This post returns to last year to pick up on a series of posts on Derrida's 'Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question', one of the more difficult of Derrida's texts.

That series of posts was left uncompleted because the text was complex and convoluted. We are wrestling with fine distinctions in the gray on grey in the borderlands. For though Heidegger forms part of the philosophical context in which Derrida works, in the 'Of Spirit' text Derrida tries to come to terms with Heidegger's Nazi connections, accommodations, and support for the Nazi's throughout 1933-4 by way of an extended reflection on Heidegger's use of the term "Geist."

Geist and history come together.It recalls Nietzsche and the way that the Platonic-Christian Spirit, now passes as the realm of organized religion to which is opposed spirit as the realm of freedom, humanness, authenticity.

Does the use of 'Geist' Spirit (or culture) counter biologism, racism and naturalism, or is it a 'spiritualisation' of biological racism? These are the interpretations suggested.

Derrida says:

Because one cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by re-inscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity, even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of the spirit in the name of an axiomatic, for example, that of democracy or 'human rights'---which, directly or not, comes back to this metaphysics of subjectivity. All the pitfalls of the strategy of establishing demarcations belong to this program, whatever place one occupies in it. The only choice is the choice between the terrifying contaminations it asssigns. Even if all the forms of complicity are not equivalent, they are irreducible. The question of knowing which is the least grave of these forms of complicity is always there---its urgency and its seriousness could not be over-stressed---but it will never dissolve the irreducibility of this fact. This fact, of course, is not simply a fact. First, and at least, because it is not yet done, not altogether: it calls more than ever, as for what in it remains to come after the disasters that have happened, for absolutely unprecedented responsibilities of 'thought' and 'action'... In the rectorship address, this risk is not just a risk run. If its program seems diabolical, it is because, without there being anything fortuitous in this, it capitalizes on the worst, that is on both evils at once: the sanctioning of nazism, and the gesture that is still metaphysical.(pp. 39-40)

So how it is a metaphysical sanctioning of nazism?

Prior to that passage Derrida addresses Heidegger's Rector Address, the enflaming of spirit, and the German character of the university. Spirit becomes German. It is here in this Address, Derrida says , that Heidegger lifts the quotation marks around Geist to celebrate Geist, and talks in terms of the destiny of the Germany people. This gives us the march of the German people towards their future between Russia and America.

Heidegger spiritualizes Nazism---- he speaks of the 'inner truth and greatness of National Socialism'.

There is a kind of contamination going on here from nationality, which is difficult to evade And it affects us today as in the war on terrorism, and the patriotism of the national security state. Borders place limits on our recognition, compassion and responsibility to ethical "other"

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