Ungar, Martin Heidegger in France

The South Central Modern Language Association

Aftereffect and Scandal: Martin Heidegger in FranceAuthor(s): Steven UngarSource: South Central Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Fascist Aesthetics (Summer, 1989), pp. 19-31Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern LanguageAssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3189553 .

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Aftereffect and Scandal: Martin Heidegger in France

STEVEN UNGAR University of Iowa

Our memory; it is a sort of pharmacy, a sort of chemical laboratory, in which our groping hand may come to rest now on a sedative drug, now on a dangerous poison.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

I

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1960 that the case of Martin Heidegger was too complex for him to explain at the time. What Sartre did not--could not? would not?-address some thirty years ago returns today as aftereffect and scandal. Until recently, the reception of Heidegger's writings in France bor- dered on the reverential. As a cultural figure, he came to personify the philosopher-poet whose conception of language and practice of writing in- spired a generation of artists and writers including Georges Braque, Maurice Blanchot, and Rene Char. This portrayal is meaningful when it is set against an alternative view of Heidegger more prevalent among British and American philosophers as "the best comic example of the philosophical quack."' Reference at the level of national practice often borders on caricature. But it also asserts that philosophy is not merely a tradition of texts and issues made up of "great books" and/or "great ideas." Phi- losophy is undeniably this, but it is also a set of practices, discourses, and institutions that regulate how ideas and books circulate in the public sphere. The pages that follow study the specifically French setting of debate over Heidegger. Despite my misgivings over the validity of reference at the level of national practice, my inquiry derives from a strong sense that the fate of a German philosopher in France points with particular urgency to questions related to philosophy as discourse and institution. National practice is thus a point of departure and a self-imposed constraint.

To my knowledge, the first of Martin Heidegger's writings published in France was a 1931 translation of "What is Metaphysics?" that appeared in Bifur alongside "La Legende de la verit'" ("The Legend of Truth"), an early fiction--a philosopher's tale-by the young Jean-Paul Sartre! After World War II, the divergence between Sartre's 1946 Existentialism is a Humanism and Heidegger's 1947 "Letter on Humanism" revised a tutelage Sartre had



20 South Central Review

acknowledged in his 1939-1940 war diaries and in the section of Being and Nothingness on "The Three H's": Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.2 A decade later, Heidegger's presence at a 1955 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium organized in his honor instituted a cult following that remained more or less intact until the appearance in October 1987 of Heidegger et le nazisme in which Vic- tor Farias claimed that Heidegger's commitment to National Socialism was longer and more substantial than had been previously thought.3

A recent commentator notes concisely that Martin Heidegger's engagement with National Socialism is not news.4 To begin, I would like to recast this assertion in the form of a contrafactual: if Heidegger's engagement with National Socialism is not news, then why all the fuss? What, in other words, is at stake in debate over Heidegger et le nazisme? In fact, the prevail- ing attitude of reverence among Heidegger's postwar readers in France has never gone uncontested. Misgivings and allegations have surfaced with regularity, as in the following remark: "The French press has spoken of Heidegger as a Nazi; it is a fact that he was a party member. If one had to judge a philosophy by the political courage or lucidity of the philosopher, that of Hegel would not be worth much. It happens that the philosopher is unfaithful to his best thought when it becomes a matter of political decisions. ... . Yet it is the same man who philosophizes and who chooses in politics." Without further information, one might mistake this passage as written in the wake of Heidegger et le nazisme when, in fact, it is taken from an editorial preface to the January 1946 issue of Les Temps modernes.5 In the light of such uncanniness, one might wonder what difference-if any-the intervening forty years have made. Controversy surrounding the Farias book has been heightened in the

