Heidelberg, February 6, 1988

The three philosophers gather in a restaurant in Heidelberg to take questions from the public, while members of the press cover the event. The first question concerns the notion of responsibility, which becomes the leading motif of the entire discussion: Heidegger’s responsibility as a thinker who gravely compromised himself politically; his readers’ responsibility with regard to their own deep knowledge of this compromise in relation to other aspects of Heidegger’s work; the responsibility of philosophy itself, both intellectually and ethically. Questions are posed as well on Heidegger’s post-war silence on the Holocaust and his refusal to retract his own statements and actions in favor of Nazism in 1933.

Heidelberg, February 5, 1988

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe speak individually and in turn on the question of Heidegger’s politics in relation to his philosophy, as well as in relation to the then recent controversy provoked in the French press by the publication of Heidegger and Nazism by Victor Farias. Gadamer recounts his experience as Heidegger’s student and then colleague, the responses of those around him to Heidegger’s involvement in Nazi party politics, and his own discovery of Derrida’s work beginning in the 1960s. Derrida speaks of the mediatized nature of the public event itself, the necessity not to be totalitarian in discussing Heidegger’s compromise with totalitarianism, the heritage of Heidegger in France, and the broader question of responsibility. Lacoue-Labarthe lays out the ethical questions at stake for him in the debate, as well as the elements of the French intellectual scene that provide the ground for the controversy, proposing finally the possibility that a certain reading of Heidegger might, paradoxically, provide access to the true nature of Nazism.