Heidegger and Jewish Thought: Difficult Others 1786604736, 9781786604736

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Heidegger and Jewish Thought

New Heidegger Research Series Editors: Gregory Fried, Professor of Philosophy, Suffolk University, USA Richard Polt, Professor of Philosophy, Xavier University, USA The New Heidegger Research series promotes informed and critical dialogue that breaks new philosophical ground by taking into account the full range of Heidegger’s thought, as well as the enduring questions raised by his work. Titles in the Series: Making Sense of Heidegger, Thomas Sheehan Heidegger and the Environment, Casey Rentmeester Heidegger and the Global Age, Antonio Cerella and Louiza Odysseos After Heidegger?, Gregory Fried and Richard Polt Correspondence 1949–1975, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, translated by Timothy Quinn Heidegger in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Jeff Love Heidegger’s Gods, Susanne Claxton Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language, Lawrence J. Hatab Heidegger and Jewish Thought, edited by Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik After the Greeks, Laurence Paul Hemming (forthcoming) The Question Concerning the Thing: On Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles, Martin Heidegger, translated by Benjamin D. Crowe and James D. Reid. (forthcoming)

Heidegger and Jewish Thought Difficult Others

Edited by Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik With Elan Reisner

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018 Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0471-2 PB 978-1-7866-0472-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lapidot, Elad, editor. Title: Heidegger and Jewish thought : difficult others / edited by Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017. | Series: New Heidegger research | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017040551 (print) | LCCN 2017041821 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786604736 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786604712 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786604729 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. | Jewish philosophy. | Judaism and philosophy. | Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. Schwarze Hefte. Classification: LCC B3279.H49 (ebook) | LCC B3279.H49 H3416 2017 (print) | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040551 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii

Introduction1 Elad Lapidot

PART I:  HEIDEGGER THINKS THE JEWS

13

 1 Beyond Apocalyptic Logos Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly

15

 2 Heidegger and Marx: A Phantasmatic Dialectic Peter Trawny

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 3 Everyday Life, Hatred of Jews, and the Identitarian Movement: The Present-Day Heritage of Martin Heidegger Micha Brumlik

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Translated by Daniel Fisher

 4 “Whitewashed with Moralism”: On Heidegger’s AntiAmericanism and Anti-Semitism Gregory Fried  5 Being and the Jew: Between Heidegger and Levinas Donatella di Cesare Translated by Richard Polt

v

55 75

vi

Contents

PART II:  HEIDEGGER AND JEWISH THINKERS

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 6 Den Anderen Denken—Being, Time, and the Other in Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger Eveline Goodman-Thau

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 7 Groundlessness and Worldlessness: Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism and Jewish Thought Dieter Thomä

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 8 Heidegger’s Judenfrage135 Babette Babich  9 Heidegger as a Secularized Kierkegaard: Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann Read Sein und Zeit155 Daniel Herskowitz PART III:  HEIDEGGER AND JEWISH THOUGHT

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10 Heidegger’s Seyn/Nichts and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof: A Study in Comparative Metaontology Elliot Wolfson

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11 Fruits of Forgetfulness: Politics and Nationalism in the Philosophies of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger Yemima Hadad

201

12 How Else Can One Think Earth? The Talmuds and Pre-Socratics Sergey Dolgopolski

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13 Of Dwelling Prophetically: On Heidegger and Jewish Political Theology245 Michael Fagenblat 14 People of Knowers: On the Political Epistemology of Heidegger and R. Chaim of Volozhin Elad Lapidot

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Bibliography291 Index303 About the Contributors

309

Acknowledgments

This volume is the collective work of many contributors, who through various forms of engagement and dedication have made its publication possible. The conference that started this conversation owed its success to the institutional support of the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg, the Humboldt University, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, the Buber-Rosenzweig-Stiftung, and the German Federal Ministry of Education, as well as to the dedicated personal efforts of Christoph Kasten. The book owes its existence, of course, primarily to the personal and intellectual engagement and cooperation of its authors, translators, and editors. Special thanks are due to Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, the editors of “New Heidegger Research,” who not only contributed in writing and translation but have also constantly supported this publication from its inception through all the phases of its realization with good advice and warm encouragement. The editors express their gratitude also to Thomas Sheehan for the generous permission to use his excellent bibliography of Heidegger’s works included at the end of this volume, as well as to the production team at Rowman & Littlefield International; the general editor, Sarah Campbell; and the assistant editors, Isobel Cowper-Coles and Rebecca Anastasi. Especially warm acknowledgment goes to Elan Reisner, who with true passion and dedication worked hard to prepare the texts collected here for publication.

vii

Introduction Elad Lapidot

This volume has an occasion. This fact is already an irritation for thought, insofar as it aspires to be pure thought, philosophy. The occasional, in its contingency, seems to interrupt, to contradict and frustrate logical necessity, the pride and title of thinking. The occasion would be external to thought, that which only gives time and place, gives occasion to thinking, but is itself outside of thought. Time and place, however, is this not, properly speaking, existence? Isn’t the occasion for thought itself therefore the very event and being of thought, that is, as the event of thinking? Is there thought without occasion? This is perhaps the fundamental question that gives rise to the present occasion: the relation of philosophy to its event, to its own history, and to history itself, to the raw facticity resonating in the proper collective name “Jews.” The occasion for this volume is in fact a proper event of thought—a debate, in which this volume intervenes. That debate and controversy constitute the being of thought, perhaps the very essence of being; this is the idea that Heidegger suggested by way of reference to the Heraclitian notion of polemos; it is perhaps the same idea—or a polemic version thereof—that is suggested by the Yiddish concept of machloykes, dispute, disagreement, quarrel. Polemos/machloykes emerges thus as a first conjunction, an encounter in dispute, en-counter, “agree to disagree,” not in the common sense of ending but, on the contrary, of beginning the conversation between Heidegger and Jewish thought. Yet the machloykes in question has, thus far, not signified a HeideggerianJewish conversation but just contrary, a profound break. The event, famous at this point, was the first publication of Heidegger’s so-called Black Notebooks, as the last part—volumes 94 to 102—of his Collected Works (the Gesamtausgabe, “GA”). The Notebooks consist of a chronological collection of 1

2

Introduction

fragments, a sort of philosophical diary, written by Heidegger between 1930 and 1970. Published so far, in 2014 and 2015, were the first four volumes, GA 94 to GA 97, containing notes from the years 1931 to 1948. These notes were written in the era of and very often—more so than any of Heidegger’s other philosophical writings—occasioned by the rise, rule, and fall of National Socialism as well as by the Second World War. The controversy has arisen from and revolved around about a dozen passages, mostly from the years 1939 to 1942, in which Heidegger deploys his innermost philosophical apparatus to formulate strong anti-Jewish statements. In a significant dynamic, the publication of these statements occurred simultaneously with, and in some important respects even subsequently to, their denunciation as anti-Semitic. The ensuing controversy was thus framed and preconfigured by the thematics of Heidegger and anti-Semitism, of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. The accusation of anti-Semitism has understandably set in motion the fiercest attack against Heidegger’s work, surpassing in passion and scope all previous controversies concerning his involvement in National Socialism. Seldom before has been so palpable the operation of discourse and thought aiming to condemn and excommunicate from the community of thinkers and philosophers a corpus so influential in the history of contemporary philosophy. A powerful process is under way, of renegotiating and thus of making visible the limits of what may be legitimately called “thinking.” It is not only Heidegger who is on trial now, but his entire heritage, everything that inspired him and that he inspired, an entire intellectual tradition. The vast, maybe unprecedented, literary yield of this controversy manifests a real event of thought.1 It is in this conversation that the present volume intervenes. Its basic intervention consists in reframing the current discussion through the configuration of “Heidegger and Jewish Thought.” This title in fact suggests a specific conceptual framework for the controversy, a specific configuration of its subject matter. It proposes that the present conversation indeed concerns the very figure, image, or ἰδέα we have not only of Heidegger—but also of Jews. It proposes that we consider both as figures of thought, as names for ways and forms and worlds of thinking. This is more trivial with respect to Heidegger, less trivial with respect to Jews. Is there a specifically “Jewish” thought, “Jewish” knowledge? Do Jews qua Jews think, do Jews as such know? This is no trivial proposition. Not least because it collides with—and thus intervenes in by calling into question—the more common configuration given in the current discourse to the question at hand, namely, “Heidegger and anti-Semitism.” Two preliminary notes on this calling into question, this critique. First, needless to say, in no way does it contest the importance of exposing and condemning anti-Semitism in Heidegger or elsewhere. On the contrary, the critique is animated by the very same motivation as the condemnation and



Introduction 3

constitutes nothing but the prolongation of its proper intention, which comes only as a second step, an act of self-reflection and self-critique—so to speak, a second thought. Second, it is in the essence of the current controversy that it concerns and activates personal positions so as to expose some ambivalence in what we call “thinking.” There are thoughts that one allows oneself more readily to form and express because of who one is or is perceived to be or to belong to or to speak in the name of, for example, “Jews.” This is so, whether or not one subscribes to this ascription, and if so on what ground. That much one can agree with Sartre. Regardless of what one thinks of it, and especially when one thinks of it, this identity, this being inevitably conditions and enables, “occasions” thought. This would be one, most immediate, way of understanding the notion of “Jewish thought”: a collective reality of nonthought, an “identity,” as a condition of thought. Back to “Heidegger and Anti-Semitism.” A first critical observation concerning the current debate is that, as previously mentioned, the category “anti-Semitism” marks, in our discourse, that is, in the anti-anti-Semitic discourse, the end of discussion, the end of thought. Being an anti-Semite, Heidegger is no longer a philosopher. Anti-Semitism is not treated as a false, but as an illegitimate, thought. This discursive device, which seemingly seeks to protect Jews, has nonetheless also a more problematic, even counterproductive, effect. In countering anti-Semitism, not by refuting it, but by precluding it from the realm of thought, it eo ipso generates a figure of the Jew as something that lies beyond thought, unthinkable. Carried out to its logical conclusion, this anti-anti-Semitic discourse is led to deny that anti-Semitism concerns Jews at all. Indeed, the fundamental problem of anti-Semitism is understood not, in the first place, as antagonism toward Jews, but rather as the very engagement of thought and philosophy on Jews. This has been a central motif, in the current critique of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism as well. Yet one of the basic thrusts of Heidegger’s anti-Jewish statements, in line with a long tradition of anti-Judaism, consists precisely in excluding the Jews, as carriers of “empty rationality” (GA 96: 46), from the realm of real thought. A certain figure of the Jew is now dangerously circulating between anti-Semitic and anti-anti-Semitic discourse. There is here a reason for second thoughts. This volume sets this second thought in motion by recalling Jewish thought. “Jewish thought” is now understood not just in the aforementioned Sartrean sense of an external condition of thought, but as a determination of thought itself, namely, as a specific way or world of thinking, as a specific form of knowledge, a specific episteme. In this framework, of course, “Jewish” is no longer predefined as designating paradigmatically what is beyond or before thought, namely, the supposedly individual living Jew, whose Jewishness would somehow inhere in his “flesh and blood.” Rather, what this volume wishes to recall is Jewish being as a long intellectual and textual tradition,

4

Introduction

a specific tradition of thought, which—through generations of works and authors—understands and identifies itself as such. There are many questions here, of course. It may be better to speak not of one tradition, but of interconnected traditions, sharing and constantly redefining an intellectual space or discourse. It may be also necessary to question the designation “Jewish” too, which is external to vast areas of this tradition, such as rabbinic discourse. Nonetheless, a unique historical world of thought exists that has been produced by people who we currently refer to as “Jews” and that has, to a very large extent, constituted what we understand as “Jewish.” This world of Jewish thought needs to be recalled, since it is often, especially in the philosophical conversation, clearly by Heidegger, generally by his critics too, forgotten or foreclosed. The Jewish names that philosophy remembers are most often of individuals like Paul, Spinoza, and Marx, who in the eyes of philosophy embody precisely the break with Jewish tradition. Rarely heard are Jewish names designating the specific knowledge of this tradition itself: Mikra, Torah, Mishna, Talmud, Kabbalah, Chassidut, Haskalah. It is this world that the present volume wishes to bring into the current debate, thereby intervening in the figure of its subject matter, seeking to reconfigure, recall, and reenact “the Jewish” not just as an object of conversation, but as a voice in the conversation. This voice can speak for itself and answer to criticism against it; it can answer to anti-Judaism, to anti-Semitism, can enter into machloykes, with Heidegger too: “Heidegger and Jewish Thought.” This conjunction, however, signifies not only a polemic. Notwithstanding the schism brought to light by the controversy regarding Heidegger and anti-Semitism, the dynamics of this same debate have at the same time also revealed a certain affinity, even a structural solidarity between Heidegger and Jewish thought. In the current process of redefining or reaffirming the already extant limits of contemporary thought, as sketched earlier, both Heidegger and Jewish thought, to different degrees and in different ways, appear to lie outside the boundaries of a certain dominant discourse or at least operate as figures of otherness. In some respects, this discourse can be seen as the contemporary deployment of the same dominant tradition of Western thought that has foreclosed Jewish thought and been—for different reasons— critiqued by Heidegger under the name of “metaphysics.” Is there a connection between these two figures of otherness? Their preliminary, structural solidarity lies in the way in which they, as others to the hegemonic discourse, offer resources for its self-critique, for critical thought. Indeed, various moments in the current debate, which through the use of anti-anti-Semitic discourse effects the exclusion of both Heidegger and Jewish thought, manifest the workings of a more general machloykes concerning the foundations of Western modernity—and the legitimacy of their critique.



Introduction 5

At the very least, this double exclusion considerably curtails our critical resources for rethinking the tenets of modernity, enlightenment, technology, capitalism, liberalism and more, a critical self-reflection that the present time nonetheless seems to render increasingly urgent. More sinisterly, deploying the accusation of anti-Semitism for the purpose of delegitimizing an entire tradition of Heidegger-inspired critical theory runs the risk of positing Jews as icons of hegemony, an operation that would both reproduce anti-Semitic discourse and misappropriate the tradition of Jewish thought. It is in view of this danger that the present volume intervenes with the proposal to reflect on Heidegger and Jewish Thought as “Difficult Others.” Otherness is thought of here, of course, with Levinas as a relation of nonindifference, otherness as always already signifying not harmless diversity but challenge, dispute of claims, a bond of disagreement. The other as other is already “difficult,” and therefore significant. Is it as such difficult and significant others that this volume proposes considering Heidegger’s philosophy and Jewish thought, both as others to each other and as—different—others to the mainstream Western tradition of thought. Affinities between Heideggerian and various forms and motifs of Jewish thought have long been observed and commented upon by scholars. The first major strand of this research has focused on the relation, both personal and intellectual, between Heidegger and the significantly large circle of his Jewish students and followers, “Jewish” being understood here mostly in the Sartrean sense.2 The second major current has identified and comparatively analyzed common features in Heidegger’s work and different corpora or major trends in the Jewish intellectual tradition.3 The third movement of more recent scholarship has been occasioned by the current controversy.4 The present volume belongs to the recent movement, seeking to engage with the present debate on Heidegger and anti-Semitism as the situation, the actual event, from which to determine the space, contours, and horizon for the necessary (in the sense of historically appointed) conversation about Heidegger and Jewish thought. This collective effort began as an actual conversation in the form of a conference, “ ‘Das andere Denken’: Heideggerian and Jewish Thought, inter alia,” held in Berlin on July 5–7, 2016.5 In attendance were both Heidegger scholars and scholars of Jewish thought, and some who are both. Among the participants were prominent voices in the current polemic, some already actively shaping it through conferences and edited collections. The principle of machloykes, difficult otherness, has guided the conception of this collection. It does not offer the systematic and comprehensive comparative discussion that the title “Heidegger and Jewish Thought” might lead one to expect, that is, between various aspects, concepts, and moments in Heidegger’s work and in the Jewish intellectual tradition—a project that

6

Introduction

no doubt has its place as well. What this volume offers is rather the non-systematic composition of a conversation, holding together in suspense different interventions from different points of view, some differing on the identity of the subject matter itself, questioning at times the very logic of this collection. To facilitate this dynamic, which first unfolded in speech, in textual form, all authors were invited and encouraged to read all the contributions, to refer to the other chapters in the relevant moments of their own, and in a prologue or epilogue to situate their intervention within the volume’s conversation. As conversations often go, responses varied in degree and format. Part I of this collection, “Heidegger Thinks the Jews,” connects most closely to the existing controversy. Its five chapters elaborate, expand, and deepen the ongoing reexamination of Heidegger’s work in view of the new elements that have emerged in the Black Notebooks, in particular anti-Semitism. Jewish thought is present in these chapters predominantly, though in no way exclusively, in the sense of Heidegger’s thoughts concerning the Jews, the Jewish as an element of Heidegger’s thinking, so to speak Heidegger’s “Jewish” thought. Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly (chapter 1) open this symposium with a wide movement of thought, inscribing the relation of Heidegger to the Jews in a deep-structure drama of Western intellectual history. They portray Heidegger as the heir of a Graeco-Christian tradition of “apocalyptic logos,” that is, of thought predicated on eschatological revelation of truth as presence. From the perspective of this tradition, the Jewish is found outside—“Beyond Apocalyptic Logos.” Dating the philosopher’s polemos with the Jews back by two decades, their chapter de- and reconstructs how Heidegger, in his lectures on Paul in 1921, founds his philosophy as an apocalyptic project from which he eo ipso excludes the Jews. Seeking to counter this foreclosure, the authors follow Levinas and Derrida in reintroducing Jewish thought as “messianicity of Justice.” A Jewish-Christian tension appears also in Peter Trawny’s (chapter 2) reading of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks entry on Marx. Drawing on David Nirenberg and echoing Sartre, Trawny analyzes the Jewish in Heidegger’s thought as a “phantasmatic” otherness, serving dialectically for the constitution of the—equally phantasmatic—German self. Trawny depicts this “phantasmatic dialectic” in Heidegger’s relation to Marx as a Jewish “anti-Christ.” In contrast to German “thinking for the sake of thinking,” Trawny argues, Marx represents for Heidegger instrumental thinking that “understands itself as wage labor.” Micha Brumlik, in his chapter on “Everyday Life, Hatred of Jews, and the Identitarian Movement: The Present-Day Heritage of Martin Heidegger” (chapter 3), extends the purview of criticism toward Heidegger’s political



Introduction 7

engagement both inwards, to the philosopher’s private life, and outward, to current phenomena in the international public sphere. In the first part of his chapter, Brumlik discusses Heidegger’s National Socialism and antiSemitism as they arise from his recently published correspondence with his brother, Fritz. The second part spotlights Heideggerian inspiration in presentday “identitarian” movements of the New Right. In chapter 4, “ ‘Whitewashed with Moralism’: On Heidegger’s AntiAmericanism and Anti-Semitism,” Gregory Fried prolongs the movement of contemplating Heidegger’s critique of modernity in view of the contemporary political and cultural situation. Fully aware of its shortcomings, Fried also indicates the potential of Heidegger’s thought to serve as a resource for Western self-critique today. His demonstration focuses on Heidegger’s anti-American criticism, which Fried identifies as analogous to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism: “America becomes for Heidegger the Jew among nations: uprooted from history, obsessed with power for power’s sake under the guise of the most trivial purposes and justified by the most shallow moralism.” Recognizing the truth in Heidegger’s critique, Fried nonetheless polemicizes against its “totalizing tendency,” stressing the crucial importance of the ethical dimension opened to the West by “Platono-Judeo-Christian-secular liberalism.” Questions of ethics and politics are also raised by Donatella di Cesare, who concludes Part I with “Being and the Jew: Between Heidegger and Levinas” (chapter 5). Di Cesare identifies the Jew at the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy, the Judenfrage at the center of the Seinsfrage. She perceives the tension between Being and the Jew as a fundamental motif in Western-Christian metaphysics, which reemerges in Heidegger’s attributing the “oblivion of Being” to the Jews. It is in this act of inscribing and defining the Jew in the order of being and essence that Heidegger’s “metaphysical anti-Semitism” would consist. To this, Di Cesare finds in Rosenzweig and Levinas a Jewish response, asserting the Jew precisely as the “unassimilable remnant,” the “anarchic,” signifying beyond and otherwise than the totality of Being. Part II of this anthology shifts the focus of the conversation from Heidegger’s thoughts on Jews to the more dialogical conjunction of “Heidegger and Jewish Thinkers.” The four chapters comprising this part present different configurations of relations, positive and negative, direct and indirect, personal and conceptual, between Heideggerian thought and that of contemporary Jewish philosophers. Eveline Goodman-Thau carries on and expands the conversation between Heidegger and Levinas in her chapter “Den Anderen Denken—Being, Time, and the Other in Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger” (chapter 6). She too reads Levinas’ critique of Heidegger as reflecting a broader confrontation in Western intellectual history, between “Hellenism and Hebraism.”

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Introduction

Goodman-Thau thus presents central elements in Levinas’ response to Heidegger’s philosophy of being through his “ethical theory of knowledge” as articulating Levinas’ “critical modern philosophy of culture from the Sources of Judaism,” such as the Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah, and the Hebrew language. In chapter 7, “Groundlessness and Worldlessness: Heidegger’s AntiSemitism and Jewish Thought,” Dieter Thomä stages a conceptual encounter between Heidegger and twentieth-century Jewish thinkers as a critical intervention in the anti-Semitism debate. Thomä critiques the hermeneutics at work in the current controversy. He points at the difficulties in basing upon Heidegger’s admittedly anti-Semitic “attitude” a reading of his work as intentional “assertion” of anti-Semitism (as exemplified by Emmanuel Faye). Against this reading, Thomä proposes an alternative reading of Heidegger’s attitudinal anti-Semitism as “unassertive.” He demonstrates the difference between the two hermeneutical models through an interpretation of Heidegger’s concepts of “worldlessness” and “groundlessness,” which have been flagged by “assertivists” as anti-Semitic. Thomä concludes his demonstration by presenting ways in which the category “groundlessness,” common in anti-Semitic discourse, was reappropriated and redirected by Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Siegfried Kracauer, Kurt Riezler, Robert Ezra Park, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas, and Vilém Flusser. Babette Babich, in her chapter on “Heidegger’s Judenfrage” (chapter 8), depicts a very different encounter between Heidegger and Jewish thinkers: an encounter that hasn’t taken place. Her meditation, more precisely, revolves around the Jewish thinkers, Heidegger’s contemporaries and students, whom he did not read: Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, F. Joseph Smith, and more. Setting out from this nonreading as an accusation leveled against Heidegger in the recent debate, Babich develops a multifaceted reflection on the hermeneutics of nonreading: on our own nonreading of these thinkers, on our own nonreading of other thinkers, on our nonreadings of Heidegger. Daniel Herskowitz, in “Heidegger as a Secularized Kierkegaard: Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann Read Sein und Zeit” (chapter 9), closes Part II with a reading that did take place: of Heidegger by two influential Jewish thinkers. Herskowitz shows that, much like their Christian contemporaries, Jewish readers of early Heidegger read him as a secularized Kierkegaard. Unlike the Christian readings, however, Buber and Bergmann approach Heidegger from their decidedly Jewish point of view, and in so doing they offer reflections on the theological charge of Heidegger’s philosophy, on the Jewish-Christian difference, and on the purported contribution that Judaism, as they construct it, can offer to modernity in its hour of crisis. Part III, “Heidegger and Jewish Thought,” concludes this volume with five chapters that examine points of affinity, convergence, and tension between



Introduction 9

Heidegger’s thought and different strands within the Jewish intellectual tradition, both modern and premodern. Elliot Wolfson, “Heidegger’s Seyn/Nichts and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof: A Study in Comparative Metaontology” (chapter 10), engages the conversation on conceptual foundations. Wolfson indicates an affinity between the key notion of “Ein Sof” (lit. no-end, in-finite) in the high-medieval Kabbala, on the one hand, and Heidegger’s notion of Seyn that is also Nichts, Nothingness, on the other. Not suggesting any factual reception, Wolfson rather points at the conceptual similarity between Heidegger and the Kabbalists, whom he likewise understands as resisting “substance-oriented metaphysics.” He shows how the “nameless name” that is the Kabbalistic Ein Sof, “the nothingness before the rupture between nothing or something,” corresponds to “Heidegger’s understanding of the nothing as the being that is given in but always recoils from the superfluity of beings (Seiende) that make up the world.” Yemima Hadad, in her chapter “Fruits of Forgetfulness,” looks at “Politics and Nationalism in the Philosophies of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger” (chapter 11), bringing into conversation Heideggerian and modern Jewish national thought. Hadad compares narratives of modernity as forgetfulness— for Heidegger of Being, for Buber of the dialogue with God—and focuses on their respective political implications. She shows how both thinkers mobilize historical ontology to develop onto-political visions of their nations, which she examines critically in view of their concrete political choices: the National Socialist and the Zionist. Similarities notwithstanding, Hadad asserts a fundamental difference, opposing Heidegger’s myth of national greatness to Buber’s biblical myth of Israel’s moral election. Sergey Dolgopolski’s chapter, “How Else Can One Think Earth? The Talmuds and Pre-Socratics” (chapter 12), offers a broad reflection on the relation between the philosophical tradition in which Heidegger’s thought is inscribed and rabbinic thought as manifest in the Talmudic corpora, staging, so to speak, a conversation between Philosophy and Talmud. This conversation concerns what Dolgopolski calls “geophilosophy,” that is, the project of thinking earth or ground. Drawing on Heidegger, Husserl, Schmitt, and Deleuze, Dolgopolski characterizes twentieth-century philosophy’s attempt to reclaim earth for thought as revolving around a notion of absolute ground, shifting between original territorialization and original deterritorialization of thought. Dolgopolski contrasts this geophilosophical constellation with another, Talmudic, approach, which through a close reading he portrays as a movement of “absolute re-territorialization”—“the one that never ends.” Michael Fagenblat, “Of Dwelling Prophetically: On Heidegger and Jewish Political Theology” (chapter 13), suggests that Heidegger’s thought may provide access to a “descriptive elucidation of the sacred disposition of Jewish

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Introduction

political life in Israel” in its current state. For this purpose, Fagenblat first undertakes a “re-theologization” of Heidegger, drawing on the latter’s readings of Hölderlin. Heidegger’s Hölderlin, Fagenblat observes, like Moses, is seen as having founded “prophetic dwelling in the absence of the God.” On this foundation Heidegger developed a “political theology of proximity rather than presence.” Fagenblat then applies this Heideggerian-Hölderlinian theo-political matrix to modern Jewish political theology, focusing on the elements of language and land, of the Holy Tongue and Zion, in the thought of Gershom Scholem, in Kabbalah, and in the biblical corpus. The last chapter of this collection, Elad Lapidot’s “People of Knowers: On the Political Epistemology of Heidegger and R. Chaim of Volozhin” (chapter 14), proposes a similar mobilization of Heidegger for reading modern Jewish thought, focusing not on political theology but on political epistemology. The first part reconstructs the question of philosophy and collective agency as a key element in Heidegger’s philosophical itinerary in the 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that Heidegger both recognized the collective as a necessary condition for truth in history and identified the danger of this condition becoming absolute. The second part of the chapter applies Heidegger’s epistemo-politics to a reading of Nefesh Chaim, R. Chaim of Volozhin’s manifesto for the modern Lithuanian yeshiva as a non-nationalist modern Jewish epistemo-political project: a knowledge republic of yisrael versus the nation-state of Israel. NOTES 1 Among the monographs: Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2014); Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2015); F.-W. von Herrmann and F. Alfieri, Martin Heidegger. La Verità sui quaderni neri (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2016). To name just some of the collected volumes that have appeared so far: Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Heidegger et “les juifs,” La Règle du Jeu, no. 58–59 (Paris: Grasset, 2015); Peter Trawny and Andrew J. Mitchell, ed., Heidegger, die Juden, noch einmal (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015); Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer, ed., Martin Heideggers “Schwarze Hefte.” Eine philosophische-politische Debatte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016); Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, ed., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016); Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger, ed., Heidegger und der Antisemitismus. Positionen im Widerstreit (Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 2016); Hans-Helmuth Gander and Magnus Striet, ed., Heideggers Weg in die Moderne. Eine Verortung der »Schwarzen Hefte« (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2017). For a good recent review of these volumes, see Jan Eike Dunkhase, “Beiträge zur neuen Heidegger-Debatte” (book



Introduction 11

review), H-Soz-Kult, March 13, 2017, http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/ id/rezbuecher-27447. 2 See, for instance, Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans. Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Samuel Fleischacker, ed., Heidegger’s Jewish followers: Essays on Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008). 3  See Marlène Zarader, La Dette impensée. Heidegger et l’héritage hébraïque (Paris: Seuil, 1990); Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); on Heidegger and Rosenzweig, see also the long bibliography provided by Elliot Wolfson, “Rethinking Rosenzweig in Light of Heidegger’s Alētheia,” in Hartwig Wiedebach, ed., Die Denkfigur des Systems im Ausgang von Franz Rosenzweigs ‘Stern der Erlösung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2013), 146–47; Sergey Dolgopolski, What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 63; Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, and Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 25; ibid., Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkley: University of California Press, 2006); and more recently, ibid., Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 4 See Donatella di Cesare, Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah, 153–55; Michael Fagenblat, “The Thing that Scares Me Most: Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism and the Return to Zion,” Journal for Culture and Religious Theory 14.1 (2014): 8–24; ibid., “ ‘Heidegger’ and the Jews,” in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 145–68; Elad Lapidot, “Heidegger’s Tshuva?,” Heidegger Studies 32 (2016): 33–52; ibid., “Der Fremde im Denken. Zu Heideggers Antisemitismus,” in Homolka and Heidegger, Heidegger, 269–76. 5 Organized by Elad Lapidot, Micha Brumlik and Christoph Kasten, at the Jacobund-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum, with the support of the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, and the Buber-Rosenzweig-Stiftung.

