questionability and interpretation: Dissemination (Derridas), Dialogue and Dialectic (Gadamer), Means WIthout End (Agamben)

“But should readers beware? Will an afternoon with Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics or the work of one of Heidegger’s acolytes – Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, for instance – really see readers washed away, unawares, by the undercurrents of Nazi thinking? It doesn’t really seem very likely, and that’s not just because there’s very little actual Fuhrer-loving, Semite-hating stuff to be read in these works. It’s due to the fact that readers are not empty receptacles into which ideas, good, bad and ugly, are just pumped. People interpret, engage, and – yes – think about what they are reading. To worry that philosophical works, and works as prolix as Heidegger’s, works that demand efforts of interpretation, might accidentally turn readers into Nazis is as patronising and absurd as the early-1990s concern that kids, listening to Judas Priest records, were being turned into the children of Beelzebub.”

I found some stuff from these seminars in Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes; his source is Faye’s book. They’re interesting because it’s rare for Heidegger to say anything about politics, and here he goes into Hegel’s ideas of the leadership of the state. It sounds like the Heidegger that Leo Strauss critizes. Normally, I don’t care for Heidegger’s politics, but I’m curious about this “radical ontologization of the state”, and how Heidegger makes the jump from fundamental ontology to something as practical as how to run a government. I’ll probably pick up Faye’s book when its remaindered. I’ve bought the other H & politics books that way a couple years after they were released. There’s always a big splash when they come out, but they never sell very well, because few people actually care to read Heidegger’s political insights.

BTW, Heidegger can be quite nastily anti-semitic in some of his personal communications, even though that didn’t prevent him from having life long personal relations with some Jews. One research topic someone should do is: when exactly did Heidegger adopt his stance against biological racism? That would closely tie in with his statements on blood and race, which don’t appear to have the meaning they have today in our age of genetic engineering, and instead seem to refer to ethnic cultures.

Also, the notion that there’s something ontologically special about the German people pops up through out Heidegger’s works. This is probably one reason non-German readers (and I suspect most Germans too) don’t buy into everything Heidegger wrote.

My German being atrocious, I hope some graduate students somewhere will grace us with translations of these seminars. However, after immersion in Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness, I’m hoping Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938-40) and Das Ereignis (1941/42) are translated before Alzheimer’s or Dementia bring my readings of ontology to an end.

Right away I notice that this bit,

“On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State (Winter 1933-34)
This is Faye’s secret weapon. An unpublished lecutre series on politics and Hitlerism.”

I’ve never heard of this title. WS 33/34 is published as Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (WS 1933/34) in GA 36/37. I assume they are the same lecture course, and that Faye doesn’t haven’t access to a secret lecture series other scholars don’t know about. I haven’t read it – translation in preparation – but I’ve heard it is the most problematic for Heidegger and Nazism apologists. However, most other scholars have a different interpretation from Faye.