Heidegger & the political: dystopias

217 Pages·1998·0.65 MB·English

by  Miguel de Beistegui

Heidegger & the Political

“I find this book exceptional and unique in the way it poses and develops its topic
within the ‘setting’ of Heidegger’s thought, de Beistegui shows on the one hand
that many efforts to derive Heidegger’s nationalistic politics from his philosophical
‘position’ have been truncated and ill-conceived with regard to his philosophy and
his problematic of the political. On the other hand, he shows the way in which
Heidegger’s thought fails from within in confrontation with fascism and the
Holocaust. It is a subtle and finely conceived study. Most of the work on
Heidegger and political questions remains on the outside of his thought and lacks
both the understanding and nuance one finds in this book.”
Charles Scott, Pennsylvania State University
Recent studies of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism have often
presented Heidegger’s philosophy as a forerunner to his political involvement, his
thought being read in search of pro-Nazi sentiment in order to explain his personal
political involvement. This has occurred often to the detriment of the highly
complex nature of Heidegger’s relation to the political. Heidegger & the Political
redresses this imbalance and is one of the first books to assess critically Heidegger’s
relation to politics and his conception of the political.
Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often
displaced in Heidegger’s writings rather than read the political into Heidegger.
Exploring Heidegger’s ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of
Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics,
Heidegger & the Political considers what some of Heidegger’s key motifs—his
emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Hölderlin’s poetry, his writing on
technology and the ancient Greek polis—may tell us about Heidegger’s relation to
the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in
Heidegger’s denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk
of thinking itself.
Heidegger & the Political is essential reading for students of philosophy and
politics and all those interested in the question of the political today.
Miguel de Beistegui is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick.
Thinking the Political
General editors:
Keith Ansell-Pearson, University of Warwick
Simon Critchley, University of Essex
Recent decades have seen the emergence of a distinct and challenging body
of work by a number of Continental thinkers that has fundamentally
altered the way in which philosophical questions are conceived and
discussed. This work poses a major challenge to anyone wishing to define
the essentially contestable concept of ‘the political’ and to think anew the
political import and application of philosophy. How does recent thinking
on time, history, language, humanity, alterity, desire, sexuality, gender and
culture open up the possibility of thinking the political anew? What are the
implications of such thinking for our understanding of and relation to the
leading ideologies of the modern world, such as liberalism, socialism and
Marxism? What are the political responsibilities of philosophy in the face
of the new world (dis)order?
This new series is designed to present the work of the major Continental
thinkers of our time, and the political debates their work has generated, to
a wider audience in philosophy and in political, social and cultural theory.
The aim is neither to dissolve the specificity of the ‘philosophical’ into the
‘political’ nor evade the challenge that ‘the political’ poses the
‘philosophical’; rather, each volume in the series will try to show it is only
in the relation between the two that the new possibilities of thought and
politics can be activated.
Volumes already published in the series are:
(cid:127) Foucault & the Political by Jon Simons
(cid:127) Derrida & the Political by Richard Beardsworth
(cid:127) Nietzsche & the Political by Daniel W.Conway
Heidegger & the Political

Dystopias

Miguel de Beistegui

London and New York
First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

© 1998 Miguel de Beistegui
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Beistegui, Miguel de
Heidegger & the Political/Miguel de Beistegui.
p. cm.—(Thinking the political.)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Heidegger, Martin. 1889–1976—Political and social views.
2. National socialism. I. Title. II. Series.
B3279.H49B43 1997
320’.092–dc21 96–48677

ISBN 0-203-19651-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19654-6 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-13063-8 (hbk)
0-415-13064-6 (pbk)
For John Sallis
“Prior to the question that alone always seems to be the most
immediate and urgent, What is to be done? we must ponder this: How
must we think? Thinking is indeed the proper acting insofar as to act
means to comply with the essential unfolding of being.”
Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre
“It would be best to talk about a revolution of the locality of thinking
[der Ortschaft des Denkens]. Rather than revolution, even, we would
simply need to hear displacement [Ortsverlegung].”
Martin Heidegger, Vier Seminare
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xii
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1 Bordering on Politics 8
2 Archaic Politics 32
• An Old Question 35 (cid:127) Finis Universitatum? 42
3 After Politics 63
(cid:127) Nihilisms 67 (cid:127) Overcoming Nihilism? 81
4 The Free Use of the National 87
(cid:127) The Poet of the Poets 89 (cid:127) The Poet of the Germans 94
5 Before Politics 114
(cid:127) The First Interpretation (1935) 120
(cid:127) The Second Interpretation (1942–3) 128
6 And into Silence… 146
Three Concluding Questions 158
Notes 163
Bibliography 188
Index 192

Preface
There will come a day, perhaps, when philosophers will no longer feel the
need to write about Heidegger’s politics. There will come a day when,
everything said and done, every single aspect of Heidegger’s life, every
single detail of his work having come under the inquisitive and scrupulous
gaze of those doctors with an eye for Heidegger-the-Nazi, the age of a freer
and more fruitful relation to the Heideggerian heritage will finally emerge.
In the meantime, everything happens as if the deluge of monographs
devoted to a (more or less sincere) understanding of Heidegger’s relation to
Nazism and to politics were not about to come to an end. Given the
popularity of the topic in academia, one might even wonder whether there
is a better way of securing for oneself access to the temple of academic
respectability than through writing a book with “Heidegger” and
“politics” on the cover. This inflation is certainly largely due to the fact
that, for too long, and under the influence of many “Heideggerians,” most
commentators remained remarkably silent on this issue. After this all too
suspicious silence came the no less suspicious cacophony which today
surrounds us, and in the midst of which the average reader finds himself or
herself utterly bewildered, wanting to flee the Heideggerian premises at
once, if not to sacrifice the Gesamtausgabe to the altar of Western good
conscience.
Why, then, a further book on Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism?
Is it to throw yet another stone at his corpus, another way to make sure
that he will remain forever buried? Or is it to keep his memory alive, to
bring yet another stone, yet another inscription to his mausoleum? Or is it
a matter of yet a third? A matter of keeping the matter of thinking alive,
simply by reading Heidegger? And why read, if not because Heidegger’s
text calls for thinking, provokes thinking, begs and cries out for thinking?
So, in a way, yes, it will be a matter of salvaging Heidegger, his texts, that
is, a matter of not letting the closure of thinking silently take place.