Supplement

Given the recent publication of another volume in German of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Anmerkungen, volume 97 of Heidegger’s Collected Edition), Nancy appends some remarks concerning Heidegger’s relationship to Christianity. He finds this relationship to be marked by a view, on Heidegger’s part, that Christianity itself is divided between a “univocal” aspect, more in line with his own thinking of being and the originary beginning, and an “equivocal” or ambiguous aspect, associated more with the institutional and dogmatic aspects of Christianity. This view suggests a strange rivalry between Heidegger’s thinking and a certain Christianity, despite the philosopher’s proclaimed anti-Christianism. What remains unexamined is the place of Judaism within this broad historical dynamic.

11

Grace, as something that cannot be foreseen requires a flaw, a breach or an insecurity, may be related in Heidegger to what he never ceased calling a task, one that required deferral, interrogative suspense, and uncertainty. While Heidegger maintained such suspense, he ran the risk of a too great certainty regarding being, of reifying it into a substance. His thought thus opened both a rich philosophical resource, but also opened it to a sordid sacrificial violence. Heidegger often speaks of sacrifice in his work, and of war. If we relate such statements to the thinking of destruction and ending found in the Black Notebooks, and to the role of the Jews in this thinking, and if we take the true measure of his evocations of sacrifice and destruction, we are left speechless in the face of a harsh truth: Heidegger not only was anti-Semitic, he attempted to think to its final extremity a deep historico-destinal necessity of anti-Semitism. In this light, Heidegger’s anti-Semitism can be seen as even more grave than the biologism of the Nazis’ racism.

4

Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is “historial” because it attributes to the Jewish people a task that is both world-historical and philosophically significant, having to do with the uprooting of beings. Why, according to Heidegger’s logic, must this be attributed to the Jews, since the process described involves multiple agents? Because the Jews are the racialized people that brings about a “deracialization” of humanity, a levelling and equivalence in indifference. This process can be compared by analogy with Marx’s analysis of money as the general equivalent, and of the proletariat as the agent and figure of revolution. For Heidegger, the new beginning of humanity requires a figure, a type, embodied in a people capable of hastening the end. For every singular beginning requires a people, as does every end.

1

Heidegger’s discourse in the Black Notebooks is banal in the sense of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” This discourse absorbed the doxa of anti-Semitism circulating in Europe from 1920–1940. Heidegger thus transfers the banality of anti-Semitism into philosophical thinking.

10

Perhaps rancor—in the sense of bitter disappointment and rage at unjust deception—is a more appropriate term than hatred for describing what infected the West from its beginnings, insofar as the latter promised itself completion and fulfillment. Such a completion then could only take the form of destruction, which Heidegger both dreaded and wished for. Such thinking gives rise to a form of despair that couples misery (Not, distress) with the need for an Other that harbors an absolute alterity through which a new and essential event may become possible. While this configuration may be highly questionable, it does not invalidate the thinking of alterity and multiplicity that was, perhaps ironically, inspired by Heidegger, in thinkers such as Sartre, Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and even Deleuze. Through such thinkers there may be seen a thought derived in part from Heidegger which in no way transmits the anti-Semitic configurations underpinning Heidegger’s fixation on the fulfillment of being. Indeed, they attest to a motif of Jewish alterity, which ironically can in turn be seen to have been made possible by Heidegger, albeit also despite him. But Heidegger also had a sense of another way, which can be seen in his evocation, in the Black Notebooks, of “grace”—which translates charis in Greek, and chen in Hebrew.

9

Heidegger’s thought, insofar as it is organized in the 1930s and 1940s by the motif of the beginning and the historial in its uniqueness, had recourse to anti-Semitism in ways that betray its share in the self-detestation that profoundly characterizes the West. While being in Heidegger arguably exceeds any thinking of a self, in the Black Notebooks he turns it into a kind of Self that is the enemy of every Other, and in turn he conceals this in his published texts. His fixation on a unitary schema of historiality played a part in his refusal to acknowledge the singularity of the extermination of the Jews. The an-archic quality of Derrida’s notion of destinerrance shows that Heidegger’s thinking also points in a different, non-unique form of destining. But Heidegger rather gave in to a rage for the initial and the archi-, though he was equipped to see this trap for what it was. An age-old hatred of self, a rancor of the West against itself, occluded this knowledge.

5

For Heidegger in the Black Notebooks, the West is bringing itself to an end, in oblivion, decline, and devastation. This end is understood ontologically also as the possibility of a beginning, an end that “comes about” both from within and from without. This thinking of a coming devastation of the world has an anti-Semitic motif inscribed within it, insofar as the Jewish people are the driving force of decline and groundlessness. For the end/beginning to come about, the Jewish people must suppress itself, must exclude itself. One finds a similar argument already in Kant, who speaks of the “euthanasia of Judaism.”

2

Heidegger’s thought begins with a questioning of being, of the difference between being and beings. He intends this thinking of being to provide a new beginning of ontology, or something other than an ontology. This thinking need not have any connection with anti-Semitism, and yet in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks anti-Semitism is invoked within the thinking of being. This is because Heidegger thinks being in terms of a history of peoples. Russians, English, French, Italian, Americans, Japanese, but especially Germans and Greeks, all make their appearance in the Black Notebooks. Heidegger understands the new beginning of the thinking of being as one that must be brought about by a people.

Coda

Between the writing of this book and its publication, many things have been said about Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. Attempts at separating their author from the infamy of anti-Semitism only reinforce the necessary denunciation of both. But what is at stake in the fact that Heidegger cannot simply be struck from our history. Neither the Nazi enterprise of crude domination, nor the thought that attempted to exceed it in the direction of a “new beginning,” arose out of nothing. It arose out of our history, and it happened [arrivé] to it; and if it did so this is in part because the thought of happening, of arrival, remains attached to the desire for foundation, for inauguration, and for schematic programming. This thought goes beyond Heidegger and reaches into many domains. In anti-Semitism, there is a hatred for what withdraws itself from auto-foundation. This hatred takes up from Christian doctrine the repudiation of the latter’s Jewish provenance, its provenance in errancy and wandering. History is not confined to being the destiny the forgetting of being, but has no doubt long since escaped this destiny as it continues to wander and err.

8

Rather than asking about the provenance and place of Judaism in the West, Heidegger posits a single and continuous process in which the metaphysics of beings passes through its historical epochs. There are two schematic reasons for this lack of inquiry. The first has to do with Heidegger’s philosophical reading of history, which precluded any consideration of a development as a succession of events. The second involves the history of Judaism in relation to Christianity as the latter developed out of it. Christianity from the beginning set about denying its origins in Judaism, for the sake of a new beginning that, while distinct, is at least analogous to Heidegger’s thinking of the historiality of being. One aspect of this repudiation is an attempt to displace Judaism entirely, and to make Christianity the only true religion, thereby associating the Jews with a curse and a misfortune, which then becomes the curse of the West itself, one that must be destroyed. At the same time, there are indications in Heidegger of another understanding of Christianity that might have allowed a different grasp of its history, and of history itself, in its differentiated and disordered succession of events, irreducible to a single history of being.