejection of man so far. Accordingly, the public figures who in the course of current history emerge in the limelight are as far from the superman's nature as is humanly possible”. Ibid., p. 70.

37 For to be sure, practical hitches remain: the seamless fantasy of switchable, upgradable body components is hardly at hand but the market for pig-human hybrids, and a profitable side-market in drugs and anti-rejection drugs, will be there as long as there is aging and disease – and what Sartre called bad faith.

38 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 40.

39 Ibid.

40 And you can turn to your Nietzsche scholar friends and ask them what they think of Heidegger's Nietzsche (as it is quite popular to denounce it) or the way Heidegger read everyone else in the history of philosophy. Heidegger's Nazism is like Heidegger's reading of the history of philosophy, the history of metaphysics, the end of philosophy.

41 Heidegger's word is noise Lärm and (the Latin is worth remarking upon for a Greek fetishist, as Heidegger was), it is the flatus vocus that echoes in his complaints.

42 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 73. The reference to Aristotle is, of course, a literal one; cf. 72–73.

43 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 95.

44 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 4.

45 However else would we know about the brain if it were not for the brains, thank you Claude Bernard, of dogs and the brains of the macaque monkeys we continue to capture, slave trade for our laboratories, in the wild? See for further discussion and references, Babich, “Mirror Neurons and the New Red Peter: On Laboratory Life”.

46 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, pp. 5–6.

47 And after science and technology about which we are sure we could be thinking if mentioning it here were not a distraction, there is the literary emphasis of most translators who usually work less as philosophers (that time is past) than in departments of German. This is not true in the USA, but only for exceptional reasons (I am speaking of recent translators of Heidegger's works) and it is the reason we do not have more translations and it is above all the reason we still do not have a complete translation of Nietzsche's posthumous works.

48 Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France.

49 Ricoeur, mindful of his own legacy, met Dominique for the interview, as Dominique mentioned when we met before his death, but as he regretted, opted for a dinner “off the record”.

50 See my discussion of Duhem and German/French science in Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science”.

51 Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science”.

52 I discuss this with attention to the time that was the first few decades of the twentieth century in the philosophy of science (and mathematics) in Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science.

53 “Let us agree that this point – which is itself nothing but an algebraic expression, only a world of geometric consonance take to designate an ensemble of n numbers – changes, from one instant to another, by an algebraic formula. From this convention, so perfectly algebraic in nature, so completely arbitrary in appearance, we deduce, with perfect rigor, the consequences that calculation can draw from it, and we say that we are setting forth mechanics.” Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science”, p. 93

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid., p. 112.

56 Duhem, “German Science and German Virtues”, here p. 122.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., p. 123

59 Heidegger, Überlegungen VIII, 5, GA 95, p. 97.

60 Heidegger, GA 96, pp. 46 (from Überlegungen XII, 24).

61 Heidegger, Ibid., p. 38.

62 That argument can be made, but for his part, Duhem is talking about “scholasticism”, that is what my old Jesuit teacher, the Canadian Thomist, Bernard Lonergan, author of the conspicuously named Method in Theology (1972) and Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), with its famous listings of points to the seemingly nth degree, no mere sic et non, took the mid-twentieth century to an extraordinary pitch well beyond the tradition of generalized empirical method of “transcendental Thomism” inaugurated by the Belgian Jesuit philosopher, Joseph Maréchal. Indeed, Maréchal was probably one of the reasons Lonergan was able to answer my questions regarding the intersection of mysticism and empiricism as well as he did. Maréchal's initial main works included: Le point de départ de la métaphysique: leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du problème de la connaissance, 5 vols (Bruges-Louvain, 1922–47) and Études sur le psychologie des mystiques, 2 vols (1926, 1937).

63 Dominique Janicaud, Une Généalogie du spiritualisme français. Aux sources du bergsonisme: Ravaisson et la métaphysique.

64 Dominique Janicaud, La Puissance du rationnel. Janicaud published his own study of the darkness of Heidegger's thought, L'Ombre de cette pensée: Heidegger et la question politique together with Heidegger's insight into the more banal darkness of rationality itself.

65 This reflection is part of the history of ideas and indeed of books and publication. Thus Janicaud reissued his first book (réédition) and moved thereby as he did so from the scholastic provinces of Rome (La Haye) to Paris (Vrin), republishing his Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris, J. Vrin, 1997).

