Studies in Continental Thought

Dominique Janicaud, David Pettigrew, François Raffoul

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780253019776
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Dominique Janicaud claimed that every French intellectual movement—from existentialism to psychoanalysis—was influenced by Martin Heidegger. This translation of Janicaud's landmark work, Heidegger en France, details Heidegger's reception in philosophy and other humanistic and social science disciplines. Interviews with key French thinkers such as Françoise Dastur, Jacques Derrida, Éliane Escoubas, Jean Greisch, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Luc Nancy are included and provide further reflection on Heidegger's relationship to French philosophy. An intellectual undertaking of authoritative scope, this work furnishes a thorough history of the French reception of Heidegger's thought.

PART I

Introduction

First Discoveries

Once upon a time, a poor Swabian child was born in a little village east of the Black Forest. By the sheer force of his intellect and the tenacity of his own efforts, he became world-famous and conquered the intelligentsia of the “hereditary enemy,” France. How was Heidegger able to occupy, for more than half a century, the privileged position of being a fashionable philosopher, a maître à penser in the intellectual and cultural capital of Paris? Some Americans have posed the question more bluntly: how could minds as acute and intelligent as those of the great French intellectuals, from Sartre to Lacan, have become ensnared in the jargonistic traps of a Swabian peasant, who might have been clever, but who was ultimately a Nazi? They even made him into a French philosopher, by claiming that he was for fifty years the maître à penser of all of French philosophy (which, incidentally, would have been completely mistaken).¹

This French “Heideggerianism” has been puzzling for some time in America, but especially in Germany. As early as 1946, Karl Löwith had this to say on the subject: “The fact that Heidegger found during the last war a wide audience among French intellectuals, in contrast to the situation in Germany at that time, is a symptom that merits renewed attention.”² Is it yet again another almost incomprehensible coquetry on the part of those French? An indulgence? A fancy? An aberration? After all, the German expression, Wie Gott im Frankreich, designates a happiness overflowing with abundance, life in a land of plenty, with all of its supposed and desired delights and follies.³ Not only do the French have the best wines and the finest cheeses, but they also decided that they can understand German philosophers—Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular—better than the Germans themselves. And they produced an unexpected and quite sophisticated French Nietzsche and Gallic Heidegger, who in many respects were more appealing and piquant than the originals. A major newspaper in Germany devoted an entire—and quite sarcastic—page to the “German philosopher’s new adventures in France.”⁴ Those French!

Heidegger himself did not miss the opportunity to exploit his French connection in the last part of his life. Finding that he was no longer a prophet in his own country after the war, he received something like a consolation prize with the French. But what a prize! It was in no way restricted to a handful of the faithful around Jean Beaufret. In this affair, an even more surprising fact was that Heidegger’s “influence” in France over the course of more than half a century constituted a multi-faceted intellectual adventure that was far from being a passive reception. It was rather a continual creation, a veritable dazzling display whose sparks extended well beyond the sphere of strictly academic philosophy. There really seems to have been a “French Heidegger.”⁵ What a contrast with Heidegger’s reception in his own country! Whether hostile or favorable, that reception remained mostly confined to academic commentary, even in the cases of Jürgen Habermas and Karl Löwith, with the notable exception of Adorno, whose polemical text, The Jargon of Authenticity,⁶ did not hold the public’s attention for long. Gadamer was a sort of privileged witness and almost an arbiter of these German debates, without anyone ever knowing which side he favored.⁷ Whereas in France Heidegger was the object of considerable intellectual debate, certainly with some misfiring or some duds, while serving as a catalyst for linguistic and conceptual inventions and opening new domains of research, by contrast, in Germany, the “Heidegger effect” fell flat, or nearly so: the Heidegger case was only the occasion, a particularly troublesome one, for an examination of the “German guilt.” This settling of accounts was too serious and too personal to be conducive to creative thinking (not to mention the sort of intellectual playfulness found in Lacan, which was unthinkable in Germany).

