Part I
ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM
1Anti-Heidegger
Anatomy of Anti-Anti-Semitism
FROM FEBRUARY 2014 TO MARCH 2015 the German Klostermann Verlag has published the first four volumes of what will come to be generally known as Martin Heideggerâs Black Notebooks. The Black Notebooks are a collection of notes written by Heidegger between the years 1931 to 1975, which he himself before his death prepared for posthumous publication, as the last volumes, 94â102, of the integral edition of his collected works, the Gesamtausgabe. The four published volumes contain the notes from 1931 to 1948. These notes could be generally characterized as philosophical fragments; however, their characterization has been controversial. Indeed, immediately upon publication, in fact even before they were published, the Black Notebooks sparked off a heated controversy. The debate started in the feuilleton sections of European press, followed by international media, then transported to academic venues, conferences, journals, and books, to take the shape of a scholarly and philosophical conversation, an extraordinary intellectual event. The entire controversy concerned a handful of notes, mostly from the years 1939â1941, covering together about three pages of text, out of about 1,800 pages of all so far published Black Notebooks. What is common to all the controversial notes is that they refer to Jews or âJewishâ things. All these references constitute negative statements and have been thus almost unanimously recognized as anti-Semitic.
In what follows, I will show how the controversy concerning Heideggerâs Black Notebooks, built up around and in opposition to anti-Semitism, unfolding, that is, as anti-anti-Semitic discourse, has been forming a contemporary site of non-encounter between the philosophical and the Jewish. I will in particular identify the underlying epistemo-political pre-conceptions of this anti-anti-Semitic operation, and indicate moments where it echoes or threatens to converge with tropes of a discourse that may be designated, by this very same anti-anti-Semitic discourse itself, as anti-Semitism. This will be just an initial indication, performed in the corpus of a still ongoing conversation. Key concepts, positions, and dynamics of this anti-anti-Semitic discourse will be examined more closely in the following chapters. The main topic here is the critique of anti-Semitism, i.e., anti-anti-Semitism. The focus for now is therefore the debate concerning Heideggerâs anti-Semitic fragments and not these fragments themselves, nor their anti-Semitism. I will come back to the question of anti-Semitism in the second part of this book, and to Heideggerâs anti-Semitism in the epilogue. Presently, as a passage to the controversy, I will simply quote the four most central notes that have been discussed in the current debate:
1âBut the temporary increase in the power of Judaism [Judentum] is grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in its modern development, offered the point of attachment for the expansion of an otherwise empty rationality and calculative capacity, and these thereby created for themselves an abode in the âspiritâ without ever being able, on their own, to grasp the concealed domains of decision. The more originary and inceptual the future decisions and questions become, all the more inaccessible will they remain to this ârace.â (Thus Husserlâs step to the phenomenological attitude, taken in explicit opposition to psychological explanation and to the historical calculation of opinions, is of lasting importanceâand yet this attitude never reaches into the domains of the essential decisions; instead, it entirely presupposes the historical tradition of philosophy. The necessary result shows itself at once in the turning toward a neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy, and this turn ultimately made inevitable a progression to Hegelianism in the formal sense. My âattackâ on Husserl is not directed to him alone and is not at all directed inessentiallyâthe attack is directed against the neglect of the question of being, i.e., against the essence of metaphysics as such, the metaphysics on whose ground the machination of beings is able to determine history. The attack establishes a historical moment of the supreme decision between the primacy of beings and the grounding of the truth of beyng.)â (GA 96: 46; Rojcewicz, 37)
2âThe Jews, with their accentuated talent for calculation, have for the longest time already been âlivingâ according to the principle of race, which is why they are also offering the most vehement resistance to its unrestricted application. The instituting of racial breeding stems not from âlifeâ itself, but from the overpowering of life by machination. What machination pursues with such planning is a complete deracializing of peoples through their being clamped into an equally built and equally tailored instituting of all beings. One with the deracializing is a self-alienation of the peoplesâthe loss of history, i.e., the loss of the domains of decision regarding beyng.â (GA 96: 56; Rojcewicz, 44)
3âThe question of the role of world-Judaism [Weltjudentum] is not a racial question, but a metaphysical one, a question that concerns the kind of singular human existence [MenschentĂźmlichkeit] which, being utterly unattached [schlechthin ungebunden; Rojcewicz translates âin an utterly unrestrained wayâ], can undertake as a world-historical âtaskâ the uprooting of all beings from being.â (GA 96:243; Rojcewicz, 191)
4âThe anti-Christ must, like any âanti-â, originate from the same essential ground as that against which it is âanti-âânamely like âthe Christâ. He originates from the Jewish collective [Judenschaft]. The latter has been, in the era of the Christian Occident, i.e., of Metaphysics, the principle of destruction. The destructive element in the turning of the consummation of Metaphysicsâi.e., of Hegelâs metaphysics through Marx. Spirit and culture become the superstructure of âlifeââi.e., of economy, i.e., of organizationâi.e., of the biologicalâi.e., of the âpeopleâ. When the essential âJewishâ in the metaphysical sense begins to fight against the Jewish, the summit of self-annihilation was reached in history; provided that the âJewishâ has everywhere completely seized control, such that also fighting âthe Jewishââand primarily itâcomes under its dominion.â (GA 97; 20)
ANTI-SEMITISM, THE END OF PHILOSOPHY
The primary anti-anti-Semitic operation effected by the ongoing debate concerning the above passages has been hermeneutic, namely pertaining to the basic relation to the text as such or, more radically, an operation revealing the basic relation to thinking as a relation to text, as a relation of reading. Designating the controversial passages as âanti-Semiticâ has led to questioning the essence of this text, of text in general, and more precisely the nature of the philosophical text, or, on the side of reception, of philosophical reading. Through a hermeneutic procedure, similar to earlier ones already performed in previous Heidegger controversies with respect to the question of National Socialism, the question of anti-Semitism triggered an operation of differentiation and separation, within the Heideggerian text, within the seeming consistency of its texture, between the philosophical and the non-philosophical. In this operation, it is by means of the category âanti-Semitismâ that the Jews have come to signify the limit or end of philosophy.
