Gary,

There seems to be a misunderstanding about the mysterious commentator who doesn’t speak (April 08). This person remains silent because she’s not aware of being part of the conversation. I’ll just recap on what has happened so far on Heidegger, from my end. I thought, as a way of advertising the forthcoming conference if nothing else – or just for something to say – I’d discuss one of the abstracts sent in, one that interested me. I remarked that, if Heidegger thought this way, it is not surprising that he might have misread the advent of Nazism as an instance of the sort of event he thinks is crucial. Nothing you have said so far has dissuaded me from this view, although I must say how insightful and informative I’ve found your contributions to my own understanding, and I must thank you for that.

I’d like to distance myself from all the criticisms of Heidegger you listed (April 10), which I agree are just based on ignorance – and I also suspect laziness, complacence, and a not very scholarly attitude, in short a comfortable bourgeois perspective.

I disagree that the promotion of the so-called ‘irrationalism of Heidegger’ prepared the way for Hitler. Changes in the territory – in the Deleuzian sense – prepared the way for Hitler. In the meantime and since the beginning of the age of imperialism (1850 onwards), there arose a constant criticism of the constructive standards that sustained all aspects of culture. Heidegger played a role in this, with Einstein, Picasso, Kafka, et al. Hitlerism is by no means an irrationalism but a rather outcome of the imperialist territorialisation. Hitler is modern and logical, not irrational and archaic.

The guys you are talking about don’t know what Marxism is. They’re armchair Marxists, very comfortable. They should read Hannah Arendt and forget about para-consistent reasoning, not that it would make any difference.

I think the idea that Heidegger’s philosophy bears a logical and necessary connection to his support for Hitler is silly. But I don’t think it’s silly to suggest that someone who is looking for completion and on the lookout for the right moment or the messianic event, or whatever, might not think that the Nazis represented just such a moment. On the other hand, somebody who thought that all positive pronouncements were suspect is unlikely to be so deluded.

Similarly, the idea that Heidegger’s ideas were a cause of Nazism is ridiculous. Ideas are epiphenomenal, particularly the ideas of some obscure philosopher whom most Germans in 1930 had never heard of. This kind of thinking isn’t historical materialism. It’s idealist thinking. The causes of Nazism are to be found in the somatic realm. Nazism – or fascism, Stalinism, New Dealism, Blairism, Bushism, et cetera – is an administrative approach, a particular administrative approach that is inseparable from the practice of imperialism, this latter being the international transportation of capital. Fascism is corporatism in the public sphere. Max Weber will tell you all about corporatism and how it fits into the grand scheme of things administrative, including its opposition to democracy.

I think there is a lot of truth in what Charles Bukowski wrote about Hamsun, Céline and Pound and their so-called ‘allegiance’ to fascism. Bukowski’s view was that these guys had to revolt against the mainstream, whatever it was. That’s what it meant to them to be a writer. I’ve read a lot of Céline and he seems a pretty strange sort of fascist to me. Hitler and the boys don’t show up in such a good light in his books, although they show up in the same light as everybody else. Maybe that’s what people don’t like about him.

I think something like this is true of Heidegger. Hannah Arendt never saw him as a fascist and she knew him, well, intimately. I think what she saw was something like what Bukowski saw in Hamsun and his mates.

Does any of this help you to understand my perspective on Heidegger? I hope I’m getting somewhere in explaining myself. I feel that I’ve got somewhere in my thinking as a result of this conversation anyway.