Part I

HEIDEGGER THINKS THE JEWS

Chapter 1

Beyond Apocalyptic Logos Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly

To reflect on the possibility of a “Jewish thought” today requires us to situate this thought at the limits of the apocalyptic logos, which—we will seek to demonstrate it—orchestrates and determines the history of our philosophical tradition. “To stand at the limits of” has here a very precise meaning: it signifies to grasp the philosophical breadth of this apocalyptic logic, its inherent capacity, which comprehends as well as presents the totality of Truth and the meaning of its development within our onto-theological tradition. But also, and at the same time, it means to open toward the possibility of stepping beyond this ancestral logic toward a thinking capable of deploying itself otherwise than according to the apocalyptic determination of philosophical thought. This double signification is not without marking a further point— which is important in the elaboration of the possibility of a Judaic philosophical thought today—namely, our insistence in questioning all the different modalities of apocalyptic discourses—whether these be inspired by Greek rationality, Christian theology up to and including those (certainly more erratic and irregular) within Judaism itself. By questioning all the recourses to an apocalyptic structure of meaning at once in the Greco-Christian philosophical tradition as well as within Judaism, through the active questioning of the manner in which apocalyptic structures of meaning end up restraining what a “Jewish thought” could bring to the philosophical concept, we will seek to radicalize a certain oblique, and yet implied, possibility in “Jewish thought” itself which would engage another relation to “temporality,” “alterity,” “universality,” “History,” and the “ethico-political.” Such a development would require that we initiate our research by the following question: according to which Law can philosophical thinking open toward the possibility of stepping beyond the ancestral logic which has defined and structured its fundamental intention in accordance with an 15

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apocalyptic logos? We are seeking thus to understand in which manner the fundamental question of what we have come to name, since Heidegger, the onto-theological history of metaphysics, has always remained within the intentional frame of an apocalyptic logos. Consequently, we shall confront how and why Heidegger’s own “destruction” of onto-theology, opening toward a renewal of the Seinsfrage, inherently calls for a retrieval of an apocalyptic logos. In which sense does the “History of Being” display itself as the incessant apokaluptein of Truth—understood no longer as adequatio, but as Aletheia? How does the Heideggerian “dispositive” determine Truth as Aletheia and the Ereignis as the appropriation of Being and Time, through what we are labeling here an apocalyptic logos? And hence, we will seek to understand how and why Heidegger engages the “renewal” of an apocalyptic logos beyond its strict theological determination, while remaining, in a certain manner, faithful to Christianity.1 These questions require first a concise definition of what has been understood as apocalypse. The word apocalypse comes from the Greek prefix apo and the verb kaluptein. The verb kaluptein, from which the name of Calypso is derived, means “to hide,” “to conceal,” or “to veil.” The privative prefix apo, when joined to a verb, marks “away” or “off.” The word apokaluptein therefore means “to do away with” or “to take off that which” “hides,” “conceals,” or “veils.” Following from this philological development thus: the word apokaluptein, and consequently apocalypse, means “to unveil,” “to disclose,” and hence “to reveal.” In this sense, apocalypse means “revelation.” This explication, however, must be further comprehended. For although the meaning of apocalypse is now understood as “revelation,” we must still develop what the inherent essence of the apocalypse as “revelation” is. That is: what is “singular” in the “apocalypse” as “revelation” or in the “apocalyptic revelation”? Indeed, the apocalypse denotes a specific “revelation.” The word is the title of the last book in the Christian biblical canon. Its authorship was for a long time attributed to John the Apostle, but contemporary theologians and scholars mostly agree that the Book of Revelation was written by a certain John of Patmos. The Apocalypse or Book of Revelation enunciates an eschatology of History. Central to this eschatology is the coming of “another beginning” whose occurrence opens to the “advent of Truth,” not as a step outside human history, but rather as a step within the fulfilled, accomplished, and enacted meaning of a historical reconciliation between God and Man through the event of the “return of Christ.” Naturally, the reconciliatory essence of this classical definition of the apocalypse lends itself entirely to Heidegger’s destructio of metaphysics and its intrinsic onto-theological determination. Indeed, Heidegger insists, as early as the 1920–1921 Seminar on The Phenomenology of Religious Life, that the question of History can be posed only from “temporality” and not, as was the case in Hegel’s systematic



Beyond Apocalyptic Logos 17

speculative philosophy, through the reconciliatory essence of Spirit’s selfreconciliation through its self-recognition, where time, Heidegger argues, is reduced to the passage and development of dialectical moments in the realization of Absolute meaning. Hence, our use of the word apocalypse in the context of Heidegger’s philosophy ought not imply that the “History of Being” deploys itself through a spiritual reconciliation with itself. On the contrary! Heidegger opens an entirely other dispositive of History, and hence, of our “situation” in History. However, we will show how Heidegger maintains an incessant apocalyptic, albeit non-reconciliatory, movement of the “History of Being,” revealing the “Truth of Being” as always both giving itself as presence and withdrawing from its presentation, presenting itself and, at the same time, wholly absenting itself from presence. We will understand that this Heideggerian dispositive, structured as Ereignis and Enteignis2—that is, as donation—reveals the concealed essentiality of the apocalyptical before and beyond its ontotheological, and ultimately Greco-Christian definition, as “reconciliation.” And we will see that it is precisely at the heart of this concealed essentiality of the apocalyptic deployed in and through Heidegger’s philosophy that will remain reserved the possibility of thinking and accessing the movement of the “History of Being” beyond onto-theology and furthermore of thinking and accessing a Christianicity beyond Christian revelation and, at the same time, a “Germanity” beyond the Greek beginning. The analysis begins early in Heidegger’s writing, as early as the 1920–1921 winter semester seminar, The Phenomenology of Religious Life.3 Heidegger proposes a reading of Paul’s Letters to the Thessalonians and to the Galatians. The primary feature of Heidegger’s reading is to retrieve the possibility of returning to the “essential origin of eschatology” through the authentic disposition and exposition in “religious life.” In order to grasp what is meant by Heidegger when developing the possibility of returning to the “essential origin of eschatology,” we must therefore explicate precisely what Heidegger intends by “religious life.” What is signified under this term and in which manner is it operating in the general economy of Heidegger’s thought? What is the intrinsic disposition in “religious life” which, according to Heidegger, offers the specific modality through which the “essential origin of eschatology” can be grasped? The intent of “religious life”—that which marks, according to Heidegger, the essence of Paul’s teaching—is to open a “factical existential” exposure to an original temporality. “Religious life” is situated in its own concrete “context” that remains entirely dissociable, and indeed dissociated, from any chronological understanding of events in History. This is why Heidegger repeatedly insists, in these early lectures, on “Christian religiosity” as being wholly and entirely “factical” and, furthermore, that “factical” life is always and already historical

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by “living” in and within temporality. “Christian religiosity” marks therefore a resolution ungraspable and irreducible to an objective or chronological concept of time. Thus Heidegger writes that “christian religiosity lives temporality. It is a time without its own order and demarcations. One cannot encounter this temporality in some sort of objective concept of time. The ‘when’ is no way objectively graspable. The meaning of this temporality is also fundamental for factical life experience” (The Phenomenology of Religious Life, 73). “Christian religiosity” as “factical life” lives an authentic temporality, that is (and to put it in words that will become typical for Heidegger), a temporality where one is resolutely gathered in and within presence. Heidegger indeed marks this resolute gathering in and within presence as the “decisive” (ibid., 72). “Christian factical life” is not an “objective” form in History that an “object-oriented historicism” could reveal. Rather, “Christian factical life” marks a “decisive” turn from “object-oriented historicism” into what Heidegger labels the situation (ibid., 67). No theological explication could properly or authentically grasp or explicate the originary “situation” of Christian factical life. Only a phenomenological-religious understanding could open toward an original access to this “situation.” Which means, as Heidegger very precisely remarks in § 24 of The Phenomenology of Religious Life: it is always and already through phenomenological-religious understanding that an authentic access to “faith” can be enacted. Heidegger thus reveals through this phenomenological-religious breakthrough—capable of suspending and “bracketing” the rational or historicizing, “object-oriented historicism,” comprehension of religion—the “indications” in which man’s existential facticity is resolutely engaged. Which means: a “life” always and already “turned towards” and “exposed” to that which gives itself in a “call,” before any capacity to determine or constitute the horizon of intentionality for that “call.” This is an important point to already situate in our reading of the 1920– 1921 seminar: in effect, for Heidegger, the source of the entire project to pose anew the question of the meaning of Being in philosophy—a question, to be sure, not yet explicated and formed as such in the seminar—is located here. It is through this phenomenological-religious breakthrough into the facticity of religious life, whose main and principal trait will reveal—beyond the grasp of “understanding” and of a “religion of understanding” (to speak here like the young Hegel who typifies Judaism as such a religion)—the initial experience of that with which Man has always been allied and by which he has already been solicited. In truth, from this phenomenological-religious analysis of the Christian experience of facticity, Heidegger indicates the very space from where the possibility of thinking a renewed philosophy will deploy itself: the existentiality of Man called and summoned by the Seinsfrage—precisely what will become, in 1927, the Existential Analytic of the Dasein.



Beyond Apocalyptic Logos 19

We are here at the heart of the project constituting itself as the renewed formulation of the fundamental question of philosophy—the Seinsfrage—and, furthermore, as we can see, it is in Christianity, as interpreted by Heidegger, that this very fundamental question can be revealed as such and deployed in its “resolute enactment.” The aim of this project is to redefine and reengage, ultimately resituate, philosophical thinking and questioning through a wholly other decision, a “historical decision” and no longer a “historicizing decision.” This is why Heidegger, in engaging thinking and questioning within this phenomenological-religious breakthrough—whose task is to unveil the facticity of religious life—situates his entire project beyond the “historical misapprehension” of philosophy, beyond the subjective determination of philosophical anthropology, which has always already cut up the perceived world into an “object” of experience. Heidegger seeks therefore to entirely rethink the lived religious fact by having phenomenologically dissociated it from its conceptualizing theological appropriation. In this sense, the aim is to deploy a refoundation of philosophical thinking where the philosophical is no longer subjected to the theological and where the theological is no longer grasped within the objective horizon of rational judgment or that of an autonomous subject capable of giving itself the capacity to set the limits of the epistemological contours for that which it knows or can experience in knowledge. For Heidegger, what is at stake is nothing less than to rethink philosophy and theology from “lived facticity,” the “exposed facticity” of that which, in its “life,” is always and already calling it. The phenomenological breakthrough is entirely concentrated on the Greek letter of the New Testament. Heidegger expresses it clearly and distinctly at the beginning of his rereadings of the Pauline Letters. This interpretative commitment is not simply marked because the Pauline text is written in Greek. More profoundly, Heidegger’s commitment lies here on insisting that this text must be read and can only be read, not according to its historical chronology, not from the depiction of the instant of Paul’s conversion from Saul to Paul, not from the passage of the “doctrine of the Law” to the “religion of Love” accomplishing the heteronomy of the Law, but rather solely from the Greek, that is, consequently, from the clear, affirmed, and “complete break” with Judaism. Heidegger deploys the facticity of religious life by situating the point where Paul has always been Paul and thereby grounds an “originary Christianity from itself and itself alone.” Here Paul is always and already the respondent to the originary experience of an initial faith opening to a temporality other than and before any “vulgar” chronology of historical factuality. Opening thus to a temporality of the “lived facticity” of faith situated where there has never been a Law. We find ourselves in the existential situation of a “facticity” which is never the condition of possibility,

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the antecedent principle of the Law. Rather, the “lived facticity” of faith is already situated in the exposure to the initial provenance of presence without Law and therefore always lives through its own “resolute enactment” as the “being-in and within” the “essential origin of eschatology.” Everything happens as if to think the facticity of religious life, one first has to mark a radical foreclosure of Judaism from history, from the “History of Being,” and hence from eschatology itself. A foreclosure so radical that the entirety of the Pauline text, and consequently the entirety of the facticity of religious life, is read and can only be read through a resolute engagement with the predominance and preeminence of the Greek as an integral, complete, and inalienable break with all or any Hebraic sources.4 Heidegger’s intention is not to reveal a historical filiation, that of Paul’s, but to situate the beginning, and thus the arche of thinking within the lived facticity of Paul’s “faith” as the proper place from where the original experience of existence is deployed as such. This original experience of existence is lived and carried by Greek logos and consequently it is precisely within this logos that Heidegger sees the deployment of an originary “faith.” In this sense, Heidegger is not marking an access to a particular religion. He is rather exposing the very possibility to sojourn within, to inhabit, to “be-in and within” the initial presence of Being that he never dissociates, in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, from the radical break with any or all historical or theological determinations, a break enacted, according to Heidegger, by Paul’s Greco-Christian word. Which means: the meaning of “faith” is entirely defined from the historicality of this Greco-Christian relation and through this determinate relation alone—which opens up the deployment of the “History of Being.” It is noteworthy how and why the originary experience of “faith” is not conceived as the Christian accomplishment of the Law. Far from simply retrieving the traditional and classical theological reading of Christianity—by which Christian faith and love come to accomplish and complete, perfect and ultimately overcome both judgment and Law—Heidegger sees in the “livedfacticity” of “faith” the appropriation of the very source and deployment of presence. For here, through Heidegger’s reading of the Pauline Letters, “faith” never presupposes a Law to accomplish or perfect or complete. What does it mean to say of the experience of “faith” that it arrives before the Law and is the initial deployment of presence? It means: faith breaks with History to open up History—which renders to the Law the mere status of a derived “phenomenon” arising out of a reduction of the “lived facticity” of “faith.” The initial Pauline experience signifies therefore a rupture, a break, an interruption with all that occurs before the revelatory experience of “faith”—a caesura with all antecedence or precedence and with all that had occurred before the exposition in “faith.” It is astonishing and yet perfectly consistent:



Beyond Apocalyptic Logos 21

the intention to transform the classical and traditional interpretation of the theological movement whereby “faith accomplishes the Law” into a rereading where the situatedness of “faith” precludes all anteriority or precedence to itself erasing out of its own experience the Law. Heidegger’s gesture engages not only the negation and crossing out of Judaism from the facticity of religious life, but it also, and through this foreclosure, marks that, in contrast to Christianity, Judaism will never be capable of returning and accessing the question of essence, the possibility to question in direction of Being and its meaning, and hence never to obtain the possibility to respond to the History of the “Truth of Being.” Excluded from the question and debarred from the possibility to respond, Judaism is foreclosed from the “History of Being” and from even grasping its own foreclosure. Judaism is hence entirely erased and effaced from History. Judaism is denied every possibility of reappropriating itself and remains “situated” where it configures no thinking capable of accessing the possibility to question in direction of the meaning of Being. It remains without access to the “as such” and is thereby sealed, by Heidegger, in the impossibility to pose the question in direction of the meaning of Being. Going to the limit of this foreclosure: Judaism is even foreclosed from the possibility of understanding the impossibility to pose the question of the meaning of Being. In this sense, when Heidegger, notably in the Schwarze Hefte, characterizes Judaism as immured in the domain of simple and unessential calculation, and consequently, as only engaged in the empty “manipulation” and “machination” of entities, one can surely trace the genealogy of these affirmations back to The Phenomenology of Religious Life (GA 95: 96–97). The anti-Judaic statements and affirmations in the Schwartze Hefte are not abstract for Heidegger. On the contrary! They follow directly from the primary foreclosure of Judaism as it is operated for Heidegger as early as The Phenomenology of Religious Life. In other words, the foreclosure from the initial facticity of existence in The Phenomenology of Religious Life is brought to its pinnacle point when Heidegger situates Judaism in the not-technical manipulation and utilization, calculation and handling of entities uprooted from Being. Judaism hence can only follow a certain instinct, but never access questioning proper, the fundamental possibility, and thus can never access what Heidegger later called “the piety of thought” (Basic Writings, 341). Judaism can only use and utilize, manipulate and handle entities, yet without ever being able to inscribe or situate these in a World. Hence, Judaism would never find, not in itself, not outside of itself, the possibility of grasping the essence “as such” of that which it uses and utilizes, manipulates and handles. This is why in the few passages where Heidegger does name Judaism in the Schwartze Hefte, it is never associated with the technological. Rather, the foreclosure from the initial facticity of existence deployed in the Pauline

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Letters and analyzed in The Phenomenology of Religious Life informs the radical foreclosure of Judaism from the technological prevalent in the Schwarze Hefte. Certainly, in the Schwarze Hefte Judaism is entirely circumscribed in dispositions quite similar to those proper to the technological sphere: calculation, instrumentalization, objectification, enframing entities in the network left by the abandonment of Being. But never is Judaism allied with the possibility of “seeing” and “hearing” the turn (Kehre) outside the deployment of technology, thus abiding within the impossibility of turning itself out of its own deployment. Judaism never engages, nor can it engage itself, in the non-technological essence of technology, that is in the essence of the “Truth of Being.” Judaism is barred from grasping and comprehending the historicality of the event of Being through its dissimulation in the technological; it can never access or “see” or “hear” the Other to technology. Ejected from the initial facticity of existence and thus far from deploying technology, Judaism appears in the Scharwze Hefte without essence and therefore unessential, without World and in a condition where it is “bound to nothing and mak[ing] everything serviceable to itself (Jewry)” (GA 95: 96–97). Let us, however, return to The Phenomenology of Religious Life, and in particular to the initial lived facticity of existence insofar as it opens toward an experience of originary temporality. Already in the 1920–1921 seminar, Heidegger uses the term Temporalität. This term marks the opening of an originary relation to presence, to the always and already “there-ness” of faith anterior to all reduction of presence to a chronologically present moment, a situated instant in a chronology of events, measured and measurable in a particular instant in time. It is within the initial experience of a “lived-faith” that the existent can grasp and seize temporality and not through an objective conception of time. Which signifies: it is uniquely through such a rereading and reinterpretation of Christianity—which will, in the Schwartze Hefte, be renamed “Christianicity”—that an experience of authentic temporality is opened. This is why Heidegger, in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, determines this temporality as the “how” of comportment. And Heidegger names the accomplishment of this “how”: being resolutely “turned towards.” In this sense, temporality projects the factical existence in an “absolute turning-around”: that is, a movement in which the existent is always and already “turning-toward God and turning-away from idol-images” (Religious Life, 67). One could perhaps detect here—but we shall leave it as a mere hypothesis—the first lineaments of what will later play the role of the turn (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking, a movement that resembles the prephenomenological indication of how the turn operates and functions, how it incessantly plays between “turning-toward” while “turning-away” as a modality of the exposition of thinking in the deployment of the “Truth” and the “History of Being.”



Beyond Apocalyptic Logos 23

Such is Paul’s existential situation. The factical existence of religious life is always and already situated in an authentic temporality: turning toward the irreducible (God) while turning away from that to which the irreducible has been reduced (idols). The factical existence of religious life dedicates itself thus to presence and thus, in the wake of presence, to guarding and safeguarding presence from its fall into the present. Heidegger names this safeguard of presence the “awaiting of Parousia.” The “decisive” is this awaiting of Parousia. But this awaiting is not a simple perspective, nor could it be reduced to an expectation, or again to the miserable fixation in anticipation of a determinate or particular instant in time. It rather marks an awaiting without waiting for something, for a something or an occurrence in time. For this awaiting as an “absolute distress” is also an “absolute concern” where existence resolutely dedicates itself to the Parousia in living not in front of time, as if time were conceived as the recipient of objective moments or instants in time, but where temporality itself is lived as temporality, where presence is lived as presence. This existential awaiting means to stand in the “upsurge” within the “provenance” of presence. To stand in the irreducibility of presence that remains irreducible to the “present”—such is the mark of the factical existence of Man. In Heidegger’s words: “The extraordinary in his life plays no role for him.” And further on: “Life, for Paul, is not a mere flow of events; it is only insofar as he has it.” This persistence, perseverance, endurance within the upsurge or the provenance of that which always and already is there in and within the factical existence is nothing less than—to say it in the words of the later Heidegger—the sojourning of existence in the unveiling of the clearing of presence. To “await the Parousia” means to resolutely sojourn in presence. But what does this sojourning of existence in presence mean for Heidegger? In order to explicate and better understand both the centrality and the meaning of this “sojourning” in presence, we ought to follow how and why Heidegger himself recalls, in his rereading of Paul, the Christian experience of Parousia. To experience Parousia means to sojourn in “the appearing again of the already appeared Messiah” (ibid., 71). This is a central point and needs to be explicated. Indeed, that which distinguishes the Greek concept of Parousia (arrival) from its Christian modification as “presence” is that whereas the first rests on knowledge, it ought to have been seen, according to Heidegger, through faith. Consequently, as the Greek concept of Parousia rests on a “knowing,” it is grounded in a vulgar comprehension of time. The Greek concept of Parousia is founded on an objective time, representing time as the chronological succession of moments. The “awaiting” here would only mean the “awaiting” of a moment, of an event not yet present but whose occurrence would be entirely graspable in and within a temporality of consecutive presents. Furthermore, the Parousia would be nothing more than the coming

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of a future present event. Indeed, this is why Heidegger emphasizes that the Greek understanding of Parousia is “nothing other than a representation” and thus a reduction of presence to the fixed temporal order of the present. Heidegger sees here a structure of “waiting for,” which is reduced to an objectifying disposition riveted to mere expectation or simple perspectivism: we always and already know how the presentation of this event will be, and, even if the event is unpredictable, we always and already know how this unpredictability will occur—it will occur as a present moment itself inscribed in a temporality of the present. Even if we do not yet know when it will occur, we always and already know that the event will present itself as a present moment in the horizon of presence. Everything is thus taken as a question of knowledge, objectivation, and the calculable representation of that which occurs in time. It is also, therefore, a veiling of temporality itself. In effect, Heidegger highlights in which manner the Greek concept of Parousia, and the comprehension of temporality it initiates, covers over, dissimulates, suppresses the lived experience of religious life. We can see here how and why the factical lived experience of the Christian comprehends the Greek better than how the Greek will have comprehended himself. Why? Because the Christian entirely appropriates the temporality of the Parousia as a sojourning in faith, that is, in the surging of a presence irreducible to the present. This sojourning—always and already riveted to a temporality as presence, and not riveted to an event to come, where the coming is reduced to a future present moment—is precisely, for Heidegger, the Pauline lesson. Heidegger emphasizes this by incessantly distinguishing Paul’s word from any epistemological comprehension. Paul speaks in a different manner than according to an episteme. He speaks from a faith preceding all knowledge, a faith overflowing every possible inscription within a regime of knowledge inseparable from a form of objectification. This is why Heidegger’s commentary on Paul always paraphrases the Letters: One could think, first of all: the basic comportment to the Parousia is a waiting, and Christian hope is a special case thereof. But that is entirely false! We never get to the relational sense of Parousia by merely analysing the consciousness of a future event. The structure of Christian hope, which in truth is the relational sense of Parousia, is radically different from any expectation. . . . The “When” is already not originally grasped, insofar as it is grasped in the sense of an attitudinal “objective” time. The time of “factical life” in its falling, unemphasized, non-Christian sense is also not meant. Paul does not say “When,” because this expression is inadequate to what is to be expressed, because it does not suffice. The entire question for Paul is not a cognitive question [cf. Letter to the Thessalonians: “For you yourselves know very well”]. He does not say: “At this or that time the Lord will come again”; he does not also say: “I do not know when he will come again”—rather he says: “You know exactly.” (ibid., 71–72)