United States by concurrent debate over newspaper articles that the late Paul de Man wrote in occupied Belgium and that have been seen as embar- rassing on a personal level and compromising to colleagues, friends and students who have come to his defense.6 The convergence of these two academic scandals is inadvertent. It is also undeniably meaningful to the extent that it derives from what I see as the staging of a common gesture: namely, an institutional purge played out in popular memory as a markedly historical return of the repressed. This scandalous convergence promotes what is fast becoming a nightmarish obsession with parallels--both real and imagined-between the cultural politics of the 1930's and the post-age of the present decade. Nonetheless, debate over Heidegger is markedly different-in scope, in substance, and in potential consequence-from that over de Man. This is so first of all because many of the so-called revelations in Heidegger et le nazisme were discussed earlier in Guido Schneeberger's Nachlese zu Heidegger and in a series of recent articles by Hugo Ott.7 As a result, the debate that Heidegger et le nazisme has generated comes as a succes de scandale promoted by a media orchestration aimed at a reading public that seemingly prefers to claim ignorance.8 For Farias, this predisposition to ignorance lends itself exactly to the type of aftershock or jolt--aprs-coup



Steven Ungar 21

in French, Stoss in German-that he seeks to exploit to full advantage. In terms of rhetoric, Farias uses understatement with a vengeance and to a point where implication replaces demonstration. It is as though the failure to account for Heidegger's ties to the National Socialist movement beyond his April 1933 to February 1934 term as Rector at the University of Freiburg implicates all those over the past half-century who may or may not have known the extent of his involvement. Thus, the claims made against Heidegger extend to his readers and exegetes via a logic of contamination that is both audacious and all-encompassing. The result is an atmosphere in which debate is focused less on engaging ideas than on judging-and presumably condemning-an individual or group.

Because I take the ongoing calls for accountability to be serious rather than simply rhetorical, I also see the inordinate desire to achieve closure on current debate over Heidegger as an instance of the trope of anticipation known as prolepsis. In regard to Heidegger in particular, this anticipation engages a disclosure that I see as integral to the notion of truth as unforget- ting (Aletheia) set forth in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935-1936). Aside from its occurrence within Heidegger's writings of the mid-1930's period known as the turning point or shift (Kehre), the interplay between closure and disclosure in "The Origin" is itself inscribed within the same sorts of social instabilities that dominate the revisionary atmosphere of current debate. In some instances, the will to closure is clear and visible, as though the irruption of a suppressed or repressed past justified suspicion and what Herman Rapaport has referred to as the hermeneutics of detection.9 The greater the resistance to the past, the more forceful its inevitable return. At a moment when a rhetoric of prosecution reduces understanding to caricature and polemic, it is worth examining the peculiarities and the consequences of the so-called Heidegger Affair. My intention is neither to condemn Heidegger nor to dispute or to explain away the allegations against him. Instead I want to assess what the return of a certain past might imply for our understanding of literary and critical modernity over the past fifty to sixty years. Rather than filling in the blanks, we need to understand where the blanks come from and why we are only now beginning to see them.

The revised perception of Heidegger in the wake of the Farias book il- lustrates how the phenomenon of aftereffect transposes a name and a cor- pus by reinserting philosophy-and, in partiuclar, the writing of philosophy-into history. In this sense, a major scandal is the extent to which a book as tendentious in tone and as dubious in scholarship as Heidegger et le nazisme has succeeded in reopening debate. Even more dubious is the fact that much of the material Farias provides as evidence in support of his allegations is biographic, concerning Heidegger himself rather than his writings. Jacques Derrida and Francois F~dier engage the question of Heidegger's Nazism from the perspective of articulating the writings and the man. Even so, Derrida and F6dier are at a loss to disqualify the fully




personal (ad hominem) challenge on the basis of which Farias proceeds. Thus, while Derrida questions whether Farias proposes any kind of textual reading at all, his own response--"The proposed reading (if there is one) is insufficient and debatable, occasionally so crude that one wonders whether the investigator (enqueteur) has been reading Heidegger for more than an hour--"replies to the Farias allegations in kind by impugning their author.'0 In this instance, Heidegger's prestige serves Farias precisely because the extent of Heidegger's ties with the Nazi Party are still unknown. As long as doubt and uncertainty remain, allegations such as those in Heideg- ger et le nazisme will continue to receive a minimal degree of serious consideration. Whether they state their cases convincingly and whether they further understanding-of Heidegger, of Nazism, of modernity-are separate matters.