66 See Janicaud, Heidegger en France, p. 33.

67 See, for example, Babich, “Arendt's Radical Good and the Banality of Evil: Echoes of Scholem and Jaspers in Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt”.

68 Werner Brock, Nietzsches Idee der Kultur.

69 Heike Delitz: „Brock, Werner Gottfried”. Martin Heidegger/Kurt Bauch, Briefausgabe: Briefwechsel 1932–1975, p. 51.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid.

72 Adorno «Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (1966), p. 92.

73 Ibid.

74 See Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée: A Star Friendship. Cf. Paul Rée, Basic Writings.

75 Hirsch corroborates from a contemporary's perspective, as does, a bit earlier, Hans Georg-Gadamer, Hannah Arendt's report of Heidegger as the “hidden king”: “We were fascinated with Heidegger's new approach to philosophy which he developed in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), a book that was published during his years at Marburg. Instead of starting with man as the creator of his world, it was Being (das Sein) that in epochal events opens a world for man's consideration. I belonged to a small group of students who were invited by Heidegger for a discussion of phenomenology every two weeks at his house. The sessions always started with Mrs. Heidegger reading a poem. Following the meetings we would have long, animated discussions among ourselves” (Hirsch, “Autobiographical Sketches”, p. 296.

76 Elisabeth F. Hirsch, 5 February 1988, Letter to the Editor, New York Times (March 2, 1988).

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 This is Gilbert Ryle's “bad man” apothegm as Robert Bernasconi cites it from The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No. 850, February 17, 1989, p. 12 in Bernasconi, “Habermas and Arendt on the Philosopher's ‘Error’: Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger”, p. 4. Michael André Bernstein assesses the statement which is parsed in the THES from a letter written by James Thrower as somehow merely “supposed” simply because it is a report of a direct communication. See Bernstein's footnote 18 in his Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-century German Writing, p. 132. To be sure, the present author can corroborate the difficulty to which Bernstein alludes: Bernasconi's original citation is minimalist, if, as I can say, quite accurate, as I have spent time tracking what seem to be comparatively archaic archaeologies of microfilm cassettes, loading and reading at the glacial pace of that same reproductive technology. See also Babich, “The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger's Linguistic Omega”.

80 Heidegger, GA 96, §138, p. 161.

81 I have this from Jacques Taminiaux, and recommend that others start with Taminiaux to begin.

82 The list is longer still if we add those with animus, against Heidegger, as this too propels a thinker, we can count Jean-Michel Salanskis.

83 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 56.

84 NB: it remains a bit misleading to speak of the black notebooks in the plural here, not because the notebooks are not plural, they are, but the passages in question are limited to those to be found in the collective volume including the notebooks dating from 1939 to 1941. The next volume, which should have been published by the end of this past year (but manifestly was not: it should appear any moment now at the start of 2015), lacks any such references, inconvenient as that is, as the years of the war go on. Yet as the above citation from Trawny's reflections make clear, what is at stake is a concern to read Heidegger's entire philosophy under the lens of these notebooks and the concerns that appear in them. What Heidegger had wished to say, as he spoke of Nietzsche, as appropriate to philosophy per se, via the exemplary name of Aristotle, and following the fleurit vision of the doxographers of antiquity, he was born, he worked, he died, will not be said of Heidegger. Nor has it been said of Nietzsche. But Heidegger's point, that our concern with biography keeps us from the work, could not be more evidently confirmed. See Babich, “Heidegger's Black Notebooks: The Nachlass and Its Wirkungsgeschichte.”

85 Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger's Black Notebooks”. Wolin also details the parallel Heidegger makes with Americanism and all the other negative associations of Machenschaft.

86 Heidegger, GA 95, p. 194.

87 Theodor W. Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” pp. 92–109.

88 Derrida, Fichus: (Discours de Francfort), p. 56. I discuss Adorno on this note which he includes in his Beethoven book in Babich, “Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals, and Jews”.

89 «[à] insulter l'animal dans l'homme ou à traiter l'homme d'animal.” Derrida, Fichus, 56. For a discussion, see Marie Berne, Derrida, Eloge de l'idiotie: pour une nouvelle rhetorique chez Breton, Faulkner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 185f.

90 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz”, p. 92. (“Er treibt die Menschen zu dem Unsäglichen, das in Auschwitz nach weltgeschichtlichem Maß kulminierte”.)

91 Ibid.

92 Heidegger, GA 96, p. 51.

93 Ibid., p. 54.

94 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz”, p. 92.

95 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 362.

96 Ibid.