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Paul’s “knowledge” is other than, and intrinsically different from any cognition or objective knowledge. It is “knowledge” of the originary Parousia as “the appearing again of the already appeared” (ibid., 71): a “knowing” of one’s self as always and already standing in the surge of presence preceding all presents. In the wake of this Parousia, Judaism remains submitted and subjected to the order of representation and incapable of thinking beyond the regime of the representable. And indeed, for Heidegger, Judaism symbolizes the absolute contrary to the possibility of accessing the Parousia. Confined to this impossibility of sojourning in the Parousia, Judaism maintains and sustains the order of objectification by incessantly reducing Parousia to a simple futural instant or moment of the present. This is why, for Heidegger, Judaic messianism remains imprisoned in the order of objective cognition. This messianism in no manner thinks the “factical” “knowledge” of the lived experience of “faith.” It occupies itself solely with the present and how the present can be uplifted in the occurrence of a future present instant. In this sense, Judaic messianism, for Heidegger, simply seeks to manipulate time itself. One passage in The Phenomenology of Religious Life brings together this hierarchy between Christian Parousia and Judaic messianism: “To the Christian, only his to nun [the now] of the complex of enactment in which he really stands is to be decisive, but not the anticipation of a special event that is futurally situated in temporality. In late-Judaism, the anticipation of the Messiah refers primarily to such a futural event, to the appearance of the Messiah at which other people will be present” (ibid., 81). Judaic messianism, for Heidegger, amounts to nothing more than the simple representational waiting for a particular event in the present. In this sense, Judaic messianism is but a simulacrum of eschatology. Indeed, this messianism only indicates the possibility of arriving at the representation of an event, a chronological instant or moment marking the completion of time. And as such, it fails entirely to grasp the “originary essence of eschatology.” According to Heidegger, it would not even constitute a proper “waiting.” This messianism waits for an objective instant in an objectifiable and chronological sequence of time. And as such it is wholly and entirely situated in the present succession of present “nows.” It neither sees nor hears, according to Heidegger, the sojourning of “faith” in presence. And this is precisely why Paul aims primarily at breaking eschatology away from all Judaic temporality and messianism. In truth, the Christian eschatology, as expressed by Paul and retrieved by Heidegger, would only and could only be lived as an “obstinate waiting,” that is, as a waiting in the presence of the deployment of presence. It never can be lived as an attitude which would only consist in incessantly reporting, for a later time, that which occurs. Heidegger marks this “obstinate waiting” as an “affective tonality” of the lived facticity of religious life. What

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is important to grasp here is how and why religious life does not live in need, in a lack to be filled or be satisfied, which would or could cease through the eventual occurrence of an event. On the contrary! Religious life is resolutely within the enactment of presence, always fulfilling itself in the acquiescing of presence, sojourning in the initiality of presence. We can therefore see why Heidegger, taking over Paul, understands the “distress” and “insecurity” of religious life as exposure always and already riveted to the deployment of presence. It is “supreme distress” never ceases to accentuate itself and never ceases to deepen—not because it is waiting for an event to occur, a recognizable event, already presentable or representable, capable also of appeasing the distress or toning down the insecurity, but rather because it guards and safeguards a presence irreducible to the present, to the presentable, to the representable. We can see here, at the very heart of the factical religious life, how Heidegger recovers a grandiose apocalyptic tonality, signifying at once and simultaneously, in one turn and gesture, the “greatest distress” and the “highest redemption,” the “profoundest insecurity” and the “utmost salvation.” But conversely: he who will not have opened himself to the anxious guarding and vulnerable safeguarding of a distress inextricably and apocalyptically linked to a salvation could not sojourn in the deployment of presence. He would remain fixed in the simple chronology of the present, operating according to it and thus finding refuge in a “worldless” realm of entities always and already uprooted from Being. But for religious life, Heidegger contends, there can be no such refuge in the security of “worldlessness,” since it never flees the world, separating itself from its being: “The Christian does not step out of this world” (ibid., 85). Christian religious life is factical exposure to and sojourn in presence. This is why, for Heidegger, there “is no security for Christian life. The constant insecurity is characteristic for what is fundamentally significant in factical life. The uncertainty is not coincidental; rather it is necessary” (ibid., 73). And Heidegger will never cease to mark and underline this necessary exposure proper to the factical religious life. But what is at work in this uncertainty and insecurity of factical life if not a more profound and resolute economy of security? What is at work in this factical life if not a subtle dispositive where it always and already finds itself sojourning in presence and furthermore where is established and consecrated a determinate and determined relation between distress and salvation, between insecurity and deliverance, between vulnerability and liberation? To the point where distress and salvation, insecurity and deliverance, vulnerability and liberation always and already turn to each other and thereby reveal one another? This economy and dispositive is not a dialectic movement, and for Heidegger we could easily see how and why it ought not to be comprehended as a dialectical rapport where distress,



Beyond Apocalyptic Logos 27

insecurity, and vulnerability would be relieved by salvation, deliverance, and liberation. On the contrary, for Heidegger, far from any dialectic, far from any Aufhebung of difference into the speculative comprehension of Truth, what is at play here is nothing less than an apocalyptic movement where distress, insecurity, and vulnerability determinately reveal and turn to salvation, deliverance, liberation as both are always and already enacting the same determined dispositive of revelation: that of Truth understood as the incessant modality of concealment and unconcealment of Being. It is not that alienation is relieved by the speculative comprehension of truth; rather, it is that distress always and already shows and reveals, divulges and discloses a concealed salvation. Such is the “resolute enactment” of the factical religious life: to remain in and within the dynamic of presence itself, by safeguarding its modality, the dispositive of its truth, the play that presence enacts with itself in both covering and uncovering, dissimulating and revealing, occulting and unconcealing. It is precisely here that one can see at work in Heidegger’s thinking the movement of an apocalyptic logos: the “Truth of Being” incessantly conceals itself in unconcealing itself, veils itself in revealing itself, to the point where the Kehre is the modality through which we see, beyond the present, the “Truth of Being” as the dispensation of concealment in its unconcealment and the release of unconcealment as concealment. And within the movement of this apocalyptic logos, no destitution as no dereliction, no fall or degeneration is ever final, terminal or absolute. Rather, the movement of this apocalyptic logos and the dispositive of its truth acutely informs and assures the incessant play where destitution is also always and already the enacted revelation of a concealed dignity. Here we can better understand what this logic of destitution will become in the Schwarze Hefte—and most particularly in regard to Judaism. Indeed, for Heidegger, Judaism remains altogether removed from the dignity of destitution. Judaism will never experience, can never have the “chance” of sojourning within the “peril” and the “danger” that Heidegger, entirely faithful to the apocalyptic logos he had already fashioned as early as The Phenomenology of Religious Life, later articulated through recourse to Hölderlin’s word, emphasizing that “the more we approach it [the peril, the danger], the more clearly the ways leading to that which saves begin to shine” (Basic Writings, 235). In the Schwartze Hefte, when Judaism is relegated to the status of an entity without being, and thus—since an entity without being is not an entity—to not even being an entity at all, one must note that this status had already been sketched in The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Consequently, Judaism is situated somewhere in Heidegger’s typology between “stone” and “animal”: without world, like the stone, and using the realm of the entities without being able to inscribe this utilization in a world, that is, in a relation to the meaning

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of Being, like the animal. Hence for Heidegger Judaism’s “destiny”—the “destiny” of that which has no world and can never access the meaning of Being—is to be without destiny.5 In contrast, the Christian factical life, by already being called in and within the enactment of presence, is always in the world. As apparent in the above quoting from The Phenomenology of Religious Life, the Christian factical life is always “in the world,” enacting the irreducibility of presence to the present, where this irreducibility is already open to its sojourning within presencing. And the Christian factical life remains always and already faithful to that call—that is, faithful to the apocalyptic logos of Truth as Aletheia, incessantly “concealing” and “unconcealing” the historical meaning of Being. The passage—which may have seemed at times oblique, if not downright brutal—from The Phenomenology of Religious Life to the Schwartze Hefte in regard to Judaism should now be visible. Indeed, in the radical foreclosure of Judaism from the factical religious life, and consequently from the possibility of accessing the “originary essence of eschatology” in the apocalyptic logos of Truth, Judaism is, for Heidegger, nowhere to be found in the History of Being. If Judaism is said to entertain a history, it is one of incessantly uprooting entities from Being and therefore it can only appear as a history without History. Indeed, the door is resolutely shut to Judaism in such a manner that its foreclosure occurs before any word, any trace, any writing. In this filiation linking The Phenomenology of Religious Life to the Schwartze Hefte, Heidegger seeks to cut off any possibility for Judaism to ever be inscribed in the History of Being. Judaism is only relegated to a silence where it is already without history, for it has never even entered History, that is, never entered the experience allowing for the History of Being to deploy itself. What is the meaning of this silence? We have said it: it marks a mutism imposed upon Judaism, sentencing it to the impossibility to speak or write itself in and according to the History of Being. But it perhaps also marks something wholly other, as it opens a path to the following questions: perhaps Heidegger foreclosed Judaism because its heterogeneity could engage a disruption of the perfectly determined dispositive of the “Truth of Being” by repeatedly proscribing the apocalyptic logos of the “History of Being”? Perhaps Heidegger foreclosed Judaism from the Truth and the History of Being because the Judaic “Law” is oriented toward a wholly other immemoriality than that of the event of presence? Perhaps Heidegger foreclosed Judaism from the Truth and the History of Being because the Judaic “messianicity” is not riveted to the apocalyptic deployment of presence? Perhaps Heidegger foreclosed Judaism because the messianic temporality it engages could incessantly disrupt the predominance of presence and remain irreducible to the eschatology it is deploying? And thus dislocate the dispositive where the History and the Truth of Being would always and



Beyond Apocalyptic Logos 29

already deploy presence as both “concealment” and “unconcealment,” “donation of presencing” and “retraction from presencing”? Perhaps Heidegger foreclosed Judaism from the History and the Truth of Being because Judaism sees its source in an entirely different call than the one heard in and within the clearing of presence? Perhaps Heidegger foreclosed Judaism from the History and the Truth of Being because Judaism sees its source in a messianicity of justice whose source calls for a response and a responsibility outside and beyond the determined deployment of presence? Would a Judaic inspired “messianicity” in this sense require that we think presence’s Other, the other of origin, the other of Ereignis, the other of Aletheia and the other of the apocalyptic History of Being? A “messianicity” not bound up by truth or by history, and thus never fixed in the apocalyptic logos of the Truth and the History of Being? To be sure, a messianicity of justice will remain inaudible to Heidegger’s apocalyptic logos of the History of Being and the determined dispositive of concealment and unconcealment always and already at work as the Truth of Being. To be sure, a messianicity of justice will remain unfathomable to the deployment of presence as “originary essence of eschatology” of the History and Truth of Being. But the fact that this messianicity of justice does not find articulation in the Heideggerian dispositive ought not steer us away from seeking the possibility of writing it according to a wholly other logic and an entirely different lexicon than the one shaped and formalized so powerfully by Heidegger. Indeed, would not this powerful determination of the Truth and History of Being as wholly circumscribed in and as the development of an incessant apocalyptic logos not mark the point where Heidegger remained wholly blind to the possibility of there being another source of meaning besides Being, besides presence, besides the Truth and History of Being as concealment and unconcealment of presence? An indication toward this displacement is embedded in Levinas’ phrase— recalled by Derrida—“Truth presupposes Justice,”6 where Levinas sees, in the first instance, the proliferation of presence structured and orchestrated by the apocalyptic logos deployed in Heidegger’s Aletheia and Geschichte of Being. To follow this indication through and spell out the radicality of its presupposition (which remains irreducible to any and all conditionality or prerequisite, cause or ground) would be the task of an anderes Denken: to think a “justice” without presence and which would neither need nor desire to confine or restrict itself to the apocalyptic logos pervading the History and the Truth of Being. And to say that the task of an anderes Denken entails resolutely engaging in the elaboration of a singular expression capable of projecting toward a messianic idea of justice, where the relation between the age-old categories of “singularity” and “universality,” for example, would be redefined and replayed in another manner and together with an incessant

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questioning of both the travesties and diversions of justice in history. Such a task entails, however, a novel language—as novel as the otherness of this thinking itself—and it requires of us that we not settle for the simple reproduction or reiteration of the signifiers which have structured our history. It entails thinking more than what has been thought under the rubrics of presence, truth, history, being. It implies the necessity of the desire for another heading in and for our thinking. Towards which other heading could this messianicity of justice command us?

This messianicity of justice could perhaps, indeterminably and incessantly, haunt the Truth and the History of Being, that is, engrave in the determinate History of the Truth of Being the impossibility for it to determine itself as such. Never belonging to the determined History of the Truth of Being, this messianicity of justice could, from an entirely different source, incessantly summon both Truth and History to their ownmost limits, requiring them to confront their inherent aporias instead of remaining always and already fixed in their utmost determinations. Through this messianicity of justice, both Truth and History in their intimate and inextricable relation, would be summoned to constantly reexamine and hypercritically re-question, as Derrida would call for, their own “apocalyptic” perseverance and the horizon of salvation they repeatedly enact—reexamine and reflect on their inherent faithfulness to their apocalyptic logos that organizes their eschatological deployment. This messianicity of justice could perhaps indeterminably alter and supplement the History of the Truth of Being by persistently dismantling the determined alliance the latter puts forth between singularity and universality. And through this dismantling, this messianicity of justice could lead to the reinvention of a wholly other relation, perhaps even other definitions for each of these terms, between the singular and the universal. As though to subsume singularity under universality would already be seen as too limited, too circumscribed, too restricted to honor the idea of justice. And consequently, as though incessantly commanding the universal to always reinvent itself in a wholly other manner from the singular, from the in-each-case singular occurrence, could perhaps open upon a justice worthy of its name. NOTES 1 Of course, we are not oblivious to the fact that Heidegger developed one of the most radical “critiques” of Christianity in the history of philosophical thought. Understood as one of the main and directing lines of onto-theology and thus as the pro-active reduction of the meaning of Being to a “highest entity,” God, Heidegger will have, from the mid-twenties on and most notably in the Black Notebooks,



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radicalized a powerful destructio of Christianity. Although we are entirely aware of the undoubtedly critical dimension in this destructio of Christianity in Heidegger’s thinking, we also recognize and identify within this very gesture the further possibility that he gathers the essence of Christianity within the History of Being. Furthermore, we could even go so far as to suggest that the very destructio of Christianity is inseparable from an authentic and faithful salvaging of the essence of Christianity in the deployment of the History of Being. Everything would happen as if Heidegger was also proposing, through the “destructio” of Christianity, a “Christianicity” beyond Christianity. 2 Cf. Heidegger’s On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; originally, New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 3 Cf. R. Zagury-Orly, “D’une forclusion dans la phénoménologie de la vie religieuse’, in Heidegger et ‘les juifs,’ ” in La Règle du Jeu, no. 58/59 (2015): 723–43. 4 The radical break with the Hebraic source constitutes the foundation and ground of Heidegger’s rereading of the Pauline text, which, at once and simultaneously, imposes on Judaism a determined negation and, by consequence, forces it into a radical silence. This negation and the silence thereby imposed on the Judaic instructs Heidegger’s profound anti-Judaism, which is, as such, dissociable from a racial anti-Semitism opening rather to what we could call here a proto-antiSemitism whose intent is to erase Judaism from the “History” and “Truth of Being” altogether. In this sense, Heidegger’s anti-Judaism is, without doubt, the most powerful negation of Judaism in the history of philosophy and informs an antiSemitism where Judaism is, on this view, condemned to “self-annihilation.” We must remark here that this anti-Judaism and proto-anti-Semitism is not a simple retrieval of other forms of anti-Judaism in the history of philosophy—for example, in Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche. Heidegger’s anti-Judaism and proto-anti-Semitism stems, from the radical effacement it imposes on Judaism, founded on the idea that it is always and already not in Being, always and already absent from the “History” and the “Truth of Being,” hence it redefines and aggravates the very concepts of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Thus, and although Donatella di Cesare’s thesis, according to which Heidegger deploys a “metaphysical antisemitism” in conjunction with the “Seinsfrage,” remains insightful, we would rather insist on the point that, for Heidegger, Judaism is profoundly severed from metaphysics itself. Indeed, according to our reading, Heidegger forecloses Judaism entirely from the very possibility of its expression within metaphysics and therefore is entirely erased from even comprehending the forgetfulness of the fundamental question of metaphysics, the question of the meaning of Being. Judaism is cut from the polarity that organizes Heidegger’s entire discourse on metaphysics and is consequently denied the very possibility of questioning toward the “Truth of Being.” Which also means: Judaism is severed from the possibility of being assimilated to the deployment of technology, which, as we know, fuels the metaphysical oblivion of Being and structures the distinction Heidegger seeks to rethink between the onto-theological order of entities and the irreducible meaning of Being. Judaism—inassimilable to the technological “enframing” of entities, incapable therefore of thinking the dynamic of the turn (Kehre) out of technology into the “non-technological essence

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of technology,” thus barred from thinking the turn between the onto-theological historical reduction of Being and the “Truth of Being,” thrown out of the “play” between the “Greek beginning” and the “other initiality” of Being—is determined as a “non-entity” and therefore rejected into the “worldless” process of its “selfannihilation” (Selbstvernichtung). Cf. J. Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, “De la ‘Vérité de l’Etre’ à ‘l’auto-annihilation du judaïsme,’ ” in Heidegger et les ‘Cahiers Noirs,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie, no. 1 (2017): 7–25. 5 Certainly we could be tempted here to accompany the rich reading proposed notably by Elad Lapidot—a reading which reinterprets the concepts of Volk and Geschick in Heidegger’s Being and Time and where these are radically excepted from the political determination of a “State”—in which is imagined the possibility of thinking, from Heidegger’s “paradoxical attempt” to “connect or reconnect the political project of the people and the epistemological project of thought,” Mitsein of knowers, a “city of knowers” in the image of the Lithuanian yeshiva. However, and despite the attempt of this reading, our question remains: in what sense can such a Mitsein be at all conceivable when the very essence of this “community” is to consecrate and determine the insoluble and unbreakable alliance between the fundamental terms of Greek thought (Moira, Phusis, Khreon, Logos, Aletheia) and the “concealed,” albeit “essential,” German appropriation of these very terms? Such an appropriation is essentially grounded in the task to retrieve the unthought German source of these Greek foundational concepts and thereby resolutely exclude any other language which does not find itself in this essential alliance. And, as we are attempting to demonstrate, it is precisely the Hebraic language which is here unquestionably severed and excluded from this alliance, to the point where the Hebrew language never expresses itself as such in the “History of Being.” Furthermore, and in order to complete our question to Elad Lapidot, we must remark that Heidegger’s retrieval of the Greek foundational concepts into their concealed German essence is entirely grounded in the task of accessing the purity, the unsubstituable propriety, the essential and authentic unalloyed dignity of each of these originary languages in the “History and the Truth of Being”: the Greek and the German. In what sense can the idea of language structuring Elad Lapidot’s proposition—itself grounded on what we could call a “language of multiplicity,” where, for example, the name “Israel” is to be heard as “Yisrael,” that is, as a Hebrew name always and already grafted and substituted through another non-originary and composite, combined, hybrid, multifarious language, here Yiddish—ever reflect Heidegger’s determined retrieval of the essential purity of the Greek and German languages in the enunciation and development of his politico-epistemological project? It would seem that Elad Lapidot’s own “­politico-epistemological project” reflects a greater care for the alterity of the hybrid in languages, where—and we are obliged to recognize it—Heidegger would have certainly dismissed this very care as still “enframed” in the inauthentic and ultimately lost in the incapability of sojourning in the “house of Being.” 6 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff and Duquesne University Press, 1969), 90.

Chapter 2

Heidegger and Marx: A  Phantasmatic Dialectic Peter Trawny

Let me briefly meditate the title of this volume. What is so different in “Jewish thought”? What is “Jewish” in “Jewish thought”? Or put otherwise: what is so “Jewish” in “Jewish thought” that it is not German, not European? Or is there something in “Jewish thought” that is European, but not German? Probably not. Are Spinoza, Marx, Levinas “Jewish” thinkers as opposed to thinkers like Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Heidegger as “German” thinkers? What do “Jewish” and “German” signify here? Do these terms represent a restriction? If so, is thinking not always and everywhere—thinking? Does not thought have a universal matrix? Can we accept a German thinking in opposition to, for example, a French one? The otherness of thought to philosophy is a subject of Heidegger’s thinking. The “other thinking” is a Heideggerian way of speaking. It is a poetizing thinking; a thinking that dwells in the rhizome of poetry. But what is otherness for this thinking? Is there another thinking for thinking (not for philosophy)? What is the rhizome of this thinking? Or does it have not a rhizome, but a root? Is there a rooted and an uprooted thinking? Or is “roots” a senseless metaphor for thinking? Otherness is an excessive phenomenon. It transgresses its logical significations. This excess influences my relations to otherness, especially if it appears as the Other (der/die Andere). Excessive signification can shatter an organized attitude to it. In this sense, otherness can become fantastic, a phantasma, a phantom, a phantasmatic ascription—and in becoming a phantasma the attitude toward it becomes unpredictable and even dangerous. I would like to present a certain anti-Semitism as such a phantom, as a phantasmatic ascription, as an excessive reaction to a phantasmatic otherness. At the end of my chapter I will interpret Heidegger’s anti-Semitism in this 33

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sense as a German anti-Semitism, as an excessive ascription of a phantasmatic, groundless otherness, an otherness as the expression of an identity, of a discourse about an identity, which in itself also is phantasmatic. In the following I want to interpret only one of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic ascriptions, a passage about Marx. Seen philologically, there are only a few Heideggerian references to Marx: in the “Letter on Humanism” and in the Le Thor seminars. One day we will have a series of Heidegger’s notes from his reading of the 1932 edition of Marx’s early writings by Landshut and Mayer.1 It is clearly the most extensive manuscript dealing with Marx. Landshut’s and Mayer’s edition includes Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”—but Heidegger does not refer to it. Although the manuscript frequently quotes Marx, it cannot be said that Heidegger deals with Marx like he deals with Nietzsche, or even with Hegel. Marx is a thinker in the margins of Heidegger’s thinking, which does not mean that Marx’s thinking is without significance for understanding and interpreting Heidegger. On the contrary—maybe Marx is one of the best perspectives from which to read Heidegger. In this sense, I want to speak about an anti-Marxian matrix of Heideggerian thinking. (An anecdote: Jacob Taubes once called Adorno a “protesting Left Heideggerian” with a talent for writing—I can agree with this on one condition: that a “Left Heideggerianism,” a reading of Heidegger influenced by Marx, is at the same time a reading of Heidegger against Heidegger.2 Incidentally: Adorno called Taubes a person who obviously has had difficulties with his productivity.) The passage I want to interpret is one of the two remarks about the Jews in “Anmerkungen I,” written around 1942, a time in which Germans could have known, and knew, what happened to the deported Jews in the East. (I refer with this to Peter Longerich’s book Davon haben wir nichts gewusst, where Longerich analyzes the Nazi propaganda of this time.3 For instance, the Völkische Beobachter spoke in some articles quite clearly about the massive measures taken against the Jews.) The passage reads: The anti-Christ must, like every anti-, come from the same ground of the essence [Wesensgrund] as that against which it is anti-—thus like “the Christian” (“der Christ”). This Christian stems from the Judenschaft [a German expression I have also found in Martin Buber’s texts, not a neologism by Heidegger, P.T.]. This Judenschaft is in the time-space of the Christian West, i.e. of metaphysics, the principle of destruction. What is destructive in the inversion of the fulfillment of metaphysics—i.e. of the metaphysics of Hegel by Marx. Spirit and culture become the superstructure [Überbau] of “life”—i.e. of economics, i.e. of organization—i.e. of the biological—i.e. of the “people.” (GA 97: 20)

Immediately after this passage Heidegger speaks of the “peak of self-annihilation in history,” where “what is essentially ‘Jewish’ in the metaphysical



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sense” combats “the Jewish.” This means that there must be a specific relation or connection between the two passages. The first clause of the first sentence begins with a remark on the “AntiChrist,” and the whole passage concludes four sentences later in an interpretation of “metaphysics.” What is the connection between these two parts? The “Anti-Christ” belongs to Christianity, because it has the same “Wesens­ grund.” The “Wesensgrund” of Christianity is “Judenschaft.” The consequence is that the “Anti-Christ” stems from “Judenschaft.” “Metaphysics” here re­presents “the time-space of the Christian west,” which means that “metaphysics” also unfolds from the identical “Wesensgrund” of “Judenschaft,” which finally appears as the “principle of destruction” in the history of “metaphysics” coming from “Judenschaft” itself. Why then does Heidegger begin this consequence (without a doubt a kind of a salto mortale of thinking) with a remark on the “Anti-Christ”? In my view, the only possible interpretation is that there is a connection between the “anti-” and the “principle of destruction.” This must be because “Judenschaft”—as the “principle of destruction”—is the origin of the “Anti-Christ” (and of “the Christian”). Christianity, then, as a form of “metaphysics” (here namely a form of Hegelianism) must be the “anti-” to the “anti-,” “spirit and culture” in opposition to “life” (Engels speaks of “the realities of life,” at the beginning of his 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in England).4 Marx represents the “inversion” in between the opposition of “spirit” and “life.” This “inversion” is an effect of the “principle of destruction”; that is, Marx is the incarnation of this “principle.” And if this “principle of destruction” represents the “anti-” of the “Anti-Christ,” Marx is the “Anti-Christ.” In this narrative, Judaism—in the form of the beginning of monotheism and the idea of a creating God—would be the origin of metaphysics, the origin of what Heidegger later called “onto-theo-logics.”5 In the “history of being,” then, Judaism would not be, as Donatella di Cesare suggests, the Other to the “history of being,” but rather the decline of the first beginning with the Greeks (chronology would not be a problem here since Christianity is a form of Judaism).6 (It should be remembered that two times in the “Anmerkungen” Heidegger designates his own thinking as the “anti-Christian” [“das Antichristliche”/“das Anti-Christentum”]—which he identifies with the Greek beginning (GA 97: 193, 199). This would force us to speak of two forms of anti-Christianity—of the pre-Socratics and Marx, that is, of Judaism.) Marx is a representative of Judenschaft, which is in the history of “the Christian west, i.e. of metaphysics, the principle of destruction.” This concept sounds almost like a quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where Hitler speaks of the “destructive principle of the Jews.”7 For Hitler, “the Marxist” and “the Jew” are the same. But what is “destructive” for Heidegger?

