The Banality of Heidegger (eBook)

Heidegger and Nazism: Ever since the philosopher's public involvement in state politics in 1933, his name has necessarily been a part of this unsavory couple. After the publication in 2014 of the private Black Notebooks, it is now unambiguously part of another: Heidegger and anti-Semitism.What do we learn from analyzing the anti-Semitism of these private writings, together with its sources and grounds, not only for Heidegger s thought, but for the history of the West in which this thought is embedded? Jean-Luc Nancy poses these questions with the depth and rigor we would expect from him. In doing so, he does not go lightly on Heidegger, in whom he finds a philosophical and historial anti-Semitism, outlining a clash of peoples that must at all costs arrive at another beginning. If Heidegger s uncritical acceptance of prejudices and long-debunked myths about world Jewry shares in the banality evoked by Hannah Arendt, this does nothing to lessen the charge. Nancy s purpose, however, is not simply to condemn Heidegger but rather to invite us to think something to which the thinker of being remained blind: anti-Semitism as a self-hatred haunting the history of the West and of Christianity in its drive toward an auto-foundation that would leave behind its origins in Judaism.