Thomas Sheehan notes that the Farias book has made two points about Heidegger "as incontestable as they are complicated: first, that he remains one of the century's most influential philosophers and second, that he was a Nazi."" My discussion of Heidegger is intended to avoid the prefigura- tion that might enable one to dismiss or otherwise reduce the conceptual and textual specificity of his vision. It also seeks to engage the stake of current inquiry into the convergence of culture and politics in interwar Europe. The mid-1930s constitutes a gap or blindspot within the evolution of a philosophical and literary modernity that is presently undergoing intense scrutiny and revision. My view is that the current debates surrounding Heidegger and de Man derive from a deeper belief that the scandalous irruption of a certain past-what I have termed an aftereffect--calls for a rethinking of the issues that I see staged ("at work in the work") in Heidegger's writings of the 1930s. While I welcome the potential contribu- tion that new documentation might make to our historical understanding, Heidegger et le nazisme simply fails to make its indictment stick. For now, it seems more feasible and more instructive to ponder the irruption of the current controversy itself. Why, then, Heidegger and the Nazis, now? And why Heidegger rather than someone-rather than anyone-else?

The question of how seriously one should take the debate over Farias goes well beyond the merits and liabilities of his book on Heidegger. I see it as equally-if not even more-important to consider the social, political, and institutional conditions that make the (serious) reception of a book like Heidegger et le nazisme possible. It suggests that what we regard as meaningful and important depends not simply on historical context, but also on a recognition that this context is itself problematic: "The historicity of contemporary philosophy finds its expression in the shape of its problems. In the range of the problems that are recognized as actual, contemporary philosophy defines itself as against tradition and at the same time puts it-



Steven Ungar 23

self into a relationship to it."12 The problems of philosophy are not just those that are legitimized by tradition, but especially those that are un- foreseen and for which there may be no simple or immediate solution. Cur- rent debate also suggests that the issue of Heidegger's Nazism engages the articulation of politics and cultural modernity. Whatever the outcome, the suspicion that Farias projects onto the "other" Heidegger-that is, the Heidegger who seems not to have retreated from politics after the Rectorate period as had been thought--carries over into practices of denial and regression that occur fully in the present.

An additional question raised by debate over Farias is that of the extent to which the claims he has made revise our understanding of the recent past. Once again, the potential for revision is problematic and allows for multiple consequences; it affects not just what we may (or may not) learn about Heidegger, but how we view those whose intellectual debts to Heidegger are now also seemingly compromised. On this side of the At- lantic, Richard Rorty has asserted the preeminence of moral concerns that bear on any revision in the wake of the Farias book when-in "Taking Heidegger Seriously"-he asked why anyone should care whether Heideg- ger was a self-deceptive egomaniac:

A good reason for caring about such matters is that the details about the attitudes of German intellectuals toward the Holocaust are important for our own moral education. It pays to realize that the vast majority of Ger- man academics, some of the best and brightest, turned a blind eye to the fate of their Jewish colleagues, and to ask whether we ourselves might not be capable of the same sort of behavior. . . . A bad reason for caring is the notion that learning about a philosopher's moral character helps one evaluate his philosophy. It does not, any more than our knowledge of Einstein's character helps us evaluate his physics. You can be a great, original, and profound artist or thinker, and a complete bastard.13

Rorty so clearly identifies the moral stake in the debate over Heidegger et le nazisme that I find myself unable-and unwilling-to follow his separation of the man from the work. Moreover, Rorty's desire to reject Heidegger the Rector and Nazi party member in order to retain the philosopher and author simply does not hold. What remains unquestioned is the perceived exemplarity of Heidegger's philosophy, an exemplarity that contains the sense of seriousness conveyed by Rorty's title. Even if Heidegger willful- ly sought to dissociate his philosophy from his political views or from the politics of Third Reich and postwar Germany, their articulation cannot be dismissed as neatly as Rorty suggests. Because I am confident that Hei- degger's writings will remain integral to our understanding of postwar modernity, it seems all the more urgent to avoid the reductive gesture that Rorty and others play out, presumably in order to assert an autonomy for philosophy that Heidegger's writings undermine.