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Obviously something that happens in history. It refers here to what Heidegger calls “the inversion in the fulfillment of metaphysics.” This “inversion” is basically the “inversion” of Platonism, which is also to be found more prominently for Heidegger in Nietzsche’s thinking. The idea’s mastery over the body in Platonic metaphysics becomes the body’s mastery over the idea in Nietzsche—and Marx. (In this sense Heidegger can call Nietzsche and Marx “Platonists.”) The destruction or the destructive character of this “inversion” is for Heidegger—especially in the Black Notebooks—the mastery of beings over Being. This inventory of “being-historical” terminology is repeated there again and again. In this sense Heidegger inscribes the history of meta­physics into the “history of Being”—this is not surprising, because the history of metaphysics is part of the “history of Being”; the history of metaphysics in Heidegger’s sense can only be in the “history of Being.” The total mastery of beings over Being finds its most characteristic phenomenon in the destructive event of the Second World War. For the philosopher the war is actually the event of the total domination of beings over Being. Precisely this destructive character—the total domination of beings over Being—is recognized in Marx. Heidegger interprets Marx as a materialist who understands history as a history of production and of means of production. But the passage has not yet come to the end. Heidegger tries to give a short introduction to what he thinks Marx’s thinking does. The difference between “Unterbau” and “Überbau” (base and superstructure) undermines the meaning of “spirit” and “culture” by emphasizing the meaning of “life.” “Life” is the same as “economics,” “organization,” “the biological,” and “the ‘people’.” This sequence or con-sequence is important because it confirms a strategy that Heidegger pursues in all his statements on Judaism. The “beinghistorical” con-sequence from “economics” to the “biological” and to the “people” is concentrated in the National Socialist understanding or ideology of “life.” In other words: If Marx’s thinking signifies the “principle of destruction” in the history of metaphysics by inverting the relation between idea and bodily beings, by understanding the “Überbau” as an epiphenomenon of the “Unterbau,” he, as a Jew, prepares the ground for the National Socialist ideology. Marx is then a pre-Hitler; Hitler a post-Marx. In this “being-historical” strategy of claiming that Judenschaft and National Socialism are “essentially” the same we could find an echo of a certain anti-Semitic figure from National Socialist propaganda, namely, that the Second World War was caused by “world Jewry,” and that all measures taken by the Germans against the Jews are only reactive measures to those measures taken by the Jews against Germans (Cf. Hitler’s speech from January 30, 1939).8



Heidegger and Marx 37

If Heidegger thinks that the “peak of self-annihilation” in “history” is reached when what is “essentially ‘Jewish’ ” fights against the “Jewish,” then he thinks of the Jewish “principle of destruction” in “metaphysics” as itself ultimately directed against the Jews. In the background to this interpretation Heidegger sees the Jewish understanding of God as a jealous creator, that is, as a God, who is then supposed to have an intrinsic relation to revenge and to technology (GA 97: 369). Technology as such would have the character of the “spirit of revenge.” I spoke in my book of a “being-historical anti-Semitism” because Heidegger’s narrative of a “principle of destruction” in the “fulfillment of metaphysics” is for him part of the “history of Being.” Only if you take into consideration the—obviously problematic—“being-historical” presupposition that the history of metaphysics is dominated by a Jewish beginning where God as creator is a super-technician and take into consideration Marx’s understanding of the importance of “labor” and “production” as referring to this beginning, which is then somehow intertwined with the history of Platonism, can you understand Heidegger’s claims here. And again, Heidegger can only speak of metaphysics because he is in a way already thinking beyond metaphysics. (Another question is whether this beyond, this beyond metaphysics, falls back into metaphysics—when the “history of Being” becomes the history of a topology of specific significations that Heidegger inscribes in the course of history.) If it is legitimate for me to think like this, I would also claim that Heidegger’s “history of Being” is the attempt to overcome Marx’s understanding of history as formations of “class struggles.” With his understanding of history, Heidegger attempts to outdo Marx (this is, incidentally, the main feature of the manuscript on Marx that I mentioned earlier). For Heidegger, the “history of Being” provides the context for interpreting and understanding Marx’s thinking—also or especially in his assumed Jewish roots. The concept of “being-historical anti-Semitism” has been criticized in many ways, including by Jürgen Habermas in an interview with the French Revue Esprit (he does not mention me by name, but he refers to my concept and criticizes it).9 The characterization “being-historical” would be a kind of sublimation. Here I would like to complete my chapter by accepting this critique under certain conditions. I accept this critique, because there is a possibility of understanding being-historical anti-Semitism as an old German anti-Semitism, which that now indeed inscribes itself in the phantasmatic dialectics, in the phantasmatic otherness of thinking as such. Let me finally try to explain this: Anti-Semitism is, for David Nirenberg, not a reaction to factual phenomena.10 Anti-Semitism does not refer to “real” Jews, but is rather an expression of a certain self-interpretation with reference to a certain otherness.11 In this sense anti-Semitism says something about the

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anti-Semites, not about the reference of the anti-, of the Other. Here I want to recall a problem that was at stake for Heidegger and, interestingly, for Adorno too. In his short text “On the Question: What Is German” Adorno refers to a definition by Richard Wagner.12 For Wagner, what is to be German means “to do something for its own sake” (deutsch sein heißt, eine Sache um ihrer selbst willen tun; the actual statement is die Sache die man treibt, um ihrer selbst willen und der Freude an ihr willen treiben).13 Wagner refers in the context of this saying to the plays of Schiller and Goethe, that is, to art and aesthetics. For him, the Germans are the people of the useless, of art—the real heirs of the Greeks (of course). For Wagner, it is immediately obvious that the Jews represent the opposite, namely, only to do something for the sake of the business, of capital. He explains this very clearly in his article “What is German?” Could the otherness of a thinking then be the source of a self-interpretation by constructing this otherness as a phantasma of what is its own? Yes, “Jewish thought” is different, because it is—I take Marx pars pro toto—a materialist thinking of “production,” a thinking of economy and being successful in economy by making money, or, better, in accumulating capital by technological means, a thinking of the superstructure as an epiphenomenon of the base. German thought—and Heidegger in this sense is definitively a German thinker—is, like Greek thought, like theoría in the Aristotelian sense (to be free of labor)—a thinking for its own sake, a thinking for the sake of Being itself, not for the sake of beings. The anti-Marxian matrix of Heideggerian thinking is based, then, on a phantasma, even on a specter—recalcitrant icon of a suffering consciousness. This suffering is the experience of a loss, namely, the loss of a thinking that only thinks for its own sake. It is a thinking which only circles around this loss (one could perhaps call this loss the loss of “Heimat”). It is the thinking of a phantom, of a phantom pain—as if thinking ever was a thinking for its own sake. From this perspective, Heidegger’s words in the “Letter of Humanism,” that Marx has a specific relation to history “because he experiences the alienation of man” (GA 9: 339), receives a certain intonation. Did Marx experience the alienation or did he develop a theory of it? Why could Marx experience the alienation? Because he was the thinker of a state of the human being which is forced to do things for a purpose that does not lie in the doing as such. Because he is the thinker of wage labor, where people work to live, to “make a living,” where thinking strives for the revolution as a liberation from such a life, where thinking, finally, becomes a revolutionary praxis. For Wagner—and for Heidegger too—this is not the condition of the Germans, of German thinking, of thinking as such. And here we have reached the phantasmatic dialectic of Heidegger and Marx, of a thinking that thinks only and uniquely for the sake of thinking



Heidegger and Marx 39

and another thinking, which understands itself as wage labor, which thinks for something that does not lie in this thinking as such—a thinking that, ultimately, does not want to “interpret” the world anymore but to “change” it. Here we are at a point that marks the difference and the otherness separating the base and the super structure, the difference between a thinking of Being itself and a thinking of beings, of a German and a Jewish thinking. NOTES  1 Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus: Die Frühschriften. ed. Siegfried Landshut and Jakob Peter Mayer (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1932).  2 Cf. Philipp Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie: Geschichte einer Revolte 1960–1990 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015), 54–63.  3 Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2006).  4 Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (Munich: dtv, 1973), 3.   5 Cf. GA 11: 31–80.   6 Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2016), 263–66. Of course, Di Cesare does not accept Heidegger’s reduction of Judaism to the monotheism of the creating God, of that proto-technician, which is how Heidegger seems to see him.   7 Cf. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolge, 1943), 498.  8 Max Domarus, Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945. Bd. I. Triumph. Erster Halbband 1932–1934 (München: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1965), 330.   9 Michaël Foessel und Jürgen Habermas, “Kritik und kommunikatives Handeln: Ein Gespräch mit Jürgen Habermas,” Eurozine, September 23, 2015, accessed on May 25, 2017: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2015-09-23-habermas-de. html: “I think that it is totally absurd that today the Black Notebooks are considered as news—and that some colleagues even make the attempt to sublimate Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and all the unspeakable rest of his dull resentments being-­historically (!)” (my translation—P.T.). 10 Cf. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism. The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013). 11 What is a “real” Jew, a “real” German, a “real” human being? This question does not doubt that there are “realities of life,” that there are human beings living their lives with all their needs and desires. But what the reality is of a Jew, of a German, even of a human being is not easy to say. Maybe it is impossible to say. 12 Theodor W. Adorno, “Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch,” in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 693. 13 Richard Wagner, “Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Vol. 8. (Leipzig: Verlag von E. W. Fritzsch, 1888), 96–97.

Chapter 3

Everyday Life, Hatred of Jews, and the Identitarian Movement: The Present-Day Heritage of Martin Heidegger Micha Brumlik Translated by Daniel Fisher PRELIMINARY REMARK: DOCUMENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE It was Martin Heidegger’s undisputedly revolutionary breakthrough in philosophy to examine everyday life and one’s own daily life as one, if also deficient, mode of human existence: “What is initially required,” so ends § 34 of his book Being and Time, first published 1927 is to make visible the disclosedness of the they, that is, the everyday mode of being of discourse, sight, and interpretation, in specific phenomena. With regard to these, the remark may not be superfluous that our interpretation has a purely ontological intention and is far removed from any moralizing critique of everyday Dasein and from the aspirations of a “philosophy of culture.” (GA 2: 222, Stambaugh, 161)

Humans are thinking beings and even the everyday life led by them is characterized by reflection, by a response formed both emotionally and linguistically toward one’s own self. Such a position toward one’s own daily life can be manifested in fleeting thoughts, ones that remain by themselves, in verbal communication to others or also in written communication, be it in the form of diaries for oneself or in letters to relatives, friends, and other acquaintances. Generally speaking, these don’t represent a critical public, in which arguments are weighed and assessed, but rather everyday trusted individuals with whom it’s expected that they exhibit the same horizon of experience and assessment as the author of such utterances. Heidegger himself designated 41

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this horizon of assessment as the sphere of the “they” [“das Man”], but overlooked that this “they” pervades by no means only the sphere of public media, but also more familial privacy: also and especially worldviews, prejudices, affects, and opinions are communicated here unproblematized. This is precisely what befell Heidegger himself, as will be shown with letters exchanged within his family cited as an example.1 This written correspondence confirms in its everydayness Heidegger’s “anti-Semitism as an essential feature in the history of Being” [seinsgeschichtlicher Antisemitismus], his hatred toward Jews that is rooted in a core ethnic-nationalist [völkisch] belief. It thereby concerns a position that—as shall be made evident at the end—minus its characteristic anti-Semitism as repudiated by German history, also distinguishes the contemporary New Right, the “identitarians.” HEIDEGGER’S EVERYDAY Martin Heidegger, since 1928 Husserl’s successor as full professor for philosophy in Freiburg, viewed the (political) Catholicism of the Weimar Republic with vehement aversion—particularly to the party and politics of Heinrich Brüning. The year 1933 and Hitler’s accession to power fulfilled hopes Heidegger had harbored since 1932 with view to the Center Party, whose chairman Heinrich Brüning was Reich Chancellor from March 1930 to May 1933, presiding over a coalition of Right Liberals [DVP/Deutsche Volkspartei], Liberals [DDP/Deutsche Demokratische Partei], Right Conservatives [DNVP/Deutschnationale Volkspartei], and an Economic Party [Wirtschaftspartei]: “I don’t know,” Heidegger wrote in July 1932 to his brother Fritz, “how much further your political conviction has advanced—but I assume you don’t belong to the admirers of Brüning and are leaving the Center to the broads [Weiber] and Jews as a haven.”2 In the last years and months of the Weimar Republic the chancellors appointed by President Hindenburg were, as is generally known, rapidly replaced under pressure exerted by the aspiring NSDAP—only three months after this letter Hindenburg appointed Franz von Papen as chancellor—a gambit that evidently appalled Martin Heidegger. Papen, a member of the Center Party and prominent long-standing exponent of a right-wing conservative restoration of monarchical relations, was a firm opponent of Soviet communism, which he characterized as “Bolshevism” and sought to confront through an alliance between Germany and Western states. This right-wing Catholic tradition also encompassed his “defensive” anti-Semitism, directed as it was toward curtailing the ostensibly excessive influence of Jews in the press, judiciary, and the arts. Papen, who would serve as Kurt von Schleicher’s predecessor, was appointed Reichskanzler by Hindenburg in June 1932, a decision that greatly aggravated Heidegger: “Schleicher yes—but Papen



Everyday Life, Hatred of Jews, and the Identitarian Movement 43

no—” Heidegger commented on the change of government, for “already in August it became clear how all the Jews were given a sudden boost and gradually freed themselves from the atmosphere of panic in which they’d fallen.”3 The transition from Brüning to Papen—brokered in difficult background discussions between Hindenburg and politicians of the NSDAP and the DNVP—led to a “cabinet of the barons” that consisted extensively of independent ministers plus DNVP members, but without representatives of the Center. Papen himself preempted expulsion from his party, the Center, by resigning. Yet Heidegger’s comment on this change of government as a Jewish machination is anti-Semitically charged: “That for the Jews such a maneuver as the Papen episode was a success just demonstrates how difficult it will be in any case to persist against everything which is big capital and likewise big. Then there’s the political clumsiness of the Nazis. And still, notwithstanding all the excesses and unpleasantness one must hold to them and Hitler.”4 POLITICAL-PHILOSOPHICAL HATRED OF JEWS In these everyday utterances of a far-right-leaning newspaper reader there are already signs of what would later appear in the Black Notebooks, in which time and again the “Gigantic” is critically conjured up, as Heidegger’s “being-historical” (Peter Trawny) or even his “metaphysical” anti-Semitism (di Cesare).5 The “Gigantic,” as it is found in Heidegger’s “Considerations” [Überlegungen IV], is nothing “quantitative,” “but rather the quality that quantity as such, that is, in its endlessness and enormousness, plainly “qualifies” as a “quale”: “The Gigantic is the genuine Countergod of the Great” (GA 94: 268). While Heidegger distinguishes carefully in the Black Notebooks, reflecting there philosophically and systematically, between “great” and “gigantic,” the “great” proves to be, in the mode of the everyday, of the everyday hatred of Jews, a predecessor of the “giant.” It goes without saying that Heidegger’s interpretation of Papen’s appointment to Reich Chancellor, as being attributable to “the Jews,” represented nothing other than the paranoid speculation of a newspaper-reading petit bourgeois. As a matter of fact, the “Central Association for German Citizens of the Jewish Faith” warned German Jews in November 1932 against casting a vote for the DNVP; after all, the DVP that supported Papen’s government would still be eligible for election.6 In other words, the circumstance that there were several Jews who supported the DVP, in some cases even acting as members, and that the same DVP supported the chancellor, sufficed for Heidegger to qualify this chancellorship as one steered “by the Jews.” In July 1932—Heidegger wrote this letter three months later in October— the DVP had garnered a mere 1.2 percent of the vote; in November 1932—one

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month after Heidegger’s letter—just 1.9 percent. As was the case in previous years it was clear—in the Jewish press as well—that the DVP, although it officially rejected anti-Semitism, could under no circumstances expect approval from Jewish voters or even members.7 Thus Heidegger and his brother—there can be no doubt about that now— thought in a conspiricist manner, explaining the influence of marginally small minorities as the essential cause for the change in political conditions. A letter written after Hitler’s assumption of power in spring 1933, by Fritz Heidegger in Meßkirch to Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, confirms this: “International Jewish high finance discovered anno 1918 in Germany amid collapse is a shining object of exploitation, so it dictated the entente, which itself will have stood on the Jewish payroll, not to carve up and lay waste to Germany, thus rendering the exploitation possible in the first place.”8 Still, it’s certainly not permissible to ascribe statements to Martin Heidegger made by his brother (1894–1980); however, such letters verify, without protest and commentary in reply, that such views counted as everyday “knowledge” in the family.9 In these weeks, at any rate, Martin Heidegger can’t but help to express his admiration for Adolf Hitler: “It appears indeed each day,” so Martin writing in April to Fritz, “toward what greatness as a statesman Hitler is currently ascending.”10 Sure enough there are also disagreements to be noted, ones brought about by National Socialist university politics: “On account of the Civil Service Law three Jews here in my field will vanish, leaving me entirely alone—without assistants—to do the work.”11 One of the personalities mentioned here was Werner Brock (1901–1974), who Heidegger brought to Freiburg and then aided in finding a position in English emigration; the others mentioned were likely Eduard Frankel, who moved 1931 to Freiburg, and professor emeritus Edmund Husserl. While Heidegger’s support for Brock is widely acknowledged, his relationship with Husserl after 1933 still remains at issue.12 The fifth edition of Being and Time certainly omits the dedication to Edmund Husserl that appeared in all previous editions—allegedly at the behest of Heidegger’s publisher Niemeyer. That Heidegger himself denied Husserl access to the university is, however, not verifiable. Apart from this, Heidegger signed as rector written statements that forbade the awarding of scholarships to Jewish students—yet before passage of the Nuremberg Laws. Here is Heidegger’s official wording: “The ban on the granting of assistance is thus applicable also to such students of non-Arian descent who result from marriages in which one parent and two grandparents are of Arian descent and whose fathers fought on the front for the German Reich and its allies.”13 In March 1933—Hitler’s invasion of Poland will take place in half a year’s time, Austria has been annexed to the Greater German Reich, likewise the Sudetenland, and in two weeks’ time after the letter now to be considered the



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Wehrmacht will crush the rump Czech lands—Martin Heidegger sends his brother Fritz congratulations on his name day and deep-sounding declarations of an “end to Western man till now,” of the transition to another beginning, hence: “What I’d like to say in all this: the actual events are too essential for a mere inquietude or couldn’t-care-less attitude to be appropriate for them. Only the deep quiet of discreet knowledge may be at work and with bearing assist in the awakening of clarity about the vital decisions.”14 Months later, where two days earlier Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Poland and the Second World War began, Heidegger, too, seemed to be growing doubtful; in a letter dated September 3 to his brother, he perceived—by all means aptly—that the “future of Western civilization” is “dark as never before,” “even if it should not come to a general catastrophe.”15 In this statement, as well, Heidegger proves to be an ordinary citizen of the National Socialist Third Reich: altogether different than at the outset of the First World War, there prevailed in those days in Germany anything but an atmosphere of elation—in reality, general consternation and solicitude. This, to be sure, given the victories of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the “Blitzkrieg” of 1940, would subside and give way to its opposite.16 In the letter to his brother Heidegger attests to his “inner belonging to a people of a most ambivalent kind,” in relation to which it is important from a sense of “personal responsibility,” “to maintain calm and to establish dignity as a measure of attitude for oneself.”17 On June 22, 1941, the National Socialist Wehrmacht then attacked—in a long-planned military campaign—the Soviet Union, which also preoccupied the Heidegger brothers. Thus, Martin Heidegger observed laconically in a brief letter from July 1941: “The war is only just beginning.” The brutality of the battle in the East is apparently of “world-historical” “dimensions”—a view that Martin Heidegger expressed in principle some four weeks later in a letter from his hut: “The actual devastation of the world will never be brought about by Russianism, but rather by Americanism, to which not only the English, but all of Europe has succumbed, because it represents utility in its unconditional viciousness.”18 At that time the United States had not yet entered the war, although in February 1941 President Roosevelt saw the Senate and House of Representatives pass the “Lend and Loan” Law that pledged extensive assistance to Great Britain already at war. One might discern from Heidegger’s lines a certain criticism toward the invasion of the Soviet Union, and yet notes in the Black Notebooks show that Heidegger distinguished precisely between “Bolshevism (in the sense of the despotic-proletarian Soviet rule)” on the one hand and “Russianism” on the other (GA 96: 109). Heidegger recognizes that “Russia” is not Asia and “Bolshevism” is not Russianism. But Germany, according to Heidegger, could stand with an “historical awareness” that “would be strong and sufficiently creative for a liberation of the essence of Russianism” (GA 96: 134).

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Under these circumstances, then, the invasion of the Soviet Union is justified, being directed at “Americanism,” to which “Bolshevism” belongs, as the metaphysically root-evil. That this war against “Americanism” in the “East” would claim victims is clear to Heidegger—in February 1942 he writes that hundreds of young Germans, like one young tank officer [Panzeroffizier] known to him and headed back to the Eastern Front, will not return.19 WAR AND INTACT WORLD In these weeks it will become clear to the thinker that this war will also not leave “the homeland” untouched. Accordingly, he shares in April with Fritz and his family that his gaze upon the homeland was beautiful, whereas “the memory would be still more beautiful and exhilarating, were I not compelled thereby to think about the women who alone with the children plough the fields. The disaster of war reigns. That’s why we always need first abide by the Holy.”20 In this situation the philosopher, who is fundamentally opposed to the accustomed Catholic faith, suddenly evokes something “sacred,” without, however, imparting in just what it might consist. As virtual combatant Heidegger asks himself shortly thereafter why German “propaganda” doesn’t avail itself of its “abundant possibilities” to depict “Americanism in all its boundlessness.”21 Yet the “Holy” appears now, in December 1942, as the Wehrmacht is undergoing a devastating defeat in Stalingrad—in the call to what can be termed an upright stoical attitude: “Yet this seriousness,” writes Heidegger in December of the same year, “must not lead to the inner serenity and sense of joyfulness in the essential and indestructible being affected in the least.”22 The events of the war no longer leave the philosopher alone, he too follows the battle of Stalingrad that will become a symbol for “Bolshevism and . . .  Americanism coalescing into a singular essential shape and destroying from this unity German culture as the center of civilization itself.”23 What’s more: “For everyone who has slept until now, it is of course finally becoming clear with ‘Stalingrad’ that the exemplar of our future struggle is given.”—­ Apparently with “Volksgenossen” who think that Russia and America were a mere bluff still wandering around. In these months Heidegger insists with Nietzsche that “everything Western” is the “end,” in order then in ever-new beginnings to hope for the “grace of being” and, in its remembrance, “to transform everything into the daily and inconspicuous” so as to live a “silent trust in the arrival of Being”—a possibility open only to “custodial humans beings” [den wahrenden Menschen].24 Heidegger no longer understands the world, stating in a letter in January 1945—the war is definitively lost—for



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the record: “What the ‘world spirit’ has in store for the Germans is a mystery. Immediately enigmatic is why it availed itself of the Americans and the Bolshevists as its henchmen.”25 In February Heidegger draws a resigned balance as he incisively observes in a letter to Fritz that his thinking was concerned with a Being “for whose justification nowhere in beings [“nirgendwo im Seienden”] a ground and argument is offered.”26 But were Heidegger not Heidegger, he’d have imputed this only to himself. No—in the same move he writes that here a “lone-liness” arises “that no longer concerns the person, but” also and nothing less than, as this great mind would have it, “the heritage of humankind.”27 The philosopher, as seen in this passage, is neither able nor willing to attest to his error, instead doing here especially everything he can to have been right, on account of which he then reinterprets all real events: “This war will be won only by he who can lose it.”28 The immediate postwar period will then be experienced—again in grotesque, egocentric misrecognition of reality—as joyless: “Everything,” Heidegger tells brother Fritz in July 1945, “is evil and worse than in the Nazi period.”29 This means that objections to his philosophy raised particularly by Christian politicians represent for Heidegger a worse reign of terror over ethos than under National Socialism.30 In the end there is resignation: the thinker sees no place further where he could be—“to actually be”: “We come for the gods too late, too early for Being.”31 Misadventures related to his denazification and his becoming an emeritus professor lead after all to a confession: “Fellow-traveler of Being I was all along.”32 And in fact, at the start of the winter semester 1933–1934, Heidegger held an address as rector in which he said, among other things: “Not doctrines and ‘ideas’ are the precepts of your being. The Führer himself is the present-day and future German reality and its law.”33 Hugo Ott, who documented this passage, makes it clear that Heidegger never recalled this statement—for which reason we can conclude from this letter that Heidegger never, indeed, not at any time left or lost his faith in Hitler—later pseudo-dissociations to the contrary notwithstanding.34 HEIDEGGER’S LEGACY Why then do authors today nevertheless relate to the still world-famous philosopher, whose importance for twentieth-century philosophy is likely to be changed neither by his advocacy for Hitler, nor by his rectorship, nor by the fact that his anti-Semitic disposition has now become undeniable. This is due above all to his book, mentioned at the outset, Being and Time,