Heidegger in France: would that be the best as well as the worst? Perhaps, but it would be perilous to speak as a judge here, when the first and foremost concern is to write a history of the French reception of Heidegger’s thought—a project whose value nobody denies.⁸ But on what conditions? First, of course, on the condition of avoiding any nationalistic pride, or its opposite: a systematically bad conscience. That should be especially easy since the word “France” designates not only a geographical entity or a national community, but also and more importantly a cultural and spiritual home expanded to include French-speaking philosophers (as well as foreign interpretations whose translations would come to enrich the debate within France). Above all, the historian must first narrate and analyze: analyze in order to narrate advisedly, narrate in order to analyze impartially, support one’s analyses through the narrative—and inversely. While remaining a philosopher (as one must in order to be able to confront the difficulties of the project, both terminological and conceptual), I shall undertake first to be a historian, true to the Greek sense of historia: an inquiry that enables one to understand events. The effort at impartiality, however, will not rule out criticism. The reader would be rightfully disappointed if I limited myself to reviewing the various stages of an exceptional “reception,” merely recording its various elements (to the extent that it would even be possible to limit oneself to such an impartial account): should one not set aside what is judged unimportant and at least lay the ground for a philosophical assessment of what is essential?

From the outset, Heidegger’s name had hardly crossed the Rhine when translations and interpretations were already being put forward. It was indispensable for this study, after having introduced and presented them, to assess their philosophical scope and limits. The author, therefore, will assume the inevitable (and salutary) risks that such an undertaking entails.

From Fad to Method

Is our task, then, to give a mere digest of the history of a fad? This is a question that is partially justified, but only partially. It is clear that Heidegger’s thinking came into the intellectual foreground in France at different times and that the inventiveness of that reception would not have been as intense (and perhaps would not even have existed) without the interest of a vast audience. How could the most difficult and austere philosophy have received such an exceptionally favorable reception? Even if one takes into account the temporary eclipses or the virulent reactions that attempted to get in its way, this fascination with Heidegger does not fail to surprise or trouble the vast majority of interpreters and historians of ideas. More generally: how could it be, is it even acceptable, that matters as serious as philosophical reflection and the most intimate movement of thoughts (which are going to orient action, ethics, politics, and so forth) are subject to external, sudden and superficial influences, or to circumstantial positions imitations? In philosophy, as elsewhere, “fame is in the end only the sum total of all misunderstandings gathered around a new name.” In spite of himself, Heidegger assumed Rilke’s disillusioned assessment for himself.⁹

The historian that I intend to remain will not censor these misunderstandings, but rather put them in context so that they may be better understood. The moralist is free to take offense, to condemn or condone. The fact is that the history of ideas is just as impure as history tout court: on the one hand, it is a matter of a purely intellectual analysis; on the other hand, it includes all-too-human passions, the most contradictory and violent “mass movement.” Intellectual or philosophical history is no less subject to contingencies, arbitrariness, and absurdity than political or diplomatic history. Certainly, the work of the historian consists in bringing interpretive structures to light in the confused mass of traces and documents. But let the historian beware of trying to impose too much order based upon one’s preferences or political or ideological orientation!

These preliminary reflections on the real difficulties of the undertaking might be discouraging. It is certain that when faced with the complexity of the “Heidegger effect” in France, considering him or herself incompetent to capture the most speculative subtleties, the historian will pass the ball to the philosopher, who will no doubt be tempted in turn to avoid overly scrutinizing such a welter, which will judged to be unrefined, journalistic, or anecdotal. Without claiming to find a definitive or indisputable balance in an inquiry that demands varied, contrasted, and even opposed perspectives, I have decided to itemize all these difficulties in order to arrive at a method sui generis, by weaving together—thanks to the thread of the narration that constitutes this first part—a text fitted to the specificities, singularities, and even the aberrations of the strange story of the eventful reception of an exceptionally difficult thought.