How seriously, then, are we to take the Farias allegations and-by exten-




sion-Heidegger's writings in their wake? How might we read the texts in question without either dismissing them outright because of a political allegiance on the part of their author that we find loathsome or reducing them to hermetic and untimely meditations? The problem is raised by the rapid appearance in France of close to a dozen studies and dossiers. Some readings openly take a position for or against Farias; others use the Farias book to develop their own projects. Most contain a little of both approaches. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's Heidegger et les modernes engages Heidegger as part of a critique of anti-humanism they have developed in a previous study of contemporary philosophy in France. Ferry and Renaut see the Farias Affair as one consequence of a Heidegger revival whose ties with a disenchanted Left they view with bemusement. By what strange in- version, they ask disingenuously, has someone who was more than a fel- low-traveller of the Nazis become today the principal philosopher of the Left?14 The question is provocative; it is also, I believe, rhetorical and overreaching, for the argument they provide in its support is too vague to be taken seriously.

More substantively, Ferry and Renaut place current debate over Farias within an ongoing critique of modernity whose philosophical model takes its initial (exemplary?) form in Heidegger's writings:

The deepest sense of the debate, of which the Farias book and even the Heidegger case might be nothing more than the pretext, begins to dawn: it revolves--one sees it clearly in Derrida-on the critique of modernity, and of what defines it philosophically, culturally, and doubtless also politically, namely the irruption of subjectivity and the values of humanism. The controversy over the Heidegger case is only the foreground of a much wider controversy, one that addresses nothing less than the sense attributed to the logic of modernity; if it is discussed so much today, is it not precisely because it is the Heideggerian deconstruction of modernity that has come to furnish to a wide spectrum of the French intelligentsia the principles as well as the style of its critque of the modern world?15

For Ferry and Renaut, Heidegger's attitude toward modernity is doubled: his response to the Nazi call to revolution is postmodern in that he sees it as promoting the culmination of modernity. At the same time, his call for a return to the Greek tradition is an antimodern reaction against his perceived decadence of Europe. In both cases, the positions are philosophical critiques of modernity and specifically of its political expression in democracy.

Next, Ferry and Renaut extend the postmodern/antimodern division they find in Heidegger's writings toward politics. Where the postmodern variant liquidates subjectivity by passing from democracy toward au- thoritarian movements such as National Socialism, the antimodern position supplements the conventional vision of decline with a lament of root-



Steven Ungar 25

lessness and loss of tradition. Two remarks are in order. First, the philosophical status of the critiques of modernity Ferry and Renaut attribute to Heidegger is suspect, as though philosophy were somehow inadequate or incomplete in the way that intellectuals are often chided for a failure to move from words to actions. Second, it would be as difficult to detach these positions absolutely from the political uses to which they were put as it would be to impute to them any strict or predetermined political expression. In sum, the postmodern and antimodern positions attributed to Heidegger do little more than suggest that what may be set forth ostensib- ly as philosophical often takes on ideological-if not openly political- status.

It is hard to agree with Ferry and Renaut that the true sense of French debate surrounding the Farias book is the extent to which the allegations against Heidegger implicate "a certain Parisian intelligentsia" whose critique of modernity they see as Heideggerian in inspiration. Despite their dis- claimers that the time for polemicizing is over, Ferry and Renaut's critique of the new-look Heideggerianism takes priority over the wider ("deeper") issues they claim to address. This inevitable fall into polemic is heightened in the strict confines of French-and more often Parisian-debate. It is a symptom of place and time; one that, in turn, points to a wider coming to terms with a political past visible in Heidegger's writings but just as certainly not limited to them. Current debate in France surrounding Heideg- ger is sobering in a positive sense if and when it forces us to think and/or rethink critically and historically. But whether or not it is serious seems to be a question of tone and rhetoric. Where Rorty argues for taking Hei- degger's philosophy seriously over and against the man who wrote it, Ferry and Renaut seem more interested in upbraiding stylish neo-Heideggerians whom they seem to take almost too seriously!