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published 1927 and considered a milestone in existential philosophy. There it says in § 74: But if fateful [schicksalhafte] Dasein essentially exists as being-in-the-world in being-with others, then its occurrence [Geschehen] is an occurrence-with [Mitgeschehen] and is determined as destiny [Geschick]. With this term, we designate the occurrence of the community, of a people. Destiny is not composed of individual fates, nor can being-with-one-another be conceived of as the mutual occurrence of several subjects. These fates are already guided beforehand in being-with-one-another in the same world and in the resoluteness for definite possibilities. In communication and in struggle the power of destiny first becomes free. The fateful destiny of Dasein in and with its “generation” constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence of Dasein.35

These sentences have already been recognized for some time—for instance, by Emmanuel Faye in 2005 and later by Johannes Fritsche—as central motifs of an ultimately ethno-nationalist philosophy, a völkisch philosophy that is nowadays experiencing its renaissance in the guise of a so-called identitarian movement.36 By referring to this, Heidegger’s thought of a fascistic antimodernism, they situate themselves likewise ideological-politically in this tradition. There is a contemporary Russian philosopher and former intellectual companion of Vladimir Putin, Alexander Dugin, with whom this völkisch, Heidegger-inspired thinking has found its way into the ideology of the New Right, of the identitarian movement—via a detour through, among others, the publicist Jürgen Elsässer, who formerly belonged to the so-called antiGerman movement. It was Elsässer who published an interview with the philosopher in which, responding to Elsässer’s question as to why he, Dugin, propagates the so-called Eurasian idea, the latter goes on record as saying: Because it deals here with a concept which meets the challenges facing Russia and Russian society. What are the alternatives? There’s Western-liberal cosmopolitanism, but Russian society will never accept this idea. Then there’s nationalism, which is likewise ill-suited for multiethnic Russia. Socialism is also not tenable as an ideal for Russia, in principle it never really worked there in the past. The Eurasian idea is in that sense a realistic and idealistic concept. It is not merely some romantic idea, it’s a technical, geopolitical, and strategical concept which will be supported by all those Russians who are thinking responsibly.37

Dugin is regarded as an advocate of geopolitical thinking and theorist of a “Eurasian” as opposed to “Atlantic” culture, consequently propagating a “Fourth political Theory,” one which, following liberalism, fascism, and communism, would be most suitable to ensure humanity’s survival in the age of globalization. His theoretical sources for this purpose are, besides the



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Heidegger reference already mentioned, the French founder of the “Nouvelle Droite,” Alain de Benoist, as well as the far-less-known Italian ideologue Julius Evola. Recently, however, Evola received attention because he’s included in the background reading of President Trump’s far right, former chief advisor, Steven Bannon.38 In Dugin’s “Manifesto of the Global Revolutionary Alliance” he finds that the phase of capitalism has come to its natural limit, with resources being depleted, that the Western-liberal cosmopolitan lifestyle and the coldness of the internet have led to the breakup of all societal bonds, and that the traditional image of individuality and of individuals has thereby been destroyed: Never before has individualism been glorified so much, yet at the same time, never before have people all over the world been so similar to each other in their behavior, habits, appearances, techniques, and tastes. In the pursuit of individualistic “human rights” humanity has lost itself. Soon man will be replaced by the post-human: a mutant, cloned android.39

Accordingly, globalization and “global governance” have brought about an end to peoples and nations, an end to substantive knowledge in favor of a “reality” diffused by the media, and an end to any progress. With further development of said conditions to the extent given—according to Dugin— nothing other than an apocalyptic catastrophe is to be expected. All of these phenomena signify, he believes, the end of a long historical cycle that is characterized by the rise and fall of the West since antiquity, at the latest since the Renaissance. The end result, says Dugin, is suicide of the species. A salvation is possible only through a radical turning back, a fundamental reconsideration of other categories of thought, a reflection which would eventually lead to the emergence of political formations capable of accelerating the decline of the West and the United States in such a way that the Eurasian countries, that is, the states that before 1989 were members of the Soviet Union, would survive it: place-bound peoples without any mutual claim to superiority. It is this thought of a radical turnaround, of a “Kehre” or “Turning,” for which Dugin refers especially to Heidegger, besides the geopolitical thought of the Eurasian ideologists in the early twentieth century. In 2011 he published the book in Russian, Heidegger: The Possibility of Russian Philosophy.40 Alexander Dugin and, time and again, Martin Heidegger: these are the theorists to whom the intellectual proponents of the identitarian movement, of the New Right refer—for instance, the ideologists Martin Sellner and Walter Spatz.41 The theoretical offering of the “identitarians” is successful not least because it makes available to intellectually interested younger, politically right-wing academics the possibility to articulate a National Socialist orientation in the narrower sense, beyond a historically discredited Hitlerism. By

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deliberately focusing on peoples characterized as homogenous cultures—and no longer on races—and moreover by emphasizing the equality of all these cultures, the identitarians create argumentative space to campaign against immigration and a religion “culturally” and “spatially unbound” like Islam. Furthermore, by placing in the classical manner the concept of community [Gemeinschaft] over the concept of society [Gesellschaft] and postulating political entities like states—sociologically untenable—as Gemeinschaften, they are able to put forth the program of political communities within their ancestral regional landscapes, and in so doing attain access to the aforementioned “Eurasian” thinking. Finally, the identitarians take up the demand, formulated philosophically by Peter Sloterdijk and publicized by his assistant Marc Jongen, namely, to counter boredom and ostensibly clarified soberness by rehabilitating even intense emotions in political discourse; referring to the ancient Greek word “thymos” Sloterdijk calls for a “thymotic” politics. Whether and to what degree these theories will shape the political sphere and find resonance with the people, the democratic sovereign, remains to be seen—perhaps even in the federal elections in Germany slated for autumn 2017. It seems clear that these tendencies at best will not disappear overnight, but are rather all but necessary side effects of globalization and digitalization and thereby of the irreversible demise of the working class in Western industrial nations. HEIDEGGER’S JEWISH LEGACY? Several of the contributions to this anthology attempt, Heidegger’s hatred toward Jews notwithstanding, to fathom the importance particularly of Heidegger’s late philosophy for Judaism. While Dieter Thomä meticulously substantiates once more the constitutive anti-Semitism of this philosophy as expressed in the Black Notebooks, Michael Fagenblat, Yemima Hadad, and, finally, Elad Lapidot and Elliott Wolfson take up the matter of correspondences and parallels not noted until now between Heidegger’s work after the “Kehre” and certain currents in Jewish mysticism—as recounted in the work of Gershom Scholem. Here a distinction need be made between two approaches: whereas Michael Fagenblat and Yemima Hadad demonstrate the parallels of certain currents in religious Zionism—without identifying these specifically—and, for instance, of Martin Buber’s ultimately still universalistic national way of thinking, Wolfson points to the parallels between the concept of God in the Kabbalah and Heidegger’s later thinking about “Being.” It is noteworthy that Fagenblat makes no mention of the extensive discussions about the work by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who like no one else stands for religious Zionism.42 Finally, Elad Lapidot makes the attempt, as



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a counter to Heidegger’s ultimately “völkisch” thought, to unfold with reference to Rabbi Chaim von Volozhin another, non “völkisch” conception of the “Jewish people.” Certainly Heidegger’s closeness to Christian mysticism has been known for some time, so that locating similar lines of thought in Jewish mysticism is not surprising—Elliott Wolfson provides the evidence necessary here.43 Michael Fagenblat however and—from the perspective of the philosophy of language—Yemima Hadad deal differently with the German-language debates in the 1920s and 1930s about the concept of “Volk.” Where most notably Michael Fagenblat points to the strong structural features common to both Heideggerian philosophy, with its thoughts about the “Germans” and their place in “Being,” and to national religious Zionism, he ultimately demonstrates that and in what way “völkisch,” that and in what way strong modern Zionism was influenced by German nationalism and (German) Romanticism, if it did not in fact emerge from its spirit. Just as it was shown years ago by Manfred Voig how Fichte served as a reference of orientation for Zionists.44 Likewise, comments made by the young Scholem on Hölderlin and his importance for the “Germans,” as cited by Fagenblat, are to be understood no differently. With reference to postcolonial theories, such acquisitions from the Romantic tradition by Zionism have been recently substantiated once more.45 NOTES   1 Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger, ed., Heidegger und der Antisemitismus: Positionen im Widerstreit (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 2016).  2 Ibid., 29.  3 Ibid., 30.  4 Ibid.   5 Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2014); Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 2016).  6  Avraham Barkai, “Wehr Dich!” Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens 1893–1938 (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2002), 268.   7 Martin Liepach, Das Wahlverhalten der Jüdischen Bevölkerung in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 1996), 148.   8 Homolka and Heidegger, Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 33.   9 Hans Dieter Zimmermann, Martin und Fritz Heidegger: Philosophie und Fastnacht (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag), 2005). 10 Ibid., 34–35. 11 Ibid., 35; see also Bernd Martin, Die Entlassung der jüdischen Lehrkräfte an der Freiburger Universität und die Bemühungen um ihre Wiedereingliederung nach 1945 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 1995). 12 Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu einer Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1988), 183. Concerning the relationship with Husserl see Holger

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Zaborowski, Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld? Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2010), 347. 13 Bernhard H. F. Taureck, ed., Politische Unschuld? In Sachen Martin Heidegger (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008), 80. 14 Homolka and Heidegger, Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 49. 15 Ibid., 54. 16 Nicolas Stargardt, Der deutsche Krieg 1939–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2015), 49. 17 Homolka and Heidegger, Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 54. 18 Ibid., 72, 76. 19 Ibid., 79 20 Ibid., 81. 21 Ibid., 83. 22 Ibid., 85. 23 Ibid., 86. 24 Ibid., 89, 91, 97, 105. 25 Ibid., 118. 26 Ibid., 120. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 122. 29 Ibid., 127. 30 Ibid., 128–29. 31 Ibid., 129. 32 Ibid., 142. 33 Ott, Martin Heidegger, 160. 34 Vgl. GA 16: 657: “Die angeführten Sätze würde ich heute nicht mehr schreiben. Dergleichen habe ich schon 1934 nicht mehr gesagt.” 35 Heidegger, Being and Time, 366. Cf. GA 2: 384/508. 36 Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: Die Einführung des Nationalsozialismus in die Philosophie (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2005); Johannes Fritsche, Geschichtlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus in Heideggers “Sein und Zeit” (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2014). 37 “Vor Damaskus stehen sich USA und Russland gegenüber: Interview mit Alexander Dugin,” Compact Heft 10 (2013). 38 Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” New York Times, February 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/ world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html. 39 Alexander Dugin, “The Manifesto of the Global Revolutionary Alliance,” in Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism (London: Arktos, 2014), 129–33. 40  Alexander Dugin, Chajdegger: Wosmoshnost russkoj filosofii (Moskow: Akademičeskij Proekt, 2011). 41 Götz Kubitschek’s Antaios Verlag published the aforementioned discussion about Heidegger. The name of this publishing house, which prints right-wing literature, refers to a figure of Greek mythology, a giant who the half-god Heracles repeatedly attempted to defeat, but who always—whenever lying on the ground anew— received from its newfound strength and was therefore invincible. An earthly son



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of a giant who even the half-god Hercules could not defeat. Not until Hercules held the giant so long in the air that he had irrecoverably lost all his strength could Hercules prevail. This—aboveground suspension in air—is, so might the myth be interpreted, the air of reason. 42 Lawrence J. Kaplan and David Shatz, ed., Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Jewish Spirituality (New York City: New York University Press, 1984). 43 Norbert Fischer und Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, ed., Die Gottesfrage im Denken Martin Heideggers (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 2011). 44 Manfred Voigt, “Wir sollen alle kleine Fichtes werden!” Johann Gottlieb Fichte als Prophet der Kultur-Zionisten (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 2003). 45 See also Christoph Schulte, ed., Hebräische Poesie und jüdischer Volksgeist. Die Wirkungsgeschichte von Johann Gottfried Herder im Judentum Mittel- und Osteuropas (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2003); Caspar Battegay, Das andere Blut: Gemeinschaft im deutsch-jüdischen Schreiben 1830–1930 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2011); Stefan Vogt, Subalterne Positionierungen: Der deutsche Zionismus im Feld des Nationalismus in Deutschland 1890–1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016).

Chapter 4

“Whitewashed with Moralism”: On Heidegger’s Anti-Americanism and Anti-Semitism Gregory Fried

THE “I AM” In my work, I have often referred to a passage from a 1922 letter of Martin Heidegger to Karl Löwith: “I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am’—out of my intellectual and, in general, my factical origin—milieu— life context—out of that which is accessible to me from these as the living experience within which I live.”1 Heidegger’s words to Löwith echo those of Socrates to his Athenian jury, “that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (Apology 38a), for both suggest that philosophy arises from and, crucially, returns to the situated, historical existence in which we find ourselves. To take Heidegger seriously, I believe, one must confront that “I am” as ethical in the existential sense that both Heidegger and Socrates intimate in the examined life: as facing up to the challenges that confront us in our own historical situation, that make our lives meaningful, and not to flinch from them. That situated context for me is one in which “I am” the child of a Jewish parent who fled Prague in 1939 to escape the regime that Heidegger actively supported, eventually arriving in the United States, where I was born, to another parent, British by birth, whose own parents served their country as long-standing opponents of Hitler’s Germany. It is a context in which “I am” an American citizen facing the presidency of a man who is the most brazenly mendacious, nationalistic, reality-adverse, fear‑mongering, and indeed protofascistic leader in my country’s history. It is this “life context” that informs my own confrontation with Heidegger as a way to understand the challenges facing us today, which are not just echoes but new guises of the same challenge we have faced before.

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THE ANGLO-AMERICAN WORLD: NIHILISTIC MACHINATION WHITEWASHED WITH MORALISM Given the uproar over the Black Notebooks in the English-speaking world, as well as continental Europe and beyond, it is worth observing what Heidegger himself has to say in them about his lack of reception in the Anglophone world in the dozen years after the publication Being and Time: “Can it be an accident that in the past decade only in England has my thinking and questioning been spurned and also that no translation has been attempted?” (GA 96: 115). This is in 1939 or 1940, when war against England, with America as its presumptive ally, had broken out. Heidegger explicitly names “the English-American world” as a leading carrier of modernity’s nihilistic machination, a world characterized by a “shopkeeper’s calculation whitewashed with morality” (GA 96: 114). He adds that, “whether this morality is hypocritical or whether, in a long-accustomed self-deception and self-satisfaction, they ‘really’ mean it, what remains decisive is this: that the English spirit is completely unable to get beyond this appeal to ‘the moral’ and evaluates everything that is alien to it simply as immoral” (GA 96: 115). The phrase “shopkeeper’s calculation” is already at least potentially antiSemitic, but beyond this, Heidegger’s attack on morality (die Moral), or, more precisely, moralism, expresses not only the nature of his specific judgment about the Anglo-American world and his reception there, it also goes to the heart of his comprehensive critique of the liberal Enlightenment as a late phenomenon in the history of Being. Heidegger’s critique of moralism, as mere ethical pose, follows very closely on Nietzsche’s: that the appeal to morality, whether sincere or hypocritical, is a mask for the will to power lurking beneath such pretensions, a will that drives the machinating nihilism of the modern age, from the shopkeeper’s petty calculations to the amassing of power by hydroelectric dams. As either the expression of sincere naïveté or a cynical pose, moralism treats ethics as the applied calculation of principles already established (the categorical imperative, or utility, and so on) and consequentially beyond question. As such, morality as moralism is metaphysical, unable to think the historical meaning of its presumed foundations. Moralism therefore prevents the Anglo-American world from confronting the depth of modernity’s crisis. In other words, for Heidegger, metaphysical ethics precludes thought, or at least a thinking (Besinnung) adequate to the apocalyptic trajectory of the history of Being, and so it is no surprise to Heidegger that the English-speaking world spurns him. By the time that the United States joins the war in 1941, England has largely dropped from Heidegger’s sights in the Black Notebooks; he takes aim almost exclusively at America as representing something monstrous, what



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he called, during the period of the Notebooks published so far, the gigantism (das Riesige) of a hyperrational modernity that can calculate and reckon but that simply refuses to think, at least in the way that Heidegger means thinking. Peter Trawny has accused Heidegger of a seynsgeschichtlicher Antisemitismus, an anti-Semitism rooted in the history of Being, and if he is right, then I think we can also speak of his seynsgeschichtlicher Antiamerikanismus.2 The question is what role the Jews play in Heidegger’s history of Being. Nazi race ideologues such as Arno Schickedanz and Alfred Rosenberg singled out the Jews as the Gegenrasse, the antirace.3 In the Nazi worldview that made race the single most important factor in both the history of individual peoples and of world history, the Jews were an anomaly. “Race” itself was a provisional term of respect, for to be a race meant having a role as one people among others, even if an inferior one, and so for race‑thinkers like Schickedanz and Rosenberg, the Jews were the one people to be denied the honorific term “race” and designated as an “antirace”—parasitic on other races, because as a non-race of their own, they could not otherwise exist. In a passage in which he cites Schickedanz as only previous researcher to make this “extraordinarily important point” about this existential parasitism of the Jewish antirace, Rosenberg writes, “Here, this concept [i.e., of the parasitic nature of the Jews] should not be taken primarily as a moral valuation but rather as a designation for a fact in the law of life (of biology),” and this is “because the ‘Pharisee’ [the Jew]—or, as we say, the parasite—simply possesses no inner capacity of its own for growth, no organic form of the soul, and therefore also no racial form.”4 One might say that for Rosenberg, this parasitism of the Jews as the antirace is metaphysical, because it defines their essence as a nonessence that can exist only by leeching upon the essence of genuine races. As such, for these race theorists, the Jews were a kind of nullity infecting not just other races, but history itself. The nullity of the Jewish race could therefore conveniently explain all that is wrong with the world, a role that served as a justification for the uncompromisingly polemical virulence and political violence directed against them. In the Notebooks, Heidegger takes account of this orthodox view that the Jews are the origin of the nihilism infecting history: That in the age of machination, race is elevated to the explicit and specially erected “principle” of history (or just of historiology) is not the arbitrary invention of “doctrinaires” [such as Schickedanz and Rosenberg] but a consequence of the power of machination, which must cast down beings, in all their domains, into planned calculation. Through the concept of race, “life” is brought into the form of what can be bred, which constitutes a kind of calculation. The Jews, with their marked gift for calculation, have already been “living” for the longest time according to the principle of race, which is why they also defend themselves as

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vigorously as they can against its unrestricted application. The establishment of racial breeding does not stem from “life” itself, but from the overpowering of life by machination. What machination is bringing about with such planning is a complete deracialization of peoples, by fastening them into the equally constructed, equally divided arrangement of all beings. (GA 96: 55–56)5

This passage reflects Heidegger’s repeated attacks in the Notebooks against biological racism as a form of modern subjectivism and therefore a part of metaphysical nihilism. Heidegger scorns using race as a “ ‘principle’ of history” by “doctrinaires,” such as Schickedanz and Rosenberg, or a party hack such as Erwin Kolbenheyer (see GA 36/37: 209–13), and he situates the dominance of race thinking in history as he reads it: as a history of Being in which “machination” expresses the uninhibited nihilism of late modernity in reducing every being, human beings included, to a quantum of resources and power. It is crucial to underline that while Heidegger may have opposed orthodox race theory and its account of the historical role of the Jews, this does not mean that Heidegger became a covert anti-Nazi or anti-racist by the late 1930s, because he continued to believe that Nazism was bound up in the history of the West. As Richard Polt has argued, at his most apocalyptic, Heidegger viewed Nazism as the most extreme expression of the metaphysical and actively nihilistic will to power and, as such, the self-destroying vehicle for the West’s ultimate and cataclysmic demise at the close of the first inception of its history. After 2,500 years, this downfall would be necessary, given the exhaustion of that history, and would be an affirmation of what might follow upon it, even as the downfall drags Nazism down, too, as the engine of this catastrophe.6 In fact, Heidegger’s characterizations of the Jews fit in with the most banal forms of conventional, European anti-Semitism, with this one difference: he weaves those stereotypes into his account of the history of Being. So the stereotype that Jews are sly and calculating, addicted to an abstract rationalism, fits with his characterization of modern machination; the stereotype that the Jews form a world conspiracy and that their own rootlessness accelerates the deracination of other peoples makes them, for Heidegger, a well-suited instrument of metaphysical contagion for the age of machination. They may be symptoms and dangerous carriers of full-blown nihilism, but for Heidegger the Jews are not, as in orthodox Nazi ideology, the origin of the Geschick of Seinsgeschichte, the trajectory of the history of Being, the source of the nullity working its way through that history. Someone, or something, else is responsible for that, and I will return to this point later. As evidence of this end-stage nihilism in the West, Heidegger invokes America again and again in the Notebooks, especially after the late 1930s, as the prime exemplar and most effective promoter of unthinking machination.



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Governed by a relentlessly technological pragmatism (GA 96: 38, 268), “Americanism,” Heidegger says, “is the organization of the unqualified meaninglessness of ‘existence,’ bound up with the view to a rising ‘standard of living’ (electrical heating and cooling of living quarters, increase in automobile owners, expansion of the number of visitors to movie theaters and all such ‘economic-technical-cultural’ comforts of ‘living’)” (GA 96: 269). Heidegger evokes a trope common to German aesthetic thinking of the era, such as in Rilke’s 1925 letter that Heidegger quotes in “Wozu Dichter?” (1946; GA 5: 291): Now empty, indifferent things are shoving their way in over here from America, bogus things, shams of life . . . A house, in the American way of thinking, an American apple, or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grapes, into which the hopes and meditations of our forefathers were infused. The living, enlivening things, the things that know us, are fading away and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last who have known such things.7

Rilke also wrote that “these Americans have the souls of shopkeepers, they are dead to the life of the mind, as dead as mutton.”8 Heidegger goes further than Rilke by giving a meaning to this destitution in an overarching narrative: America is utterly unhinged from history and Being; it seeks to reduce everything to a calculable unit for the pragmatic manipulation of resources, so that nothing is truly a thing anymore but just a quantum, and all for the sake of a meaningless comfort as the aim of history interpreted as material progress. In America, then, arises the purest expression of what he later calls das Ge-stell, the enframing that restricts the meaning of Being to what can be manipulated in this way. This accounts as well for how Heidegger might say, in the Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, that Germany is caught between the pincers of America and Soviet Russia, which “seen metaphysically, are both the same” (GA 40: 40). In this sense, America becomes for Heidegger the Jew among nations: uprooted from history, obsessed with power for power’s sake under the guise of the most trivial purposes and justified, or masked, by the shallowest moralism of universal human rights. While Heidegger in the Notebooks interprets Bolshevism as an essentially alien imposition on Russia, he judges America irredeemable, the avatar of what he calls a “planetary idiocy” (GA 96: 267–68) committed to the complete devastation of all historical thinking and the question of Being itself: “The Americans take the condition of nullity as the promise of their future, given that they annihilate everything in the pretense of ‘happiness’ for all. In Americanism, nihilism reaches its apex” (GA 96: 225). While he holds out hope that Germany and Russia might still

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have a genuinely productive historical confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) as part of a resistance to modern nihilism (GA 96: 256–58, 276), Heidegger sees no such hope for interaction with America, which he believes will never be a dialogue but rather a self-destructive capitulation: “Through over-Americanization, we will never overcome America and the ‘Anglo-Saxon world’; instead, we will destroy ourselves in that world” (GA 96: 275; see also 259). THE WEST’S FIRST JEW I have argued elsewhere that even if Heidegger’s thinking led him into National Socialism, we must take him as an opportunity to engage in a serious reflection on our predicament, because the crisis in modernity announced by fascism did not end with the Third Reich.9 The unfolding politics of ethno‑nationalism in 2016 and its aftermath should convince us of that. If the principles of the Enlightenment that serve as the foundation for the democratic experiments of the past two centuries are not to wither and die as empty clichés and pious declarations of faith, we must renew them in a confrontation with one of their most serious critics. We must not flinch from this, just as we must not fail to criticize ourselves; as an American, I have published confrontations with my own nation on the questions of racism and torture.10 There can be no mistaking what is at stake here: the Americanism that Heidegger identifies as a player in the endgame of the first inception of the history of Being is but the most visible representative of what he names liberalism, by which he means the familiar political form of a rights-based conception of the human person and the state as well as something larger than this: namely, the entire metaphysical system that understands what it means to be in terms of metaphysical abstractions, such as the universal human rights that are independent of time and history. Indeed, Heidegger traces the roots of this liberalism back to Plato himself, when he claims that thinking’s first inception in the West stumbled and fell into metaphysics, casting the question of Being into oblivion. The passage that most succinctly summarizes Heidegger’s political understanding comes in a lecture course of late 1933, in Being and Truth: If we talk of [Plato’s] doctrine of ideas, then we are displacing the fundamental question [of truth] into the framework of ideas. If one interprets ideas as representations and thoughts that contain a value, a norm, a law, a rule, such that ideas then become conceived of as norms, then the one subject to these norms is the human being—not the historical human being, but rather the human being in general, the human being in itself, or humanity. Here, the conception of the human being is one of a rational being in general. In the Enlightenment and in liberalism, this conception achieves a definite form. Here all of the powers against which we must struggle today have their root.



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Opposed to this conception are the finitude, temporality, and historicity of human beings. (GA 36/37: 165–66; Fried and Polt, 129)

For Heidegger, the West’s nihilism originates with Plato’s ideas and culminates with, or rather degenerates into, the universalism of the liberal Enlightenment, which is merely a moralistic mask for the will to power. It is not only America, obviously, that is responsible for the trajectory of this history, even if America is the most powerful representative of its nihilism. Nor are the Jews responsible for it, even if they are among its most effective disseminators, unless Heidegger would want to call Plato the first Jew in the West, because according to his history of Being, Christianity, as a more thoroughly universalizing form of Judaism, became, as Nietzsche called it, Platonism for the people. At issue is not only America but also any polity founded in the egalitarianism and universalism of the Enlightenment tradition, whose roots Heidegger traces all the way back to Platonic idealism. This includes not just “the West” but any nation embracing some version of the liberal-democratic project that includes individual rights and freedoms, the rule of law and equality before the law, mixed government, and economic systems ranging from free market capitalism to social democracy. It would be easy to dismiss Heidegger’s critique of liberalism (in his broad sense) as the poor judgment of an academic crank enamored of an extremist politics, except that his critique forms part of a long tradition of hostility to the liberal Enlightenment that has ongoing and perhaps increasing resonance, given current events, from the global economic instability to the planetary degradation of the environment, all of it plausibly attributable to Western metaphysics and liberalism as the hubristic aspiration to conquer nature, both as human nature and nature as the totality of resources and energy. Twentyfive years after the triumph proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama at the fall of the Soviet Union as a supposed “End of History,” liberal-democratic regimes across the globe are facing a grave crisis today, not just in their economic foundations, but also in their very identity as rights-based regimes able to hold together a social contract among all sectors of society. I need hardly point this out today, with the rise of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism across the world, including in the form of Donald Trump in the United States. In this crisis, Heidegger’s challenge may be all the more unavoidable, because it may provoke us to think through who we are and what we face.

