Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his
Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher’s exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time.
For much of the philosophical community, the
Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical anti-Semitism’ was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews’ own ‘self-destruction’: a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about.
Situating Heidegger’s anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger’s life, work, and legacy.
Tabella dei contenuti
Foreword page vii
I Between Politics and Philosophy 1
1. A Media Affair 1
2. A Nazi by Chance . . . 3
3. Biographical Detail, or Philosophical Nexus? 4
4. Heidegger, an Anti-Semite? 6
5. What Has Been Left Unsaid about the Jewish Question 8
6. The Black Notebooks 9
7. Reductio ad Hitlerum: On the Posthumous Trial of Heidegger 11
8. A Calling to Account? 13
9. From Derrida to Schürmann: Toward an Anarchic Reading 14
10. Taming Heidegger 18
11. The Exclusion of Nazism from Philosophy 19
12. Philosophical Commitment and Political Decision 20
II Philosophy and Hatred of the Jews 22
1. Luther, Augustine, and “the Jews and Their Lies” 22
2. The “Jewish Question” in Philosophy 26
3. Kant and the “Euthanasia of Judaism” 32
4. Hegel and the Jew without Property 36
5. “Anti-anti-Semite?” Nietzsche, the Antichrist, and the Falsification of Values 46 6. Lies and Fakery: The Non-being of the Jew in Mein Kampf 59
III The Question of Being and the Jewish Question 65
1. The Night of Being 65
2. In An Esoteric Tone . . . 68
3. Anti-Semitism and Never-dispelled Doubts 69
4. Metaphors of an Absence 75
5. The Jew and the Oblivion of Being 77
6. The Greeks, the Germans – and the Jews 80
7. The Rootless Agents of Acceleration 84
8. Against the Jewish Intellectuals 88
9. Geist and ruach: The “Original Fire” and the Spectral Breath 93
10. Machination and Power 96 11. The Desertification of the Earth 99
12. The Apocalyptic and the “Prince of This World” 101
13. The Deracification of Peoples 103
14. Race or Rank? 106 15. The Metaphysics of Blood 110
16. “My ‘Attack’ on Husserl” 115
17. Heidegger, Jünger, and the Topology of the Jew 123
18. The Enemy: Heidegger versus Schmitt 129
19. Polemos and Total War 142
20. Weltjudentum: The Jewish World Conspiracy 148
21. Judeo-Bolshevism 154
22. Weltlos – Without World: The Jew and the Stone 161
23. Metaphysical Anti-Semitism 164
24. The Jew and the “Purification” of Being 169
25. “What Is It about No-thing?” 172
IV After Auschwitz 175
1. Bellum judaicum 175
2. To Abdicate to Silence? 178
3. “The Production of Corpses” and Ontic Indifference 184
4. The Ontological Massacre: Parmenides and Auschwitz 188
5. “Do They Die? They Do Not Die, They Are Liquidated. . .” 191
6. Positionality, Technology, Crime 193
7. The Northeast Wind: Heading Toward Defeat 196
8. Selbstvernichtung: The Shoah and the “Self-Annihilation” of the Jews 199
9. The Betrayal of the “German Essence” 202
10. If Germany is a Lager, Then Who Is the Victim? 206
11. The “Question of Guilt” and the Crime Against the Germans 211
12. The “Note for Jackasses”: Against the Jewish Prophecy 212
13. World Democracy and the Dictatorship of Monotheism 218
14. “An Old Spirit of Revenge Makes its Way upon the Earth” 220
15. Whether It Is Possible to Forgive a Rabbi 223
16. Cousin Gross and Cousin Klein: Jews and Family Resemblances 224
17. The Oblivion of the Jew: The Hidden Debt 229
18. Where Paul is Hidden 233
19. The Future of Being and the Hebrew Name 238
20. A Pagan Landscape 240
21. The Other Beginning, the Beginning of the Other: Anarchy, Birth 241
22. An Angel in the Black Forest: Apocalypse and Revolution 243
Notes 248
Index 303
Circa l’autore
Donatella Di Cesare is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome.
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