Significantly, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's La Fiction du politique: Heideg- ger, l'art et la politique has an institutional origin. It began as a statement Lacoue-Labarthe was asked to write by the committee of examiners to which he had submitted his candidacy for the French Doctorate degree on the basis of his cumulative work (sur travaux).16 Unlike the relative open- ness of an American academic market that we often take for granted, the French university system is rigorously nationalized. Lacoue-Labarthe is very much of a civil servant, as are Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and others such as Julia Kristeva and H6~1ne Cixous whom Anglo-Americans tend to see mistakenly as free agents removed from Ideological State Ap- paratuses. The institutional context also transforms what might otherwise be mistaken as a statement of faith (profession defoi) into a reflection on the claim to philosophize. Lacoue-Labarthe's way of questioning this claim stages his engagement with Heidegger's writings as a potential measure of philosophy's limits. Attentive readers will recognize the gesture as de- constructive to the extent that it posits an initial determination of end or closure that Derrida and others model on Heidegger's notions of Destruk-




tion, Zerst'rung, orAbbau. The gesture is neither respectful homage nor stylistic indulgence; it is most certainly something other than arbitrary. For the question of determining philosophy's limit points directly to the ambitions that Heidegger holds for philosophy from the late 1920's period of Being and Time through the 1966 interview with Der Spiegel that was published only after his death in 1976.

To the extent that Lacoue-Labarthe takes the figure of Heidegger as exemplary of the end of philosophy, he also directs the question of closure and limit toward the institution of the university: "And it is outside the University, or on its fringes that at the same time an imitation twice removed has assumed the title of philosophy (Sartre) and that thinkers of an otherwise rigorous exigency and of a completely different sobriety have continually tested, at its limit, the capacity-to-philosophize [le pouvoir- philosopher] (Benjamin and Wittgenstein, Bataille and Blanchot, for example).""7 La Fiction du politique ties the legitimation of philosophy as dis- cipline and profession to practices that border on autobiography and con- fessional discourse. In so doing, Lacoue-Labarthe elides the very distinc- tion between "man" and "work" [l'homme et l'oeuvre] that Farias seems in- tent on maintaining with little or no reservation.

Early in his narrative, Lacoue-Labarthe identifies the origin of his (mod- est) claim to philosophize when he writes that a reading of Heidegger gave him a first jolt (he uses the French term choc and adds Stoss, the German term for push or shove that he cites from "The Origin of the Work of Art."'8 At about the same time, he learned that Heidegger had been a member of the Nazi party. From the start, then, Lacoue-Labarthe reads the Heideg- gerian text in view of a political commitment that he cannot abide. This means also that he refuses to separate the political from the philosophical or to reduce the former to the status of lapse or aberration. Where, then, does Lacoue-Labarthe locate the political within the philosophical?

My hypothesis is this: that it is, in a sense, in the philosophical movement and the style of the 1933 commitment, because a commitment is just what it is, entailing even utterances of a philosophical type and intelligible as such within tradition. The commitment of 1933 is authorized by the idea of a hegemony of the spiritual and the philosophical over the political itself (this is the motive of the leading of the leading, or of the leader [Fiihrung of the Faihrung, or of the Fiihrer] that reverts at least to the Platonic basillia, if not to Empedocles. The statements (on Germany, on work, on the University, etc.) are purely and simply programmatic and are organized in large part on multiple "calls." Furthermore, if it is true that certain of these calls (the most immediately political or the least removed from the National-Socialist program) will be thereafter openly dropped and re- jected, in its deep intention and essential expectations, the injunction of '33 will be maintained to the end.19

This interpretation is, I believe, all the more condemning because Lacoue-



Steven Ungar 27

Labarthe holds that a serious political commitment connects the 1933 Rec- torate speech and the 1935-1936 seminar on "The Transcendence of Aes- thetics and the Question of Art" in which Heidegger presented early versions of "The Origin of the Work of Art." Where some have trivialized the rectorate period as a lapse (Heidegger himself supposedly called it the greatest stupidity-"Die Gr6sste Dummheit"--of his life), others have in- voked it to suggest the basic affinity between Heidegger's writings and Na- tional Socialism. Lacoue-Labarthe's conclusion is unequivocal: in 1933, Heidegger neither slips nor falters. He willingly commits himself to the Rectorate and to what he might accomplish to make the university a historical site: "In 1933 Heidegger is not mistaken ["ne se trompe pas"]. But he knows in 1934 that he was wrong ["il s'est trompd"]; not on the truth of Nazism but on its reality."20 Heidegger's gesture of commitment is unequivocal and serious when he makes it, even if one limits its political expression-that is, its impact on the insitution of the German University system-to the ten months of the rectorate. The key point for Lacoue- Labarthe is that Heidegger's 1933 acceptance of Nazism cannot be dismissed or glossed over; it is integral to a philosophical vision that retains its essential disposition to what Heidegger takes for the essence or truth of the movement even after he resigns from the rectorship.