THINKING IDIOTICALLY This volume is dedicated to “difficult others,” and so let’s take up that challenge, even if very preliminarily. My own work on Heidegger has focused on his appropriation of the Greek word πόλεμος, war or conflict, in Heraclitus,

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fragment 53: “Polemos is the father of all things and the king of all, and it reveals some as gods, others as human beings; it makes some slaves, others free.”11 At first, in the early 1930s, Heidegger translates polemos as Krieg (war), but quickly gives that up in favor of Kampf (struggle), Streit (conflict), and, most prominently, Auseinandersetzung (confrontation). I have argued that in this period Heidegger takes up the polemos of Heraclitus to find a substitute for the idea or eidos of Plato.12 The problem is this for Heidegger: Plato was at least right in seeing that we inhabit a world meaningful to us because things stand out as distinct and bounded from one another, aus-einander-gesetzt rather than durch-einander-gesetzt. Plato expresses that intelligible boundedness as eidos, form, but Heidegger does not want Plato’s metaphysically eternal, timeless idea or eidos to account for meaning, but rather something that permeates the “finitude, temporality, and historicity” both of things and human existence. Heraclitus’ polemos fits this role, especially as given voice by Fragment 53. For Heidegger, therefore, polemos defines the ongoing relationship between Being and human beings as Dasein, reinterpreting their worlds historically—if they can live up to the authentic calling of thinking as confrontation with self and other. Engaging in the polemos, then, is the authentic way of engaging in any questioning, whether with one’s own possibilities, with the thinking of a philosopher, with the history of one’s nation, or with other persons and other peoples. A world, for Heidegger, then, is always a historical world that makes provisional sense for a particular historical community that shares in the given but conflictual meaning of that world. While such communities may enter into potentially constructive conversation with one another, there are no overarching, eternal metaphysical principles of truth or justice by which conflicts between communities may be resolved. What matters politically, then, is cultivating the capacity of historical peoples to enter into a genuine polemos with their own particular historicity, and only on that basis with other peoples, a capacity that metaphysics in general and the liberal Enlightenment in particular cut off by uprooting peoples from historically specific meaning in favor of universal conceptions of human nature and justice.13 This is what Heidegger means by accusing America of advancing a “planetary idiocy”: a will to eradicate polemical difference in favor of global homogenization. He means “idiocy” not as mental deficiency (beschränkt begabter Menchen, GA 96: 265) but rather in the Greek sense: idion—one’s ownness [das Eigene] . . . the homogeneity in which each and everyone, in which “one” [“man”] finds and correspondingly confirms himself. . . . Idiocy is the essential restriction to the world-wide, that is, the planetary. . . . The radio, as a device, is the symbol of the belonging together of the planetary and the idiotic. . . . It is not enough that in every house and on every



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floor there be one playing. Each member of the “family,” the servants, the children, must each have their own device, so that each and everyone is able, quickly and easily, to learn and to hear and to “be” just what each and everyone else is. . . . The real pacemaker for the unity of the planetary and the idiotic, but also its really well-suited heir, is Americanism, surely the most desolate form of the “historical” lack of history. (GA 96: 265–66)

Anyone who has a family or a classroom of students where everyone “must each have their own”—that is, eigenes, idiotês—“device” (Gerät) may feel the sharp point of this description. Idiocy as the Greek idion is the eradication of the radically singular and the historically situated in favor of a homogeneity in which one encounters “own’s own” (das Eigene) homogenously anywhere and everywhere and which thereby serves the reduction of the world to a warehouse of resources at the ready disposal of machination. Understanding this modern disposition has made the American Apple—the computer company, not the fruit Rilke described—very rich indeed. In an infamous letter of 1929, Heidegger warned a colleague against the Verjudung, the Jewification, of the German spirit in the universities.14 We might say that for Heidegger, the American idion becomes the Verjudung of the entire planet; but both Americans and Jews, unbeknownst to themselves, contribute to the final catastrophic trajectory of the Western metaphysics without themselves being the source of that trajectory. This is, in part, what distinguishes Heidegger from what orthodox Nazi anti-Semitism would claim about the Jews as the ultimate source of degeneration in history. ENGAGING HEIDEGGER To take Heidegger seriously as a philosopher, rather than an ideologue to be understood, categorized, and dismissed, we must ourselves engage in a polemos with him. We can risk this because, by engaging the question of Being, we are addressing a question as ancient as the Presocratics and Plato, not one copyrighted by Heidegger; even if we take seriously Heidegger’s response to that question, then, we are not obliged to agree with him in that response but rather to come to grips with it as a way to understand the challenge we face ourselves, our historical moment’s collective “I am.” In particular, even if we concede that there is something to Heidegger’s history of Being as a history of metaphysics, we are not obliged to agree with him about the totality and the mono-directionality that he ascribes to that history. Even more specifically, even if there may be something to his critique of Platonism, I would argue that he gets his Plato deeply wrong, and this leaves open possibilities for the meaning of the history of Being that he

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did not consider. Without going into the details of my critique of Heidegger’s reading of Plato, let me suggest how disrupting the totalizing tendency of Heidegger’s history might bring us to “another thinking” about both Judaism and America.15 Starting with Judaism: in the Notebooks, Heidegger makes this none-toooriginal observation: “The modern systems of total dictatorship stem from Judeo-Christian monotheism” (GA 97: 438; circa 1948). What if we set aside Heidegger’s own totalizing, mono-destinal account of the Seinsgeschichte and actually looked at the Hebrew Bible, something that Heidegger himself never seems to have done, despite its incontrovertible role in Western history? Quite apart from the passage (Genesis 3:14) where God declares to Moses that his name is ehyeh asher ehyeh (‫אהיה אשר אהיה‬: “I am that I am”; or: “I will be who I will be”), which ought to have given Heidegger plenty to think about, consider the passage in Genesis (32:22–32) where Jacob wrestles with the angel of the Lord during the tense night before he must meet with his brother Esau again after many years of separation. The passage reads, in part: “And a man struggled with him until the breaking of the day” (32:24); the man, who is revealed as avatar of God, tells Jacob, “ ‘Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed’ ” (32:28). The key words here are ‫( ַוּי ֵָאבֵק‬veyeavek), from “to fight, struggle,” ָ‫( ׂשָרִית‬sharita), from “to strive,” and ‫( י ִׂש ְָראֵל‬Israel), “he-who-has-striven-with-Elohim”—and to do this fighting, struggling, and striving with none other than God. The name of the man, and of the people of Israel, is a name that incorporates a polemos into its innermost core, and a polemos with God Himself, which echoes the polemos that differentiates mortals and the divine in Heraclitus’ fragment. Or consider the Book of Job and how extraordinary it is that it was included in the compendium of Jewish holy texts. For in that book, as a trial and a test, God lays waste to Job’s body, possessions, and family, all at the instigation of Satan, who had suggested that Job was only loyal to God because of all the blessings showered upon him. Job’s unnamed wife helpfully suggests to Job that he “curse God and die” (Job 2:9). Instead, Job insists on questioning God as a way of maintaining his connection to Him. Job loses patience with the three “comforters” who assure him that his sufferings must be a punishment from God for some failure of Job’s, which the text itself shows is not the case, so we can side with Job when he berates them: “Look, my eye has seen all this, my ear has heard and understood it. What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you. But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God. As for you, you whitewash with lies; all of you are worthless physicians. If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom!” (Job 13:1–6)16



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Quite apart from the ancient and enormous questions of theodicy and the finitude of human comprehension in the face of divinity, what is worth underlining here is that Job rejects the impulse to “whitewash with lies” what we cannot understand; if Heidegger had had the courage for a reading of Job, he might have seen that Job also rejects an ethical stance that is merely a rote reckoning of merit and sin, reward and punishment, as whitewashing with petty moralism what most demands our thoughtful questioning, namely, what it means to be righteous in the face of a world that does not automatically uphold justice, either by nature or by God’s intervention. To repeat: it is extraordinary that the Hebrew Bible would include such a book. For even though God ultimately restores Job (in a manner that itself seems a whitewash to the narrative), this text confirms that as an act of piety Job seeks to confront God in a polemos about the meaning of his suffering. If piety were mere submission to dictatorship, as Heidegger suggests, then nothing would have been simpler than for the Jews to have excised the Book of Job when codifying their holy texts after the Babylonian exile. Despite the old contrast between Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation, it is a mischaracterization to say that Judaism must be an unthinking submission to Law. One need only look at a page of the Talmud, with its layer upon layer of interpretive commentary by hundreds of rabbis in Auseinandersetzung with the tradition and with each other, to see that in Judaism the Law, Torah, rather than being a suppression of thinking, may be its instigation in a dialogue spanning millennia. Ever ongoing examination of self and of life and of community and of God is the purpose of Talmudic interpretation, not the imposition of dogma and unthinking submission. At issue is what thinking itself is. Heidegger famously said that “questioning is the piety of thinking” (das Fragen ist die Frommigkeit des Denkens), and it is precisely the relation of piety, questioning, and thinking that throws the confrontation of Judaism and Americanism with Heidegger into sharpest focus (GA 7: 36; Lovitt, 35). Piety ordinarily understood marks the boundary of what may not be questioned, what is not open to thought; the accusation of impiety against Socrates is what brought him up against that limit and to his own limit in death. In a recent review of Peter Trawny’s Irrnisfuge, I argued that if, as Trawny claims, philosophy, as thinking, requires an absolute, abgründig, an‑archic freedom, then Heidegger’s paradoxical piety demands that there be nothing off-limits to thinking‑as‑questioning, an ongoing polemos with meaning as we find it given historically.17 I also think that Trawny and others (e.g., Dennis Schmidt) are right in arguing that for Heidegger it is precisely the urge to set limits to thinking that renders conventional ethics suspect at best and moralistic at worst.18 Heidegger accuses Plato of erecting the idea as “a value, a norm, a law, a rule” and of making this normativity the criterion for thinking. He must have in mind the Decalogue and other divine

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commands as the timeless Law that a dictatorial monotheism imposes in Judeo-Christianity, or Kant’s categorical imperative, or the equally timeless “rights of man” in the secularized onto-theology of modern liberalism, most fully embodied by America. For Heidegger, metaphysical, ontotheological thinking applies ethical norms and natural laws already posited in advance to human action and to a nature reduced to facts and data, materiel and energy, all in the service of a will to power whitewashed with moralism. From within moralism, the positing of norms in advance of what is and will be is what binds us to the authority of those proleptic norms. Even atheistic secularism would be pious in this way, because it also cleaves to postulates that are in advance off-limits to questioning. For Heidegger, it is norms as such that are at issue, because norms presume a nihilistic disjunction between Is and Ought and thereby constrain thinking to the Platonism of projecting atemporal ideals as the measure of Being. This is why, for Trawny’s Heidegger (and I think he is right about this), thinking must be errant and ab-errant: by leaping into the abyss of an‑archic freedom in questioning, it necessarily engages in a tragic τόλμα, Wagnis, a daring risk that might fall into catastrophic error. But, according to this argument, ontic error is not ontological errancy, and errancy cannot be guilty, cannot be responsible for its errors, for that kind of responsibility is a mark of the moralism that wishes to constrain thinking in advance. CAN WE FORGIVE ERRANCY? “To err is human; to forgive, divine”—a quote from Alexander Pope so familiar that it risks becoming a cliché but is nevertheless worth deploying here.19 If Judaism can sustain questioning even God Himself, and if Plato can sustain questioning even the ideai themselves as a theory, as happens in the Parmenides, how does Platono—Judeo-Christian-secular liberalism differ from Heidegger on questioning norms as what it means to think? The key is to take responsibility for the ontic errors of one’s ontological errancy, for only then is error potentially forgivable and errancy properly responsive to its responsibility. What, other than a hubristic arrogance, prevents errant questioning from becoming guilty for its errors, from truly owning them, when it piously dares to question taboos at the limits of the given? What distinguishes this Platonism in all its forms is that it does not share Heidegger’s recoil from norms as metaphysical. Of course, this overarching Platonism can fall and historically has fallen into onto-theology by placing those norms beyond question. But that historical fact does not itself limit what can or indeed should happen. Everything hinges on how one relates to the norms, to the ideas, in philosophical questioning and in worldly living. What



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I would suggest is that there could be no questioning, and so no thinking, without the givenness of norms as existentially constitutive of the meaningful world we inhabit; but that does not necessarily mean that as metaphysically construed, such given norms are eternal, only that as a constitutive feature of our Miteinanderdasein, we hypothesize them as such to engage in the ongoing polemos of their reconstitution. Socrates, in Book 2 of the Republic, declares that it would be me hosion, impious, of him not to defend justice when it was under such violent attack by Thrasymachus (368b-c); but Plato has Socrates give that defense in the context of radically laying open the idea and ideal of justice precisely as a question. What Heidegger ignores is that justice as normative, as well as a questioning relation to justice, is a phenomenological given of human being-together, not merely the alien imposition of theory and onto-theology. The Socratic posit or hypothesis of the ideas, such as the idea of justice, is not metaphysical dogma; the ideas are a way of remaining faithful, pious, to the phenomenon of human being-together by endeavoring to conceptualize it, however partially. Rather than a necessarily dictatorial onto-theology, what Platonism as Judeo-Christianity and as secular liberalism can offer, in contrast to Heidegger, is the realization that what we are now pleased to call metaphysical ideas are more properly understood as a way of retaining and instigating the piety of a questioning that can both confront the given norms in a deconstructive polemos and then reconstruct those norms in the context of the finite, historical, and temporal situatedness of those who inhabit a particular historical time but who must also transgressively transcend that habitation in order to restore it. We are always called upon to the respons‑ability of this restoration because human understanding and human institutional constructs are necessarily finite and fray in the course of history. The situated, transgressive transcendence that is required for such reconstruction is a form of errancy and a recognition of our finitude that is willing to take as much responsibility for its errors as for its successes in restoring a broken world. Such daring may be forgiven its errors, but only if it accepts its responsibility. Heidegger’s piety, in focusing on apocalyptic tragedy as the eventual confirmation of finite Dasein’s questioning, neglects forgiveness of error as an essential aspect of the divine comedy of our finitude. Heidegger’s deepest failure, then, would be the hubris of refusing responsibility for his own errors. A last word here specifically about Americanism. While I find Heidegger’s treatment of Jews and Judaism utterly compromised by the most thoughtless stereotypes of banal anti-Semitism, it is hard not to see some truth in his portrait of Americanism as a blind pragmatism that understands thinking only as a reckoning that champions production for production’s sake and consumption for consumption’s sake, that masks with moralism the will to power driving this machinating rationality, and that abides questioning only

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as a prelude to expanding the technological hold over resources, both human and material. Indeed, even the Left, particularly the New Left of the 1960s, inspired by the Frankfurt School and Marcuse, took up a very similar critique of America and the capitalism it embodied on the world stage: as the consumerist, hypocritical, implementation of an instrumental reason. At the same time, though, perhaps we should be mindful that as apt as the portrait may be in some ways, what America means need not be confined to such stereotypes either, especially if America might play historical roles beyond Heidegger’s mono-directional and totalizing account of the history of Being. My favorite saying that characterizes the Platonism of the American tradition comes from the once-enslaved Frederick Douglass become freeman and abolitionist: “Man is the only picture-making animal in the world. He alone of all the inhabitants of the earth has the capacity and passion for pictures. . . . Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and achievements: they see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”20 Despite himself being born a slave in the supposedly liberty-loving United States, Douglass argued that the meaning of the American founding must transcend what some or even most of the founders themselves understood by it, and that this philosophical meaning must overthrow both slavery and the subordination of women; he could argue this way because he could appeal to the idea of equality and human rights latent but still present in the American founding. To seek justice, to be a re-former, is to reflect on an idea as a picture (a what-has-been-seen, an eidos, in the projective power of thinking) of what may be and should be, and to attempt to reconstruct the present in the light of that idea. The moral “ought” is not a nihilistic falsification or a hatred of life as it is given, as Nietzsche would have it; the envisioning made possible by the ideas is the only way to remain true to the ethical phenomena of finite human existence. If Heidegger was right that we must both distinguish Being from beings while also understanding their relation, and if we must similarly distinguish and relate ontological errancy from ontic error, then we must also distinguish the ethical (including the political) from ethics. At issue again is thinking: ethics, as ontic, is a system of norms by which we judge and reckon acts, regimes, and persons; the ethical, as ontological, as existing as situated in a world, embraces the errant thinking that allows us to question any such system of norms when it inevitably falls into contradiction with our lived world, to engage that system in interpretive polemos, and to reconstruct it. Crucial to this is to distinguish the ontology of questioning from the ontics of the specific answers a given person or text may offer to a question that remains at issue; if we treat the answers as responses, rather than inert, dead letters to be either validated or refuted, we may reenter the dynamic of the question, even



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with an interlocutor as compromised as Heidegger. Embracing this dialectic as an ever-ongoing historical process acknowledges the in-between essence of our Da‑sein: as both situated in our finitude and also able to transcend it, if ever only partially, to critique and reconstitute that habitual understanding that we inhabit. To be ethical, then, need not deteriorate into the pose of moralism so long as ethical thinking does not whitewash its own challenges and struggles by abandoning thinking in favor of rigid theories and norms that give the lie to their own inevitable failings. What Heidegger detested in Platonism, in what he took to be a Platonized Judaism and Christianity, and in what he saw as the naïve mendaciousness of American liberalism, may be understood in a radically different way, so long as we don’t capitulate to Heidegger’s monodirectional historical narrative. If we always already necessarily inhabit a world of shared norms as an existential feature of being human, that does not necessarily mean that these norms must necessarily serve as a crutch by which we hobble into an inauthentic thoughtlessness and conformity. Rather, as both Jacob and Frederick Douglass knew by their own struggles with what most situated them in this world, it is only by confronting the given, what is, by envisioning what surpasses the given, however dimly we may perceive it, that the world properly takes on meaning in its finitude. But we can no more dispense with the given as such or the norms we find ourselves enmeshed in than we can become ethical by applying those norms as ready-made formulae, even and especially when history uncovers their latent inadequacies. That is where moralism’s whitewashing may attempt to cover over those faults. But it is also wrong to think that the envisioning, as Douglass said, of “what ought to be by the reflection of what is” is just another expression of Platonic nihilism, because the “endeavor to remove the contradiction” is precisely what keeps those faults open in ethical thinking. EPILOGUE This chapter began as a paper for a particularly fruitful conference in the summer of 2016 in Berlin, and the volume editors have invited its authors to respond to each other as we did then. Space permits me only a few remarks, and so I will choose one contributor whose piece particularly resonated for me. Donatella di Cesare discerns a metaphysical anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s history of Being, and she rightly asks, “in the charge Heidegger makes against the Jew, the oblivion of being, can we not hear the echo of another, more ancient accusation—the charge of deicide?” (p. 78). At issue in comparing the Christian charge of deicide with Heidegger’s charge of the oblivion

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of Being, is whether the Jews for Heidegger are the source of this “radical killing,” as he calls the death of God in “The Word of Nietzsche” (GA 5: 263), or whether they are just another delivery system among many within the Western tradition for this death‑as-oblivion. I believe it is the latter, because Heidegger locates the failure of history’s first inception among the Greeks themselves, not the Jews, as I argue previously. This would set Heidegger apart, though perhaps in no better a light personally, from other Nazis such as Rosenberg who see the Jews as indeed the prime source for the parasitic undermining of history, Europe, and the German people. This is important because it bears upon the question of how we can think both with and against Heidegger by thinking beyond him. Di Cesare writes that “For Heidegger, too”—that is, as for so many otherwise presumably great German thinkers from Luther to Kant to Hegel and after—“the Jew is an obstacle, a stone on his path” (p. 78) who trips Heidegger back into metaphysics by inciting him to define the essence of the Jew. This “Jew,” as Di Cesare rightly points out, is never this Jew here, the one in Heidegger’s company, but rather the Jew as an abstraction, a metaphysical what rather than a who, an actual person as Dasein, who can be there for him in his or her human specificity. The Jew as this “stone on his path” evokes the Stolpernsteine—“stumbling blocks,” the ongoing project begun by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 to replace selected cobblestones in the streets of German towns and cities with bronze plaques to commemorate the Jews who had lived in adjacent homes, whose existence and then memory the Nazi had subjected their own radical killing and oblivion. For Di Cesare, that the Jews prove a stumbling block as unassimilable is a gift to history, not a poison. In a reading of Levinas, she writes: Judaism is not an archaic residue that modernity has failed to assimilate, but rather an unassimilable remnant that, for the West, points to the possibility of an elsewhere and a beyond. Thus, the alternatives of particularism and universalism, between which the Jew was imprisoned for centuries, lose their sense. The ineffaceable singularity of Judaism is not the condemnation to the particular of a closed existence, the limit of a difficult destiny. The “more” of Israel, so often misunderstood and slandered, is the opening of the beyond that prevents Western civilization from drifting into a totalizing universalism. (p. 81)

At his worst, as in the lecture of late 1933 where Heidegger speaks of an internal enemy that has “attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act against it,” he uses imagery and a tone not so far from how Schickedanz and Rosenberg treat the Jews as parasites, the antirace whose essence is to have



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no essence of their own. Unsurprisingly, given this language of parasitic infestation, against such an enemy Heidegger says one must look “far ahead with the goal of total annihilation [Vernichtung]” (GA 36/37: 91). There is at the very least a least complicity with incitement to genocide here. But Di Cesare upends Heidegger’s Jew as Stolperstein. Instead of tripping the West into nullity, the unassimilable remnant may bring the West to a pause: to take heed of itself, to recall its own finitude from self‑imposed erasure, and to be mindful of the potential hubris of its totalizing ambitions. What I take Di Cesare to be suggesting is that the Jew may be part of the West precisely as unassimilable, not as an internal, existential enemy, but rather as an “Israel” in the sense of the polemos that I have suggested: one who struggles with God and is brought up short and as such fulfilled. As an integrally unassimilable strand of the West, Jews and Judaism call the West to sublate the polarity of universalism and particularism, whose historical oscillations have caused such damage. That sublation happens in recognizing that to be-here fully, to be Da‑sein in its particularity yet without falling into atavism, requires a concomitant openness to a “beyond,” as Di Cesare says, that exceeds both the historically given and the pretensions of an overweening universalism, but without abandoning its commitment to the ethical as it applies to us all. At his best, Heidegger asked again and again Wer sind wir?—“Who are we?”—and adamantly would not accept answers that reduce the historical “We” from a who to a what, such as a race. Indeed, Heidegger thought that remaining alive to the “Who are we?” question as a question is the only way to respond to it responsibly, for in answering, then, we remain open to what is questionable about ourselves and our historical community, and therefore alive in the polemos with Being. This strikes me as not all that far from what Di Cesare is arguing, and it is why it is important that Heidegger never did ascribe to the Jews a foundational role in history as the source of its nullity, as did other Nazis. That does not mean that some of his own answers were no less egregious, but it does mean we can think with Heidegger against him, because the anti-Semitism is not absolutely integral to the thinking, even if it might have been to the man and to the answers he gave. We are free to take up thinking the question for ourselves. Thinking with and against Heidegger, then, may stumble productively into the beyond that Di Cesare evokes. This strikes me as vital in a time when we seem to be careening again from liberal universalism into atavistic particularism. NOTES   1 Martin Heidegger, “Drei Briefe Martin Heideggers an Karl Löwith,” in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 2, Im Gespräch der Zeit, ed. Dietrich

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Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990), 29. All translations in this chapter are my own unless otherwise indicated.  2 Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2014).   3 Schickedanz was the first to coin the term Gegenrasse. See Arno Schickedanz, Sozialparasitismus im Völkerleben (Leipzig: Lotus-verlag, 1928). For an analysis, see Alexander Bein, “ ‘Der Jüdische Parasit’: Bermerkungen zur Semantik der Judenfrage,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 13:2 (April 1965), 121–49, especially 135–36.  4 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (München: Hoheneichen, 1939), 461.   5 I am grateful to Richard Polt for the translation of this passage.   6 See Richard Polt, “Inception, Downfall, and the Broken World,” in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism, ed. Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). One might ask in this context, why can’t we call Heidegger an anti-Nazi, if he sees that movement as the calamitous but necessary crossing-over to a post-metaphysical world, just as Marx held that capitalism was a necessary stage to history, without himself being a capitalist? But the analogy is inexact. Heidegger affirmed Nazism in an ardently positive way that Marx never did with capitalism. Yes, he then came to see Nazism as yet a further intensification of the West’s nihilism, with the silver lining that it might serve as the engine of the final downfall to the first inception of history. In that, one might say he echoes Marx’s assessment of capitalism; however, Heidegger continued to affirm “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism after the war in his 1953 publication of Introduction to Metaphysics. In this sense, he remained loyal to his vision of what Nazism could or should have been, which is ironic for an anti-Platonist. That vision included much, if not everything, “we moralists” find repugnant about it. For that reason, it would be a distortion to call him an anti-Nazi, because that implies an opposition to the moral meaning of Nazism and its policies well before their full unmasking in the war and Shoah.   7 Rainer Maria Rilke to Witold von Hulewitz, November 31, 1925, in Briefe aus Muzot: 1921 bis 1926, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke und Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1935), 374.   8 Rilke to Rudolf Christoph Jenny (1896), quoted in Karen Leeder, “Rilke’s legacy in the English-speaking world,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rilke, ed. Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 191.   9 See, for example, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” Philosophy Today 55:3 (Fall 2011), 219–52. 10 See Charles Fried and Gregory Fried, Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) and the Mirror of Race project, for which I serve as director, available online at mirrorofrace.org. 11 Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). This is a fairly standard English translation of the Greek: Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους.