It is true that Heidegger was at the center of French intellectual life, but not continuously and not in the same way over the course of seventy years: before the war, after Liberation, up to “the Farias affair,” and beyond. There was not a continuous expansion of his influence; rather, there were ruptures, upheavals, reversals, and strange delays, too: for example, it took nearly sixty years for two complete translations of Being and Time to finally appear in French!

“What is surprising in the reception of Heidegger in France is its slowness as much as its constancy and intensity,” noted the greatly missed Jean-Michel Palmier.¹⁰ Here, I will tell the tale of this unusual history—cryptic (like a mystery novel), at times dramatic (like a love story or a soap opera)—and I will tell it in its highs and lows, at its inspired peaks as well as its polemical episodes or extra-philosophical agendas. I will also endeavor to punctuate the narration with critical analyses. My aim is not only to raise the level of the debate or to restore it to its proper level, which would already be justified since the body of thought in question is so complex and demanding. Not to pursue the investigation all the way to the foundations and choices of that thought would be to condemn oneself to merely following or recording superficial effects. Is it impossible to trace these back to their presuppositions? One must at least try to address all issues throughout the many philosophical and ideological conflicts that I will analyze, in their clashes and in their truces.

This will be an interpretive text, then: no more, no less; and, in order to give it substance, to render it as interesting and as exhaustive as possible, instructive, and (why not?) useful, it is plainly necessary to be respectful of facts, dates, texts—and to meet the demands proper to the genre, by inscribing oneself within the lineage of the “histories of reception.” On this path, with regard to Heidegger, this work will be pioneering, at least in the French-speaking world (whereas, with regard to Nietzsche, for example, the reception of his ideas and texts has already been the subject of significant work).¹¹

These two giants, Nietzsche and Heidegger, however different they may be in other respects, share a common trait: they both were the subject of receptions in France so exceptional that they became, in a sense, “French philosophers.” This recognition is more surprising in the case of Heidegger than Nietzsche: Nietzsche did not hesitate to rail against Prussian heaviness or German bad taste by contrasting them with the wit and style of the French. Heidegger, in contrast—and he has been rather harshly criticized for this—based his meditative power on the German-ness of his language, which he privileged along with Greek; he associated the tasks of essential thought with an approach that rejected universalism. Whereas Nietzsche, inspired by our French moralists and novelists, courted the support of the most distinguished French minds (to receive a letter from Taine filled him with an immense joy), Heidegger at first did little, in the early part of his career, to cultivate such connections. On the contrary, his indisputably nationalistic engagement in 1933, his attacks on Cartesianism, and the relative dearth of significant references to the great French authors (aside from the most classical, Descartes and Pascal, in Being and Time) did not seem destined to strike a chord in France. One should also point out that the French enthusiasm for Heidegger ran counter more than once to the prevailing cultural and political climate: before the war, when anti-German feelings were prevalent (even among intellectuals), one would think that Heidegger would have found his first admirers among those on the extreme right who had been seduced by Italian fascism, and then by Hitler. This was not at all the case, as his first admirers were on the contrary the great liberal intellectuals, who were mostly Jewish. After the war, the collapse of Nazism ought to logically have alienated the French intelligentsia from German thought in general and from Heidegger in particular. Again, this was not at all what happened; one had to wait for the publication of Farias’ book in 1987 for a realignment to occur, one that nonetheless did not associate “Heideggerianism” with the extreme right.¹² The French reception of Heidegger was thus not exempt from peculiarities (which some might denounce as a kind of intellectual masochism) and it indisputably appears more disconcerting than that of Nietzsche. This paradoxical aspect, which I am not the first to note,¹³ should not be minimized: instead, our task shall be to contextualize and analyze it.

Heidegger himself was surprised by this reception, but was able to turn it to his advantage, to the point of exploiting this fame among his compatriots to some ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Translators’ Introduction
• Part I.
• Part II. Interviews
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index