The test of Lacoue-Labarthe's thesis concerns the consequences of Heidegger's commitment. To restate this in the accusatory terms more suitable to Farias than to Lacoue-Labarthe, we might ask what Heidegger's crime was. What exactly did he do? In recasting the question as I have just done, I am trying neither to dismiss the charges nor throw out allegations of any sort against Heidegger. Instead I want to clarify the extent to which accountability is warranted in terms of specific acts. And this is exactly the point where the allegations in Heidegger et le nazisme benefit from the lack of access to the documentation that might prove or disprove them. Until such access occurs, closure on the Heidegger case will remain deferred while accusers and defenders continue to amass evidence. (Francois F6dier lists no less than thirteen specific points on which he finds the Farias allegations open to question.)21

III

While I see no simple way to work through or be done with the current scandal of aftereffect over Heidegger, a number of considerations strike me as worthy. First, future debate needs to be played out less in the determination of a definitive meaning than in the series of changes over time. This is not to say that the true meaning of Heidegger's writings will appear only gradually. Nor does it suggest that rereading is always already mediated by the passage of time and thus at a necessary remove from an originary meaning. To the contrary, debate over Heidegger is very much of a current affair. It engages the claim to authority that Farias makes against the grain




of received opinion. In this sense, Heidegger's writings serve as both pretext and supplement: they are the points of departure for a contest among rival approaches as well as the material evidence to be scrutinized if and when consensus over approach is ever reached.

A second consideration concerns a relation to the past that takes form in the act and products of narration. If history is a kind of narrative, then what is it about? Who narrates it? How and why is it narrated? Hayden White raises these questions in conjunction with historiography and the authority attached to certain accounts that impose on real events the forms and coherency more commonly associated with stories about imaginary events. The authority of historical narrative arises from a desire to make experience meaningful and coherent, a desire whose origin White locates in wishes, daydreams, and reveries. Historiography allows this desire for the imaginary and the possible to be considered against the imperatives of the real and the actual: "If we view narration and narrativity as the instruments with which the conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse, we begin to comprehend both the appeal of narrative and the grounds for refusing it."22 White reaches no definitive conclusion concerning the role or the function of narration. But the questions he raises concerning the appeal of narration and narrativity in the representation of events construed to be true rather than imaginary bear directly on current debate.

The turn to history I am sketching should not be mistaken for a his- toricism-either "new" or conventional-with scientistic ambitions. This is especially so because this turn is imposed rather than chosen, a precon- dition over which we have no control rather than a circumstance growing out of an objective situation resulting from individual or collective agency. Furthermore, attempts to attain rapid closure are overreaching and ill- founded in that they derive from claims to mastery and appropriation that are reductive and dubious. Part of the problem comes from relying on em- pirical inquiry and on an ill-defined notion of evidence to contend with what I see as a complex and multiform phenomenon of which current debate over Heidegger is a symptom. Just as Freud believed in the return of what consciousness tries to repress, so an acute awareness of the past is returning to the literary and critical practices of the current decade. My reference to the concept of repression is intended as figurative. It modifies a psychoanaltyic usage and redirects it toward expressions of ambivalence, denial, and resistance. These, in turn, can be both immediate and longterm, with many of the latter intelligible as instances of the aftereffect that Freud designated by the German term, Nachtrdglichkeit. As in the strict sense of the verb tragen contained in the German noun, something is carried along as addendum or supplement. (Curiously, a secondary sense of the verb denotes resentment or the bearing of a grudge.) My use of the Freudian concept of Nachtriiglichkeit needs to be qualified. Suppression (Unter- driickung) or displacement (Verschiebung) is more accurate in this instance



Steven Ungar 29

than repression (Verdraingung), although the displacement and return that I want to convey derive from something more than a willful exclusion from consciousness.