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12 See G. Fried, “Heidegger, Politics and Us: Towards a Polemical Ethics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39:9 (November 2013), 869. 13 See, for example, this passage from Wege zur Aussprache of 1937: Understanding oneself here is also—and here above all—a struggle [Kampf] of putting oneself into question that is reciprocal between participants. Only confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] impels each participant into what is most his own. This happens only if confrontation gathers up and endures in another way, in the face of the threatening uprooting of the West, an uprooting whose overturning demands the initiative of every people capable of creativity. The grounding form of confrontation is the actual conversational exchange of the creative in a neighborly encounter. (GA 13: 20) 14 Ulrich Sieg, “Die Verjudung des deutschen Geistes: Ein unbekannter Brief Heideggers,” Die Zeit 54 (December 22, 1989). 15 See, for example, G. Fried, “Back to the Cave: A Platonic Rejoinder to Heidegger,” in Heidegger and the Greeks, ed. Drew Hyland and John P. Manoussakis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 16 The key phrase here in English, “you whitewash with lies,” derives from the American Standard Version of the Bible, edition of 1951. The King James version renders the phrase as “ye are forgers of lies.” The Hebrew is ‫רקש ילפוט‬ (tofley sheker), which means to smear with lies; ‫( ילפוט‬tofley) means to attach or smear something with something, usually in a bad way. So, while “whitewash” is not quite a literal rendering, it captures the sense of the duplicity and the spurious application of a false surface to something in ‫רקש‬. Interestingly, the Neue Evangelische Übersetzung of 2010 renders the phrase as: Ihr habt doch nur Pflaster aus Lügen (“You, by contrast, have only patch-ups [made] from lies”). A Pflaster can be a patch on a surface or a band-aid. The Schlachter Bible of 1951 (first edition, 1905) has: Ihr streicht ja doch nur Lügenpflaster (“You, by clear contrast, paint [or apply] only patches of lies”) which comes closer to “whitewash.” My thanks, here and previously, to Nir Eisikovits for assistance with the Hebrew. 17 Gregory Fried, review of Peter Trawny, Freedom to Fail: Heidegger’s Anarchy, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, June 13, 2016, http://ndpr.nd.edu/ news/67707-freedom-to-fail-heideggers-anarchy. 18 See G. Fried, “Retrieving phronêsis: Heidegger on the Essence of Politics,” Continental Philosophy Review 47:3 (September 2014), which was in part a response to a series of lectures on Heidegger and ethics given by Denny Schmidt at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in 2013. 19 From Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” (line 525), an “essay” in the form of a poem. 20 Frederick Douglass, “Life Pictures,” holograph dated 1861, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, microfilm accession no. 16377, reel 14, frames 394–412; quoted in Gregory Fried, “ ‘True Pictures’: Frederick Douglass on the Promise of Photography,” Mirror of Race, available online at mirrorofrace.org.

Chapter 5

Being and the Jew: Between Heidegger and Levinas Donatella di Cesare Translated by Richard Polt

A recent reading of the Black Notebooks led me to choose the theme of being and the Jew. It is a theme that could have been addressed earlier, simply by starting from Levinas’ criticisms and adopting a different way of considering being alongside the history of being that Heidegger sketches. But the Black Notebooks contribute a new chapter to the question. In fact, they contain the unsaid that many had assumed, or hoped, was also an unthought: the unsaid of the Jewish question, the Judenfrage.1 It is now possible to examine the relationship between being and the Jew in a new and different way, and, from this angle, to reconsider the relation between Heidegger and Levinas. 1. The first question to be asked is: what, according to Heidegger, is the relationship between being and the Jew? Who is the Jew, or better yet, what is the Jew? It is Heidegger himself who insists that the “Jewish question” is linked to the question of being, the Judenfrage to the Seinsfrage (GA 96: 243). This is what is new in the Black Notebooks: the Jew takes his place at the heart of Heidegger’s thought, the center of the philosophical question par excellence. However, it is precisely the Jew, inscribed in the history of being, to whom Heidegger imputes the most serious fault, the oblivion of being. Anti-Semitism becomes a philosophical issue and sheds new light on Heidegger’s adherence to Nazism, which can no longer be considered a political interlude—instead, it is a philosophical knot. It is true that anti-Semitism is the cornerstone of National Socialism, but the case of Heidegger cannot be explained in terms of the gap between philosophy and politics. What comes to light in the Black Notebooks, rather, is that his anti-Semitism was a philosophical error. What error is that? We will find it precisely in his definition of the Jew. 75

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The landscape in which the Jew appears in Heidegger’s pages is the one where the history of being is delineated. This is why Peter Trawny has rightly spoken of a “being-historical” (seinsgeschichtlich) anti-Semitism.2 However, I think it is even better described as a metaphysical anti-Semitism. First, because seinsgeschichtlich has an esoteric aura and tone that soften and mitigate the discriminatory act; but the term can also be misleading because it isolates Heidegger’s position, as if it were unique. To the contrary, Heidegger is dealing with a theme that is not new in Western philosophy—the theme of the relationship between being and the Jew. I need not recall the pages in Derrida’s Glas on Hegel and Judaism.3 But the horizon is much broader and extends to Western philosophy itself inasmuch as it is post-Greek, profoundly Christian philosophy (even when it pretends to be secular), a philosophy whose anti-Semitism still has not truly been brought to light. Heidegger joins Kant, who hoped for a “euthanasia of Judaism”; Hegel, who, among other things, accused the Jews of being incapable of possessions or property and thus of being “a nothing” as citizens; and Nietzsche, who sensed the approach of a new bellum judaicum.4 But also important for Heidegger is an accusation against the Jews that starts with Luther, extends to Schopenhauer, and is then repeated by Hitler: the accusation of lying. Jews falsify and lie. In Mein Kampf, the lie becomes the key to deciphering the mysteries of Judaism: Jews pose as Germans even though they are “foreigners” (Fremde), they make people believe that they are what they are not, they disguise their nonbeing, their constituent nothingness.5 It is precisely this metaphysical charge that had devastating consequences. In the Black Notebooks, the ontological difference is exaggerated and becomes an extreme dichotomy, an irreconcilable conflict. The Second World War is read by way of the scheme of the ontological difference and thus turns out to be the war of being against beings. The planetary conflict has a value that is at once ontological, theological, and political. The history of being becomes a narration with apocalyptic tones, the story of an ultimate battle, the metaphysical version of the War of Gog and Magog. If the destiny of being is entrusted to the Germans, the vanguard of the peoples of Europe, the predominance of beings is imputed to the Jews. Not only is the Jew irremediably separated from being, but he is also accused of this very separation. His fate is, in a way, already sealed: severed from being, the Jew is dangerously close to the nothingness to which Hegel had already condemned him. Heidegger denounces a nexus of complicity between metaphysics and Judaism. Metaphysics, in its modern forms, has smoothed the way for Judaism, which has known how to profit by favoring metaphysics in turn (GA 96: 46). The fate of Judaism is tied to the fate of metaphysics. Here is one of the



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principal nodes of the vision that Heidegger sketches. Overcoming metaphysics means liberating oneself from Judaism as well—and vice versa. Based on the complicity between Judaism and metaphysics, Heidegger launches specific charges against world Jewry, Weltjudentum: the power of machination, the desertification of the earth, and the deracialization of peoples, that is, their bastardization (GA 95: 56, 262). The Jew is weltlos, deprived of a world, world-less (GA 95: 97), like the stone—a metaphor already marked and used by Hegel. He is an obsolete and petrified remnant that can have no place in any part of the planet. Here we must recognize the project of a biopolitical remodeling of the planet that will be realized for the first time by National Socialism. Heidegger’s apocalyptic vision sees the Jew as the figure of an end that obsessively repeats itself, preventing the German people from reaching the “other beginning,” that is, a new dawn of the West. The Greco-German axis cannot give ground to the metaphysical enemy who, as he has lied for centuries, letting it be believed that he is what he is not, disguises being, hiding it, and, favoring the predominance of beings, impedes the passage, bars the way to the realization of the other beginning. 2. It is thus necessary to speak of a metaphysics of the Jew. When he asks about the Jew, Heidegger poses the metaphysical question ti esti, what is the Jew? In this way, he takes part in the project of defining the Jew during the period of the Nuremberg laws, a project that did not involve only jurists and scientists. In vain does one try to define the “essence” of the Jew by way of a metaphysics of blood. If the jurist, such as Schmitt, is more preoccupied with defining who is a Jew, the philosopher must answer the more original question about the “what,” the essence of the Jew. Yet there are at least three other motives for speaking of a metaphysics of the Jew. Heidegger wants to define the Jew with a capital letter, to whose essence the Jews of flesh and blood are traced back and reduced. The metaphysics of the Jew gives rise to the metaphysical Jew, an abstract figure to which the qualities that supposedly pertain to the “idea” of the Jew, the fantastic model of the figural Jew, are obscurely transferred. Furthermore, the way in which supposed qualities are attributed or denied to the Jew partakes of the secular metaphysical dichotomies that Heidegger challenges elsewhere. What is metaphysical is his appeal to those hierarchical oppositions that have dominated the Western tradition. Proceeding from the originary to the derivative, the Jew represents the extreme that is to be discarded in every dichotomy: beginning/end, pure/impure, autochthonous/ foreign, same/other, authentic/inauthentic, creative/reproductive, being/nothing. The metaphysics of the Jew thus produces a metaphysical Jew, the idea of the Jew defined metaphysically on the basis of the secular oppositions

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that relegate the Jew to inauthentic appearance, that reduce him to a soulless abstraction, to a spectral invisibility, and eventually to nothingness. Real Jews, with their countless differences (which become a matter of complete indifference), give way to the Jew per se. Thus, next to the noun there emerges the nominalized adjective, das Jüdische, in which the quidditas is supposed to be condensed. Likewise, Judentum does not indicate Judaism in its history, in the complex vicissitudes of the Jewish people; Judentum is the term for a further abstraction where all the substantial characteristics attributed to the Jews merge into a nominalized collective that takes on the features of a monolithic subject, a disquieting Moloch that that comes to represent the menace par excellence. Heidegger’s metaphysical anti-Semitism, which revolves around the terms Jude, Jüdisches, and Judentum, has much in common with the anti-Semitism of the times, which sought theological and philosophical legitimacy. So there is another reason to speak of metaphysical anti-Semitism: the referral of metaphysics to theology. The hierarchical oppositions of metaphysics take up the theological oppositions between soul and body, spirit and letter, internal and external. In this regard, one may well ask: in the charge Heidegger makes against the Jew, the oblivion of being, can we not hear the echo of another, more ancient accusation—the charge of deicide? Just as in theology the Jew was responsible for the death of God, in ontology he is responsible for the oblivion of being. So it is precisely in his attempt to define the Jew that Heidegger compromises himself with metaphysics. This takes place when, on the path of the history of being, which is supposed to bring him to the dawning light of the other beginning, he stumbles across the Jew. But which Jew? Not one of his pupils, not one of his teachers, not one of his girlfriends, not one of his lovers. Not Hannah. He finds the shadow of the Jew—the specter, the projection, the figural Jew burdened by a metaphysical weight. It is this Jude who must answer for his belonging to Judentum. But how? The Jew always seems to escape from every attempt to conceptualize his essence. The more the philosophers have tried to consider the Jew as a metaphysical phenomenon, the more he has escaped them. Consequently he has been rejected, refuted—from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche. For Heidegger, too, the Jew is an obstacle, a stone on his path. The simplest way to remove him, to clear the ground, is to define him. Thus Heidegger attempts to capture the metaphysical mystery of Judaism. In order to define the Jew, he falls back on metaphysics, submitting to the impulse to legitimize the atavistic abhorrence for the other who is closest. He does not reveal new dimensions of the question of anti-Semitism; to the contrary, he aggravates the question and makes it more perspicuous. He says quite clearly that there exists a “Jewish question,” the Judenfrage, and links it to the Seinsfrage, the question of being. Never has the Jew had more



Being and the Jew 79

importance—he is at the heart of being and philosophy. Never has he represented such a great threat. The Jew that Heidegger meets there is an obstacle to reaching the source of purity, Reinheit. It is as if the Jew declared that there is no source and no purity. No source, no origin, no purity, no authenticity, no autochthony—not for the Jew, and not for the German either. The Jew undermines being; he anarchically subverts its archē. Here, then, is what the Judenfrage has to do with the Seinsfrage. The Jews are uncomfortable witnesses to the noncoincidence of the self with the self, to the immemorial expropriation, to insuperable otherness, to the impossibility of being with oneself. They hinder every project of appropriation, every foundation and self-foundation, every compulsion to completion. This is why National Socialism chose them as enemies. For whoever thinks that the question of being is the authentic question, the position of the Jews begins to become unstable. The non-place of the Jews even becomes ineluctably concrete. In an exacerbated ontological difference, the Jew appears as the entity who has been separated from being, with no possibility of recovering his relationship. Accused of abandoning being, he is condemned to be abandoned by being. Heidegger has the feeling that the Jew that he has encountered is not a petrified and obsolete residue that can be discarded by the West—which is by vocation “catholic,” as he writes in the Black Notebooks, in that it aims at being “total,” as Schmitt asserted (GA 95: 325–26). He intuits that the Jew is beyond—that the Jew is, even, the beyond. The limit that the Jew constitutes is not a military trench, but the limit of the beyond that only the other in his otherness can disclose. Yet he retreats. Being is more important. He drops the Jew. He repeats a gesture that philosophers have already reiterated many times. There is no place for the Jew in the history of being. But his gesture of exclusion is all the more disquieting because it is carried out in a time of indigence and the night of the world, on the brink of the abyss. Now he does not hesitate to speak of a “first purification of being from its profound disfigurement at the hands of the predominance of beings” (GA 96: 238). At the time he is writing, in the early 1940s, the Reinigung des Seins, the purification of being, has already become Vernichtung, annihilation. 3. What has been the Jewish reply to the “spirit” of metaphysics, which has constructed its own edifice around the purity of being, leaving the rest of the execrable un-world to be translated into nothingness? The strategy of eroding the monolithic idea of the Jew, of offering a polyphonic and concrete vision in its stead, began decades ago. For centuries, Jewish philosophers from Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen had

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accepted the universality of Kantian reason and had had to justify their own Judaism, which was relegated to a private and particular sphere. In the tortured debate around the “Jewish-Christian symbiosis,” which was about to collapse, Rosenzweig became increasingly aware of the difficulty of conceptualizing Judaism. Every category proves inadequate to define the Jews. For instance, are the Jews a “people”? To this question that was posed to him by the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau, Rosenzweig replies in one of his final contributions, published in August 1928. The Jews are also a people; they are somewhat less and somewhat more: Regarding the concept of the Jewish people, we find ourselves in the complicated but very Jewish situation of the chazon who, asked by a court what sort of thing the shofar was, explained after many hesitations and detours that, in sum, it was a sort of trumpet. When the exasperated judge asked him why he hadn’t said so right away, he replied: but is it really a trumpet?6

As long as we try to define it in concepts, Judaism breaks their bounds, provokes perplexity and doubts that are more than legitimate about the very “concept” itself, and thus about abstract, static, and essentialist metaphysics. Now the need for a “new thinking” arises that provokes a crisis in the entire Western tradition. But the contrast grows deeper until it explodes after the Shoah. The Jew who remains presents himself on the scene of history not as an archaic and awkward residue of the “question” that modernity has pretended to liquidate, without completely resolving it, but rather as a remnant that cannot be assimilated. 4. It is at this point that Emmanuel Levinas comes on the scene. There are peculiar traits that characterize his speculative universe and distinguish him from other Jewish philosophers. First of all, there is his origin in Ostjudentum, to which he consciously lays claim. Levinas’ sober neo-Mitnagdism is a way to remain faithful to the Torah comme culture, without abdicating from the West. The passage to the West, although it occurred by way of traumatic events, has already been completed. Levinas acknowledges this fact and, starting in the 1930s, adopts a position that will have decisive repercussions for his encounter with Heidegger and his philosophy. The Jew cannot do without philosophy, science, and art; he cannot renounce the values of Western civilization that he has helped to build. But how is it possible that this acceptance of the West does not require abdicating from Judaism? From the passage to the West there emerges the Jew who has left behind him not only the enclosure of the ghetto but also the assimilation to the cosmopolis. Of course, the two strategies of Jewish existence derived from them



Being and the Jew 81

still confront each other: the strategy of the Jew who bends back upon himself and stands heroically alone against all, and the strategy of the enlightened Jew who, prepared to sacrifice his own self on the altar of the universal, experiences his own identity as a particularism. In both strategies, Judaism seems to be defended as a vestige of the past. For Levinas, the question arises from the start in a different way. Judaism is not an archaic residue that modernity has failed to assimilate, but rather an unassimilable remnant that, for the West, points to the possibility of an elsewhere and a beyond. Thus, the alternatives of particularism and universalism, between which the Jew was imprisoned for centuries, lose their sense. The ineffaceable singularity of Judaism is not the condemnation to the particular of a closed existence, the limit of a difficult destiny. The “more” of Israel, so often misunderstood and slandered, is the opening of the beyond that prevents Western civilization from drifting into a totalizing universalism. Levinas may always have been conscious of standing at a watershed of history where Jewish singularity was waiting for his philosophy, and philosophy was waiting for Jewish singularity. In this he was close to other Ostjuden such as Soloveitchik, whom Krochmalnik called “Der ostjüdische Dr. phil.”7 This consciousness clearly emerges when Levinas studies with Heidegger in Freiburg. Much has been said about this relationship, which was closer than one generally imagines. “Je pense à Heidegger malgré moi,” confessed Levinas in an interview in the nineties.8 If, in his reply to Sartre in 1947, Levinas faces the theme of Existentialisme et antisemitisme, in the immediately following text, Être juif, he reflects phenomenologically not only on the experience of being Jewish but also on being and the Jew.9 In the light of the Black Notebooks and of what Heidegger was thinking, today it is easier to agree with those who, like Samuel Moyn, have already found the traces of this reflection in Levinas’ confrontation with Being and Time.10 This is also confirmed by Levinas’ writings of the thirties. In this sense, it is not Sartre so much as Heidegger who is Levinas’ interlocutor, and even his philosophical adversary, against whom is directed not only the counter-narrative of Western thought that Levinas begins to outline, but also his sketch of a new philosophy that draws on Judaism. With a gesture that would leave its mark on two or three generations of philosophers, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and not only in France, Levinas affirms the uprooting, the exteriority, the strangeness of the Jew, to whom he grants the privilege of having testified to this condition through the centuries. It is not difficult to discern a response to the Entwurzelung attributed (not only by Heidegger) to the Fremder, the foreigner par excellence, the Jew. Yet Levinas avoids the trap of metaphysics from the start.

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It is not a matter of resuming the hierarchical oppositions in order to overthrow them. The point is not to idealize the characteristics of the figural Jew, which were formerly stigmatized, or simply to valorize what has been excluded, in order to readmit and reintegrate it. Levinas’ gesture is at the same time more astute and more daring: on the one hand, he avoids all essentialization, every definition of the Jew that would tie him to an essence and submit him to the parameters of Western philosophy, to being, destiny, origin, logos, ratio, the aut aut; on the other hand, he sees in the exteriority of the Jew, whose existence is inscribed in the polyphonic Jewish tradition, that condition of irreducible strangeness that can make metaphysics implode. Decisive is the encounter and collision with Heidegger. One usually pays plenty of attention to the theme of the self and the other in Levinas; the conflict between paganism and Judaism is seen as secondary; and the election of Israel, which is perhaps the linchpin of Levinas’ response, remains in the shadows. It is truly impressive that one of the most disturbing passages of the Black Notebooks considers the election of Israel, understood as a theological and political choice of an existence “in conformity with the principle of race” (GA 96: 56)—a reproach that already resonates in Mein Kampf. The three themes are linked. Let us begin with Levinas’ first theme, which already emerged in the thirties, from his Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism to On Escape, and was to be developed in detail later. With a manifestly political purpose, Levinas claims that Nazism is not an incident, the madness of a few years. Instead, it emerges from a philosophical conception according to which man should be ready to accept his own way of being, and even to consider it a historical destiny. Levinas points his finger at Dasein even before pointing it at Sein. Heidegger’s Dasein appears riveted, rivé, to the facticity of its “there,” which risks becoming a trap.11 This does not mean, as some have misunderstood, that there are no fissures in Dasein or that the other does not appear in Heidegger’s purely solitary landscape. In fact, in regard to Dasein, Heidegger even comes to speak of an Überstieg, a crossing over, a surpassing (GA 9: 38–39; 107). So he recognizes that Dasein, reclaiming itself from the abyss that cleaves it, projects itself toward further possibilities, continually surpassing itself. Without the beyond, there could be no Dasein; even more, Dasein itself is this beyond. Dasein exists “in transcendence and as transcendence.” But “Dasein exists finitely” (GA 2: 329; Macquarrie and Robinson, 378), and finitude conditions the way in which its surpassing is seen—a surpassing that “does not go up and beyond into an other; it comes up and back to itself” (GA 5: 310). The German term is herüber, which precisely means a return to “this side.” Heidegger is wary of the hinüber, the “beyond,” because he distrusts the infinite, which must be excluded from a thinking of originary finitude. Therefore, the movement of Dasein always takes shape within the finite: as it surpasses itself, it does



Being and the Jew 83

not go toward the other but turns back to itself, it returns to the authentic appropriation of itself. The finitude of Dasein is defined, that is, confined by the other. It is not the other that makes one exceed one’s own confines. For Heidegger, the limit is always abyssal—it is never the limit of others, which opens onto the infinite beyond of the other. Hence the asceticism of the limit that accompanies the mourning for being and that lacks the messianic impact of the beginning of the other. Levinas sees all this very early. But it is not enough. In the diesseits, in the returning to self, in the this-side, he recognizes not only a movement of Dasein but also the distinctive trait of paganism. In this, Levinas proves to be quite close not only to Rosenzweig and Benjamin, but also to Jonas and Taubes, who see a new bellum judaicum taking shape against the background of an epochal theological-political conflict between paganism and Judaism. The quest for the numinous and the sacred is pagan. But paganism is not only polytheism. It is, rather, the inability to leave the world. The pagan, as Rosenzweig had written in The Star of Redemption, is the self “closed in itself,” incapable of opening a gap in the elemental immanence of the world, which the pagan finds quite solid and well-founded, and where, conforming to the cycle of nature, he waits for the eternal recurrence of the same. Heidegger’s Bodenständigkeit, the flag of Hitlerism, is the tragic, the radical inability to find the path of the other. Israel breaks the cycle of the eternal recurrence. Its task, Levinas reiterates in his later writings, is not limited to teaching monotheism. Distrustful of things, restless and tormented, the Jew lives in the world, which for him contains the mark of what is created and provisional, constantly maintaining the tension with regard to the elsewhere. With his roots in the heavens, he stretches toward the inaccessible Place, the unpronounceable Name that, distinct from the numerous local divinities, guides universal history. But what is the distinctive gesture that Levinas carries out? It is not only the rejoinder to Nazi repetition, and not only the preoccupation with keeping Judaism alive. It aims at witnessing the possibility of a new way of “being.” The question of Jewish being now reveals its breadth and depth. It catches sight of the violent trait of Western metaphysics: the will to appropriate the other on behalf of the self, to assimilate it, totalize it, annihilate it. For the first time, Western metaphysics is accused of an egocentric totalitarianism, always victorious over the differences of others. The accusation is deepened and consolidated after Auschwitz, considered as the logical conclusion of a philosophy in which knowledge is always identified with power—the power of an ego that simply persists in being, a sovereign rooted in its own self but released from any responsibility. The exodus from being to the other is the necessity of leaving this autistic syntax; it is the step into the exterior that takes place even before questioning.

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Without the exit from the self toward the other, the ego would not even exist. The world did not begin with me. Before me, in an immemorial past, there is always the other who summons me and to whom I am called to respond, without the possibility of choice, because it is in turning toward the other that the ego is constituted. Responsibility precedes freedom. There is no need of a command to express, in a Jewish way, the duty that ties me to the other: hineini, “Here I am!” It is impossible to derive or explain this duty in which, on each occasion, my being-there takes shape. The inversion of the path is the Jewish subversion that marks the break in the axis of being. For it is the other who, uprooting the self every time, relieves it of the weight of being. To think after Auschwitz does not mean being otherwise, but rather an otherwise than being.12 The exodus from being to the other is the Jewish movement that permits not an abstract freedom, but a liberation. Levinas does not Judaize the other, as some have said. No less does he reify the other, making him an essential other, capable of conceptually containing all the others. Instead, from Jewish history and the figures of the Torah, beginning with Abraham, he takes an exemplary account of that interruption that, on each occasion, is the epiphany of the other and of the other’s face. And Judaism increasingly appears to be the exemplar of estrangement, of interruption, or rather of separation. Just as God uprooted Abraham, the other uproots the self: the ego is a privilege and an election. Over the years and decades, Levinas pursues a clear strategy and resorts both in his philosophical texts and in his Jewish ones to the language of election. He is aware that here lies the key to a response that can leave a mark on philosophy. So even after the Shoah, it is not just a matter of confronting anti-Semitism, which even in Hitler is not simply racism but the repugnance aroused by the neighboring other, by the Jew who undermines the identity of others. The question—which remains open today, as we unfortunately know—is the question of the accusation addressed to an arrogant people that presumes and pretends to be chosen. In order to clarify chosenness, Levinas departs from Heideggerian thrownness: in the Jewish horizon, to be thrown into facticity does not mean being irredeemably riveted to one’s own self, but means being ineluctably elected, summoned, commanded. Where Heidegger speaks of the possibility of Dasein, Levinas speaks of Dasein’s responsibility. Election transforms the experience of being thrown into the experience of being responsible. The yoke of election subverts thrownness, uproots rootedness. Here, for Levinas, a gap opens up between solitude and community, in the sense of the Hebrew Kol Israel arevim ze laze (All Jews are responsible for each other). In this regard, how can one not praise the mitzvah that articulates the form of life, ties the community together, and teaches heteronomy? The irremissibility of the call is the irremissibility of a being-for, a “for” to which the Jew, in an exemplary way, bows down, simultaneously elevating being.