What is meant by this is not the diverging appreciations of how central to Heideggerâs thought, in general or as expressed in the Black Notebooks, are his discussions of Jews, starting with the explicit passages and variously expanding the scope of this corpus through more or less far-reaching semantic extrapolations (whereby Jews are also intended or should be understood as signified by terms such as âcalculation,â âmachinations,â âuprootedness,â âgroundlessness,â âenemy,â âbeingsâ etc.). One easily joins, for instance, Karsten Harriesâs rejection of Richard Wolinâs exaggerated assertion of Heideggerâs âobsession with World Jewry.â
What I mean is rather the various conceptual devices deployed in order to trace within the Heideggerian text and Western corpus or thought in general a clear separation between anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism and philosophyâboth in Heideggerâs defense or against him. Thus, on the apologetic side, Friedrich Wilhelm von Hermann considers all Heideggerâs texts pertaining to Jews to be âphilosophically without import.â Rosa Maria Marafioti understands âthe non-philosophical passages critical of Jewsâ as the âopinions of a private person.â Jeff Malpas uses the distinction between âphilosophicalâ and âpersonal/political,â and Daniela Vallega-Neu finds the controversial passages not to represent âoriginary thinking.â In contrast and in breach of this original level of philosophy, the anti-Semitic text represents an external and alien element, which can only enter the philosophical text by the effect of âinfectionâ or âcontamination.â âA small, but highly poisonous dose,â Dieter Thomä called it. Stamped âanti-Semitic,â these texts are completely banished from the realm of thought, meaning, and intelligibility. Reading them, the hermeneutical expert Jean Grondin can do nothing more than âshake the headâ and identify them as âNazi war propaganda,â of which Heidegger was the âvictim.â While the apologists use the separation of anti-Semitism and philosophy for surgically removing the malignant passages and thus salvaging the otherwise healthy corpus, the more prosecutorial voices use the exactly same separation for disqualifying the entire oeuvre. Thus, invoking Emmanuel Fayeâs 2005 excommunication of Heideggerâs work from philosophy on the charge of National Socialism (âSuch a work may not remain in philosophy libraries: it rather belongs to the historical archives of Nazism and Hitlerismâ), Marion Heinz upholds the sentence by ruling that âthere can be no âanti-Semitic philosophy.ââ
BAN OF THE COLLECTIVE
For such an operation as this, which determines the limits of philosophy, which thus in a way decides on the definition and essence of philosophy, either a very elaborate reasoning is requiredâor the certainty of self-evidence. The current debate most often seems to hold the mutual exclusion of philosophy and anti-Semitism as self-evident. In any case, no elaborate reasoning has been so far provided for this virtually universal gesture. The desire to distance oneself and oneâs discourse from anti-Semitism, in particular in the historical context of Heideggerâs Black Notebooks entries, is no doubt self-evident. As I explained above, however, the way of anti-anti-Semitism is ambiguous, and may also lead to the opposite of the desired direction. For this reason I find it essential to insist on asking the explicit question: why is anti-Semitism excluded from philosophy? Or better: what in anti-Semitism excludes it from philosophy? Or yet better: what in anti-Semitism, as understood by the current discourse, excludes it from philosophy?
My basic argument, which I will quickly state at the outset, before demonstrating it in the texts, is that this crucial component is not the âanti-,â namely is not the negative attitude of anti-Semitism toward Jews, not what statements anti-Semitism makes about Jews, but rather that it makes any statements about Jews at all, whether negative or positive. In other words, I argue that the problematic component of anti-Semitism, which in the eyes of the current discourse excludes anti-Semitism from philosophy, is the Jews. This means that the current anti-anti-Semitism as it expresses itself in the current Heidegger controversy is grounded on âa certain perception of the Jewsâ as something, a collective being, with respect to which no philosophically relevant statements may be made, namely as something that lies outside of thought.
For demonstrating my claim, I start by referring to one of the most important and omnipresent voices in the current debate, to whom I will continue to refer often in this chapter. Indeed, the basic terms of this debate were set in advance, a few months before the actual publication of the Black Notebooks, through a chain of interactions triggered by their editor, Peter Trawny. Trawnyâs essay on the Black Notebooks was published simultaneously with the Notebooks themselves, but pre-circulated as a draft a few months earlier, and isâas are his editorâs notes in the Gesamtausgabe volumes themselvesâthe most often explicitly and inexplicitly quoted authority and source on the matter. It was Trawny who opened and framed the discussion by initially introducing the accusation of âanti-Semitismâ that had allegedly âcontaminatedâ Heideggerâs thought. As far as I know, Trawny has been so far the only participant in the discussion who also offered an explicit definition of what he meant by âanti-Semitism,â which has not been contested or further discussed, and so seems to express a general consensus. I should emphasize that if my critique of the current discourse often refers to Trawnyâs work, it is not because I find it to be more problematic that others, but, on the contrary, the best articulated and so the most interesting to engage with, the best Gegner, as Heidegger would have it.
The first part of this definition focuses on the âanti-,â the negative component of âhateâ: âAnti-Semiticâwas and is anything affective or administrative directed against Jews based on rumors, prejud...