I focus on details of language and vocabulary for two reasons. The first is my sense that the interplay between French, German, and English terms is necessary to understanding what I see as the slippage and substitution of meaning-trope of metalepsis-that the post-age displays with singular forcefulness. Second, because as the potential for such slippage is heightened, the choice of terms takes on particular urgency within an inquiry that repeatedly engages the difficulty-if not the impossibility-of finding words to contend with the disclosure of actions and events that are taken by many to be unsayable and somehow beyond language.23 Jean-Fran<ois Lyotard uses the concept of originary shock-refould d'origine in French and Urverdriingung in German-to designate a condition of aftereffect that he sees as removed from representation:

A "past" that has not passed, that does not haunt the present in the sense that it would abandon it, be missed by it, would presently point to itself like a spectre, an absence, that does not inhabit it in the status of a beauti- ful and good reality, that is not the object of memory like something for- gotten that should be recalled (with a view toward "proper end" or proper knowledge). That is not therefore there as a blank, absence, terra incognita, but that is however there.24

Finally, disclosure is a necessary supplement to aftereffect. Its various meanings and forms--divoilement in French and either Erbffnung or Verber- gung in German-lend themselves especially to a dynamic of secrecy that students of narrative recognize as prime marks of detective fiction. Today, that dynamic is especially visible as a search for clues that occurs collective- ly and on an institutional basis. Where to go from here? One option-among others-is visible in a play

of terms that ought to have alerted Ferry and Renaut to collapse the title of their book around the central figure of Heidegger. Though we might prefer to believe otherwise, admitting fascism and/or National Socialism as integral to certain conceptions of modernity is one of our big cultural night- mares. It is not just that we might be contaminated at a distance, but that we are already contaminated through Heidegger and de Man as well as through all those who in one sense or another made common cause with the project of a revolution from the extreme right, whether that project be seen as fascist, National Socialist, royalist or simply anti-communist. This is not-I imagine--a message that self-styled liberal or progressive readers would like to receive. Yet it seems that we will learn nothing from the debates over Heidegger and de Man until we come to grips with the full implications of what it means to associate fascism with modernity25 And that means taking a longer and harder look at our cultural past than at least some of us are willing to chance. The irruption of a certain past surrounding the figures of Heidegger and de Man is not simply "theirs"; through




them, it is very much ours as well. That is a primary sense of what it means today to take Heidegger-and the scandal of aftereffect-seriously.

NOTES

Gerald L. Bruns, Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989) 2.

2 Sartre was among the first in France to recognize the potential importance of Heidegger's extension of and departure from Husserlian phenomenology. But even before the Bifur translation appeared, Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer had participated in a 1929 meeting of French and German philosophers held at Davos, Switzerland. In February of the same year, Husserl came to the Sorbonne and gave the lectures on "Einleitung in die transzendentale Phe- nomenologie" ("Introduction to Transcendental Phenomenology") which came to be known as The Cartesian Meditations and that Gabrielle Pfeiffer and Emmanuel Levinas soon translated into French (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931). Proceedings of the Davos talks have been published as Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Ddbat sur le kantisme et la philosophie, ed. Pierre Auben- que, (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972). The "Letter on Humanism" first appears in a November 1945 response to a question by Jean Beaufret, who was Heidegger's strongest postwar advocate among the French. On the reception of German existentialism and phenomenology by the French, see the eye-witness accounts in Beaufret's De l'existence a Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1982) as well as Levinas's En dicouvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1967) and the more recent commentaries in Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) and Vincent Descombes's Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding (New York: Cambridge UP, 1980).

3 The book, translated from the Spanish and German by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Bap- tiste Grasset, was first published in French (Paris: Verdier, 1987). Temple University Press has announced an English translation.

4 Arnold I. Davidson, "Opening Debate,"Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 408. 5 For another early post-war assessment, see Eric Weill, "Le cas Heidegger," Temps Moder-

nes 22 (July 1947): 128-38. 6 Initial attention to the allegations against de Man focused as much on the scandal itself as

on the writings in question. For three very different versions of what is at stake in current debate over de Man, see Jon Wiener, "Deconstructing de Man," The Nation 9 Jan. 1988: 22-24. Geoffrey Hartman, "Blindness and Insight: Paul de Man, Fascism, and Deconstruction," New Republic 7 March 1988: 26-31; and Jacques Derrida, "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 590-652. More recently, a facsimile of the texts has appeared as Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943 ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988). A companion volume, Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, eds. Hamacher, Hertz, and Keenan (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989) has been reviewed by Wiener under the title of "Debating de Man," The Nation 13 February 1989: 204-06 and by Zeev Sternhell, "The Making of a Propagandist," New Republic 6 March 1989: 30-34. See also Lindsay Waters's introduction to Paul de Man, Critical Writings, 1953-1978 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989).

7 See, for example, the extensive references to secondary sources in German cited by David- son 408, n.2. In English, see the concluding section of George Steiner's Heidegger (New York: Penguin, 1982) and Karsten Harries, "Heidegger as a Political Thinker," in Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978).

8 Franqois F6dier, Heidegger: anatomie d'un scandale (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988) 30.

9 Herman Rapaport, "Literature and the Hermeneutics of Detection," L'Esprit Crdateur 26 (1986): 48-59.

10 Jacques Derrida, "Heidegger, l'enfer des philosophes,"Nouvel Observateur 6-12 Novem-



Steven Ungar 31

ber 1987:70. Hans-Georg Gadamer, who first heard Heidegger lecture at Marburg in the 1920s, is no less critical when he writes that the Farias book is "wholly superficial and long outdated, even as regards the information it imparts; and that where it touches on philosophical matters it exhibits a grotesque lack of depth and fairly bristles with ignorance." See "Back from Syracuse?" Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 429.

1 Sheehan, "Heidegger and the Nazis," New York Review of Books 16 June 1988: 38. 12 Rildiger Bubner, Modern German Philosophy, Trans. Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge

UP, 1984) 6-7.

13 "Taking Heidegger Seriously,"New Republic 11 April 1988: 32. Rorty's title echoes the following passage from a discussion of Heidegger's politics by Karsten Harries in which the notion of seriousness takes on a markedly different emphasis: "The more seriously we take Heidegger, the more weight we must give to the path he has cleared, the more carefully we must consider where he is leading us and by what authority" ("Heidegger's Politics," in Mur- ray 307).

14 See Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut's Heidegger et les modernes (Paris: Grasset, 1988) 31. For their earlier study, see La Penste 68: Essai sur l'anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

15 Heidegger et les modernes 119. 16 Lacoue-Labarthe's text appeared first in February 1987, printed by The University of Stras-

bourg Press, some eight months before the Farias book. Future references are to the revised version (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1988) that includes an afterstatement written when Lacoue- Labarthe read the Farias book while at the University of California at Berkeley.

17 La Fiction du politique 15. 18 La Fiction du politique 11. 19 La Fiction du politique 28-29. 20 La Fiction du politique 41. 21 Heidegger: anatomie d'un scandale 138-47.

22 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) 4.

23 In "The Politics of Heidegger's Rectoral Address," (Man and World 20 [1987]: 171-87), Graeme Nicholson engages similar questions of language, meaning, and power when he studies Heidegger's failed attempt to transform Fiihrer (leader), Kampf (struggle), and Volk (people) from "Nazi street words" into existential terms. Nicholson maintains that Heideg- ger allowed politics to displace categories more suited to a philosophical vision of authenticity: "The danger was not that he might fall under the suspicious eye of the Nazis. It was, rather, that by borrowing the Nazi language and seeking to transform it to philosophical thought, he was entering an uneven battle between words and things, thought and might. So he exposed his philosophy to the world of power, and he lost. That is to say, it lost: not philosophy as a whole-his philosophy" (Nicholson 179).

24 Jean-Franqois Lyotard, Heidegger et "les juifs" (Paris: Galile, 1988) 27. 25 In the case of France, extensive discussion of this and related issues can be found in Zeev

Sternhell's Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), Robert J. Soucy's French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), and Alice Yaeger Kaplan's Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986). See also the polemical accounts in Bernard Heni-L6vy's L'Iddologie franqaise (Paris: Grasset, 1981) and Jeffrey Mehlman's Legacies: OfAnti-Semitism in France (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983).



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