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Exemplary, as we know, does not mean universal. Certainly, Levinas resorts to figures and models from the Torah, but always staying on the crest of the exemplary. Furthermore, is not exemplarity strictly connected to the election of a people without proselytism? Does not the Torah itself originate from the memory of those liberated slaves who were called to testify to that event of liberation at all times, to carry liberation in an exemplary way into history? But more complex is another question that in the end cannot be avoided. If the Jew is the breach in imperturbable being, the vigilance that is prepared to denounce the in-human that is concealed or justified in the universal that is always about to close, the question concerns the breach, the separation, the interruption, the strangeness of the Jew. What is left of this strangeness? And where is it left? Or should we accept the stigmatized figure of the eternal wanderer? Without a return? The question is a burning issue in our own day. It concerns Israel. Dissidence and resistance of the letter, the Jew is the alien who resides, above all, in the Book. Because he is the first reader of God, he lives in and on commentary, thanks to the open logic of the Talmud. Can he, then, return to a land? And what of his uprooting from his dwelling, now? Does he not risk facing the philosophically emblematic alternatives of an endless diaspora and the metaphysical fall into an “antimythical myth,” the myth of a nation-state? The task that Levinas has left us is that of responding to this question. Let us not forget what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about a possible Jewish State which, “universally borderless,” would jeopardize global equilibrium.13 Words of which Heidegger must have been well aware. Levinas meditates on a key concept in Heidegger’s reflections: wohnen, dwelling. For Dasein, being-in-the-world means precisely dwelling. But Levinas criticizes the way in which, in his question concerning technology, Heidegger addresses the theme of dwelling, always under the influence of nature, homeland, autochthony.14 Can we dwell as strangers? Can we reside without being part and parcel of the earth, keeping our roots in the heavens? Can we stay separate from a land that is not claimed as a mother but welcomed as a bride? Can we be gerim, resident aliens, once we have returned? Can we preserve exile in return? And can an anarchic critique of the statocentric order of the world pass through Israel? NOTES   1 Cf. Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger e gli ebrei: I “Quaderni neri” (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2014).  2 Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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 3 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), esp. 55a.   4 Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 95; G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 197–98; Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. 124 (§205).  5 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: Zwei Bände in einem Band, 815–20. Auflage (Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolge, 1943), 329–62.  6 Franz Rosenzweig, Liberalismus und Zionismus: Ein offener Brief an die Jüdische Rundschau, in Gesammelte Schriften III, Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. E. von Reinhold and A. Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 557–58.  7 Daniel Krochmalnik, “Emmanuel Levinas im jüdischen Kontext,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 21 (1996), 41–61.  8  Emmanuel Levinas, “L’humanité est biblique,” in Questions au judaisme: Entretiens avec E. Weber (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), 140.   9 One can now consult the new edition, Être juif: Suivi d’une lettre à Blanchot, ed. D. Cohen-Levinas (Paris: Rivages, 2015). 10 Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 11 Emmanuel Levinas, Quelques reflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme (Paris: Rivage, 1997). 12 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). 13 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 262. 14 Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. S. Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

Part II

HEIDEGGER AND JEWISH THINKERS

Chapter 6

Den Anderen Denken—Being, Time, and the Other in Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger Eveline Goodman-Thau

SUMMARY In this chapter I trace the tension between Hellenism and Hebraism in Being and Time from the perspective of Humanism as developed by Emmanuel Levinas. More than any other modern Jewish thinker, such as Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Loewith, and Herbert Marcuse, Emmanuel Levinas presents us with a radical philosophical critique of Heideggerian thought. The core of this critique is the question of the difference between “Being” (Sein) and “being a human being” (Dasein). “I have to justify the Da- of my Dasein,” says Levinas against Heidegger. For Levinas the I as moi is the ultimate answer to Western philosophy in regard to Being, il y a, the Heideggerian es gibt. This anonymous fearsome reality is the recognition that this moi cannot be constructed as a concept: the return to self-consciousness must, through a digression from its path, undo the knot of being bound up with the ethical. “Through the ethical, through the emphasis of my responsibility am I.” The Wisdom of Ethics as first philosophy is thus redeemed from its reduction to self-consciousness, open to the other. It is here that Levinas’ ethical theory of knowledge is rooted: in the crisis of the ego, which is “the very crisis of the being of a human being.” Tracing the biblical roots of Humanism from the perspective of Jewish thought will show the very tension between Hellenism and Hebraism developed by Levinas in his critical reading of Heidegger. Levinas is less interested in the question of what the other can or must do for me than in the notion of responsibility, which is inscribed in my very being as substitution, thus establishing Ethics as First Philosophy. 89

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I Responsibility for the neighbour is precisely what goes beyond the legal and obliges beyond contracts; it comes to me from what is prior to my freedom, from a non-present, an immemorial. A difference gapes open between me and the other that no unity of transcendental apperception can undo. My responsibility for the other is precisely the non-indifference of this difference—the proximity of the other. An absolutely extraordinary relation, it does not reestablish the order of representation in which every past returns. The proximity of a neighbour remains a dia-chronic break, a resistance of time to the synthesis of simultaneity.1

Heir, as many of his Jewish contemporaries were, to the atrocities of the twentieth century and a survivor of the Shoah of European Jewry, Levinas developed a critique of Heideggerian thought, incorporating more than any other modern Jewish philosopher the close and ineffaceable connection between Judaism and the Western tradition, while at the same time presenting the most radical critical challenge to the latter. “Levinas defines Europe by a double loyalty, a loyalty made up of tensions and conflicts between the Bible and the Greeks, the prophets and the philosophers; the good and the true.”2 The philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas represents the most serious attempt toward the creation of a critical modern philosophy of culture from the sources of Judaism out of what we would call—paraphrasing William James’3 expression—a “Variety of Historical Experiences”: The unique person, unique in his historical position is called upon: this means no less than that the Revelation requires History, which means, whatever theosophical “wisdom” may have to say, that our God is a personal God—for surely the first characteristic of any God calling upon persons must be that he is personal? By what means, however can this calling upon a diversity of people guard against the arbitrariness of subjectivism? But perhaps it is essential that a certain risk of subjectivism, in the pejorative sense of the term, should be taken by the truth.4

Both pillars of the Western tradition, the Book of Books—the Bible—and Greek philosophy, lived side by side in this great modern thinker, who carried the philosophies of Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig into the mainstream of the philosophical discourse of the twenty-first century. Humanism, history, and hermeneutics are not only methodologically present, breaking the “System” (Hermann Cohen) and opening it up to the light shining out of the “Star” (Franz Rosenzweig), but they are also existentially instrumentalized: in their respective counter-readings, both the Bible and Greek philosophy vouch for the fact that life itself can have a personal and philosophical meaning after this cataclysmic breaking of time,5 that “dia-chronic break, a



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resistance of time to the synthesis of simultaneity” caused by the destruction of the Jewish Heritage of Europe resulting from the annihilation of six million innocent men, women, and children.6 For Levinas, the search for the meaning of being, as the responsibility for the other, beyond the legal obligations laid down in a contract, becomes the common denominator of both philosophical and religious language: “A difference gapes open between me and the other that no unity of transcendental apperception can undo. My responsibility for the other is precisely the non-indifference of this difference.” It is a search for an ethical theory of knowledge, which “does not reestablish the order of representation in which every past returns.” The proximity of the other gains the ontological status of responsibility for the other: “It comes to me from what is prior to my freedom.” The irruption caused by man within Being constitutes for Levinas the interruption of Being by man, “or more exactly, the interruption of the alleged correlation of man and Being in essance, where the figure of the Same (Même) appears; just as I have wondered, if the worry generated in the Same by the Other (l’Autre) might not be the meaning of Reason, its very rationality.”7 The Interruption, the breaking in, of the infinite into the finite, enabling the connection between transcendence and immanence, is held together by ethics, as the origin of all meaning: “Onto-logy—that is the intelligibility of being—only becomes possible, when ethics, the origin of all meaning, is taken as the starting point.”8 The meaning of reason, rationality as the path and method for the search for meaning, and of truth is for Levinas rooted in the responsibility for the other “prior to my freedom”: “To be one’s brother’s keeper is be his hostage.”9 The danger of subjectivity is thus overcome by the notion of responsibility for the other, which is in fact the origin of all freedom. It entails the hearing of a call which is directed at me as a command and becomes for me a demand, as a lifnim meshurat hadin—an “obedience to the unenforceable.”10 Levinas’ intention is not to find a synthesis between Hellenism and Hebraism, but rather to confront the one with the other, a confrontation which cannot be reconciled or even described with the notions of philosophical discourse at our disposal: not by Hegelian dialectics and not by a dichotomy, also not by the way of the Platonic concept of complementarity, but rather by the biblical notion of ze ke-neged ze, a face-to-face, where the recognition of the one is subjected to the recognition of the other, as in the first encounter of Adam and Eve in Gen. 3: Adam recognizes his adamic sameness as otherness as Isch (man) when he comes face-to-face with Ischa (woman)—a theme we will return to at the end of our contribution. In the notion of ezer ke-negdo, a helper against him, as expressed in the relationship between man and woman, we may recognize also the relationship between man and God and in the “Philosophy of the Other” of Emmanuel Levinas and perhaps the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. The moment of awakening to the other, the

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exposedness of the face-to-face born out of the biblical self-reflection of God (lo tov heyot ha-adam levado, eheseh lo ezer ke-negdo: “It is not good for Adam to be alone, I will make him a Helpmate against him”11) prior to the creation of woman, yields the paradoxical recognition of the human origin as originality, which does not individuate a concept: It is I, unique in its genus, who speaks to you in the first person. . . . This exposedness is not like self-consciousness, the recurrence of the subject to himself, confirming the ego by itself. The recurrence in awakening is something one can describe as a shudder of incarnation through which giving takes in meaning, as the primordial dative of the for another, in which a subject becomes a heart, a sensibility, and hands which give. But it is thus a position already disposed of its kingdom of identity and substance, already in debt, “for the other” to the point of substitution for the other, altering the immanence of the subject in the depth of his identity. This subject unreplaceable for the responsibility assigned to him finds in that very fact a new identity.12

The recognition of origin13 comes to me, Levinas explains, as a summons from the face of the other demanding a response to something that could not be evaded; it is the hyperbolic demand which at once exceeds that response. This comes as a surprise for the respondent himself by which ousted from his inwardness as an ego and a “being with two sides” he is awakened, that is exposed to the other without restrain or reserve. . . . The opening of the ego exposed to the other is the breakup or turning inside out of the inwardness. Sincerity is the name of this extra-version.14

Levinas calls this increase of the infinite the “glory of a long desire.” It reminds us of the kabbalistic commentary on the creation of woman out of the rib of Adam: hu noten la ezem ve-hi meschivat nafesh: he gives her a rib (bone) and she returns to him a soul! The sources of Judaism, that is, the Jewish reading of the Bible, have for Emmanuel Levinas, as for Hermann Cohen, as stated in his last work “Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism,” a Doppelbezug—a twofold characteristic of history and of witness-bearing.15 The sources of Judaism thus do not merely have the status of historical fact, but create the basis for personal identity and for the social reality of the Jewish people throughout the ages, as each generation must find its connection to the common origin. Levinas speaks therefore of the Bible as l’espace vital, the living space encompassing both the intellectual and the physical for the people of Israel: “It is through reading that references take on reality; through reading in a way, we become to inhabit a place.”16 Out of the sources of Judaism Levinas develops, as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig did before him, a critical reading of Western philosophy from Iona to Jena, posing the question, how this philosophy would look in



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the light of “the sources of Christianity.”17 What is at stake here is more than the writing of a Jewish philosophy, but rather the question of the connection between religion and reason18 and finally the notion of rationality itself. It means inverting Descartes dictum cogito ergo sum into sum ergo cogito, where Being becomes concrete as Human Being: “Subjectivity is the very fracturing of immanence,” says Levinas. The self lives in this fissure, faceto-face with the Other, facing his neighbor. Ve-ahavta le-re’acha kamocha, ani Haschem: “Love your neighbour like yourself, I am God”; ve-ahavta lere’acha, kamocha ani Haschem “Love your neighbour, like you am I God. Here, the love of God and the love of one’s neighbor become One.”19 In his Talmud lectures, Levinas did not merely try to teach the method of a Jewish hermeneutics of the Bible, but also showed how critical reading of Jewish and of philosophical sources can enhance our understanding of tradition and modernity. Over and over against Derrida’s claim that “Not to philosophize is still to philosophize,”20 Levinas evokes a critical spirit, “which draws its force from elsewhere. It begins in a cry of ethical revolt, bearing witness to responsibility; it begins in prophecy. Philosophy does not become suspect at just any moment in the spiritual history of the West.”21

II For Levinas this moment in time is crucial for the recognition that truth is not eternal but the product of the human search for the meaning of being, a search which cannot end in the recognition that the real is rational and the rational is real, but which cannot “smother or cover over the cry of those who, the morrow after this recognition, mean to transform the world.”22 It means to enter philosophically into a realm of “reasons that ‘reason’ does not know, and which have not begun in philosophy.”23 This project of a “kommende Philosophie,”24 in Walter Benjamin’s formulation, would bear witness “to a beyond which would not be the no-man’s-land of non-sense where opinions accumulate.”25 Jewish sources fill the no-man’s-land with the opinions of particular people: “Whoever brings an opinion in the name of its author brings redemption to the world”26 and “These words and the others are all words of the living God,” read famous rabbinic sayings,27 where each and every opinion is needed to complete the “words of the living God.” The totality of the text demands the difference of opinions as differance, not the accumulation of mere opinions, but the recording of the negotiating process of opinion in the light of social reality, yielding an ethical theory of knowledge. Not to philosophize would not be “to philosophize still,” nor to succumb to opinions. There is meaning testified to in interjections and outcries, before

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being disclosed in propositions, a meaning that signifies a command . . . ethical signification signifies not for a consciousness, which thematizes, but to a subjectivity. . . . In this signification the ethical moment is not founded on any preliminary structure of theoretical thought, on language or any particular language. . . . An alternating rhythm of the said and the unsaid, and the unsaid being unsaid in its turn, will have to be substituted for the unity of discourse. There is here a breakup of the omnipotence of the logos, that is system and simultaneity. The logos breaks up into a signifier and a signified which is not only a signifier. This negates the attempt to amalgamate signifier and signified and to drive transcendence from its first or last refuge, in consigning all thought to language as a system of signs. Such an attempt was elaborated in the shadow of a philosophy for which meaning is equivalent to the manifestation of being, and manifestation equivalent to being’s esse.28

We see how Levinas’ criticism of Western metaphysics works on the level of history, language, and the self, to save Being. It is a radical break with Heidegger29—and at the same time it establishes a necessary link between immanence and transcendence as a new phenomenology. “Transcendence owes it to itself to interrupt its own demonstration and monstration, its phenomenality. It requires the blinking and the dia-chrony of enigma, which is not simply a precarious certainty, but breaks up the unity of transcendental apperception, in which immanence always triumphs over transcendence.”30 From this position, Levinas critiques Western philosophy in its very core, where the difference between knowledge and being is overcome in the true, when knowledge appropriates beings and frees it from its otherness.31 “In the realm of truth, being, as the other of thought becomes the characteristic property of thought as knowledge. The ideal of rationality or of sense (sens) begins already to appear as the immanence of the real to reason; just as, in being a privilege is granted to the present which is presence to thought, of which the future and the past are modalities or modifications: re-presentations.”32 What is at hand here, Levinas argues, is the act of knowing, the “reasoning will” to grasp things and make them one’s own inherent in the intellectual process. However, in the Western tradition, knowledge is mere re-representation, “a return to presence, and nothing may remain other to it.”33 Aristotelian ethics grants sovereignty to thought in the splendid isolation of contemplation, in a solitude through which finite freedom may be gained. And for Descartes in his Second Meditation the concept of human consciousness or the cogito, which encompasses feeling and willing, is the expression of knowing as the psychic or pneumatic force of thought. In cogito ergo sum human consciousness, the active and the willing I, is in fact condemned to passivity and, ultimately, to death, ending in the Heideggerian motion of authenticity as Sein zum Tod: “Modernity will subsequently be distinguished



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by the attempt to develop from the identification and appropriation of being by knowledge toward the identification of being and knowledge.”34 The way out of this dilemma as expressed in the Heideggerian notion of Geworfenheit—thrownness—is, for Levinas, a first step, in the wake of Husserl, in the marking of a difference between the thinking self (soi) and the thinking ego (moi). The thinking self is unintentional, representing what Levinas calls mauvaise conscience—a bad or guilty conscience (we might take this English translation in its literal sense, as it is indeed one of the characteristics of the modern mind to feel guilty for a crime one does not knowingly has committed—Franz Kafka’s writings, especially the story of The Castle, are the best example of the Western guilty conscience, not to mention the Christian notion of original sin), resulting in Angst—anguish. The thinking Self is in the first place a speaking self: “Language is born in responsibility.”35 To be “I,” I have to know what it means to be me (moi). Here, Levinas is inspired by the Hebrew language: the Latin habere, “to have,” is in Hebrew yesh li, “it is mine.” Moi is for Levinas the point where the I is faced with the other; to know and to grasp the other is only possible in responding to the other, and the right to be is conditioned by the demand to respond: “In affirming this me being, one has to respond to one’s right to be.”36 I have to justify the Da- of my Dasein, says Levinas against Heidegger.37 The Wisdom of first philosophy is thus redeemed from its reduction to self-consciousness, open to the other. It is here that Levinas’ ethical theory of knowledge is rooted: in the crisis of the ego, which is “the very crisis of the being of a being.”38 “My-being-in-the-world” or “my place in the sun”39—“have these not always been the usurpation of the whole earth.”40 For Levinas, the I as moi is the ultimate answer to Western philosophy in regard to Being (il y a), the Heideggerian (es gibt). This anonymous fearsome reality is the recognition that this moi cannot be constructed as a concept: the return to self-consciousness must, through a digression from its path, undo the knot of being bound up with the ethical. “Through the ethical, through the emphasis of my responsibility am I.”41 Levinas is less interested in the question of what the other can or must do for me than in the notion of responsibility which is inscribed in my very being as substitution: the other in the very core of “la condition humaine” of modernity, of dealing with obligation beyond the letter of the law, as selfobliging obligation, from which no flight into freedom is possible, since it is forever bound up with my freedom to be myself, as a self emptied of itself, without losing oneself. Finally breaking all the restrictions of one’s skin. And thus Levinas asks, at once breaking the boundaries of self and the boundaries between being and ethics, “do the being encumbered with oneself, and the suffering of constriction in one’s skin, better than metaphors, follow the exact

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trope of an alteration of essence [my italics], which inverts, or would invert, into a recurrence in which the expulsion of self outside itself is its substitution for the other? Is not that what the self emptying itself of itself would really mean?”42 Levinas uses the term “incarnation” for this recurrence, and at this moment his critique of the Christian notion of suffering and substitution becomes abundantly clear, even before he spells it out in the passage that follows: “To give his cheek to the smiter and to be filled with insults43 to demand suffering in the suffering undergone (without producing the act that would be the exposing of the other cheek) is not to draw from suffering some kind of magical redemptive virtue.”44 In Jewish tradition, there cannot be any substitution for suffering and death, only as an act of Kiddush Hashem45, and for the idea that everyone dies for his own sins.46 But Levinas’ interpretation goes a step further, to my mind under the influence of the Shoah and the moral responsibility to commemorate inherent in survival: “In the trauma of persecution it is to pass from the outrage undergone to the responsibility for the persecutor, and in this sense from suffering to expiation for the other. Persecution is not something added to the subjectivity of the subject and his vulnerability: it is the very moment of recurrence. The subjectivity as the other in the same, as an inspiration, is the putting into question of all affirmation for one-self, all egoism born again in this very recurrence.”47 We encounter here a radical antithesis to the Christian notion of incarnation and resurrection: subjectivity is here a “recurrence of the self in responsibility for others. A persecuting obsession” beyond “altruistic will” and “love.” It is “incarnated passivity, in which the responsibility for everyone goes to the point of substitution. A subject is a hostage.”48 Being constantly thrown back on oneself, accused of the actions and responsible for the suffering of others, “the uniqueness of the self is the very fact of bearing the fault of another.”49 Thus the question “Am I my brother’s keeper?”50 becomes the crucial question for Levinas in a most radical way, where standing before the other (brother) and standing before the Other (God) are one. As the other cannot be a substitution for the me, as there cannot be another who can be a substitution for my death. “Responsibility for the other, this way of answering without a prior commitment, is human fraternity itself and it is prior to freedom. The face of the other in proximity, which is more than representation, is an unrepresentable trace, the way of the infinite.”51 It is the ultimate triumph of infinity over totality, the place where substitution becomes responsibility, inscribed in the biblical narrative of the creation of man in God’s image as zelem and demut, that is not likeness in external ways but in inner qualities (Lihyot deme lo bamiddot; Rabb), as expressed in the prohibition to make a graven image of God and the famous scene between God and Moses, when



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Moses asks to see God’s face and God answers: “I will make all my goodness pass before you. . . and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy”. Here we find the very core of Levinas’ search for a fundamental philosophical and cultural critique of the Western tradition out of the sources of Judaism. There can be no substitution, only an unrepresentable trace of infinity expressed in the ethical endeavor of the self. It is not by recognizing in the face of the God that one knows, but in the face of the other; the love of God is thus undeniably bound up with the love of one’s neighbor. Every person stands in his or her own individuality and freedom, unique before God, and it is the other who represents this A Dieu—to God. Which enables one to think time in terms of the other. It is a time lived as relation to what in his difference cannot be indifferent to me. “The non-interchangeable par excellence the I, the unique one, substitutes itself for others. Nothing is a game. Thus being is transcended.”52 The relation to the other is for Levinas not a religious-ethical category but an ontological one. It does not fall into the category of knowledge about character, social position, or needs, but rather starts at the point where the other completely occupies me (m’obsède). The word “I” means here I am.53 Responsibility is therefore not a return to oneself, but “an exasperating contracting, which the limit of identity cannot retain.”54 It is an encounter with the “force of alterity in me,” breaking the boundaries of my identity. Levinas speaks here of the personal and unique aspect of the relation to the other, which is irreducible. Metaphorically it can be described as the cleft of the rock in which God presses Moses, when He passes by him, where only the protecting but at the same time concealing hand of God, but not his face, is visible—the face of God which can at any moment be replaced with the face of the other as a grasping of self and of the other as responsibility.55 The uniqueness of the I is indeed the answer to a call directed at me personally, uniquely, an answer to God’s call to Adam: Ajeka? “Where are you?”56 The uniqueness of the I means the impossibility of withdrawal. To be a hostage— as the biblical story of slavery in Egypt tells us—is the way to freedom. In the language of the Rabbis: it does not read charut “engraved” (on the tablets), but rather cherut “freedom.”57 One cannot speak of freedom and bondage if there is no individual identity, and it is the merit of Emmanuel Levinas to reveal this paradox in its stark nakedness and radicality by connecting it to the relationship to the other, as the very foundation of ethical philosophy and theory, connecting Sinn, Sein, und Sollen—Meaning, Being and the Ethical— in the Western tradition.58 “Through the Ethical, through the emphasis of my responsibility am I Me (Moi),” says Levinas. The time of conscious knowing begins with the encounter with the other.59

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The fear for the other, not of the other, transforms the anonymous law into responsibility, into that which cannot be prescribed by any juridical procedure, since the being of the Self is determined by the Other and can therefore never be abstract. The face of the other is for Levinas the place of meaning as the encounter of knowing and being. The naked face is the limit of human being, where no flight from myself, neither inward60 nor outward, is possible, without passing by the other. It is the last station of encounter, where evasion is impossible: painful and blissful arrival. In this moment, the self is defenseless before death. From the beginning there is a face to face steadfast in its exposure to invisible death, to a mysterious forsakenness. Beyond the visibility of whatever is unveiled, and prior to any knowledge about death, morality lies in the other. . . . The first murderer probably does not realize the result of the blow he is about to deliver, but his violent design helps him to find the line with which death may give an air of unimpeachable rectitude to the face of the neighbour; the line is traced like the trajectory of the blow that is dealt and the arrow that kills.61

As in many philosophical texts of Levinas’, here again the biblical story serves as the backdrop scenery of the argument (as in rabbinic hermeneutics and consequently in Levinas’ Talmud reading, the text is an illustration of the argument as the Redactor as Rabbenu (Rosenzweig) thus inscribes himself into tradition and time guided by the hand of those who came before him). Neither protagonist is mentioned by name, but we know that it is the story of the first fratricide, of Cain and Abel. The intention is already there in the expression of exposure to the face of the other, whose mortality, even before any knowledge about death, calls me before the court of justice, calls me to answer, for something which I cannot evade, as I cannot flee from my own mortality: In its mortality, the face before summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the visible death, that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated in some way from any whole, were my business. . . . The other man’s death calls me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become an accomplice of the death to which the other, who cannot see it, is exposed; and as if, even before vowing myself to him, I had to answer for this death of the other, and had to accompany the other in his mortal solitude. The Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility and calls me into question.62

The mortality of the other is my concern, calling me into question. It concerns me in my relationship to myself and to the other (God and man), paradigmatically expressed in the relationship between man and woman: It is the answer to the question addressed by God to man in paradise “Where are you?” and



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to the question asked by Cain after he killed his brother Abel “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Questions which in the face of death find no answers. “A guiltless responsibility, whereby I nonetheless am open to accusation of which no alibi, spatial or temporal, could clear me.” Even before being I had to answer for the other’s death, I accused and accuser, I perpetrator and victim. Questions that call me to responsibility for the death of the other make my existence dependent on his death, condition my life through the death of the other. The recollection and realization of this responsibility break through the boundaries of time and place, and the face of the other becomes in that very moment the face of God, invisible yet visible in the godlike image in which the other is, as I myself and as every human being, is created. Levinas connects here the story of Paradise, where self-consciousness, moral consciousness, and consciousness of God are one, and the story of the first fratricide. The first is the confrontation with God, the second with the other. Both involve matters of life and death. The meaning of death, however, falls beyond the dialectics of Being, immanently bound up with responsibility both towards God and towards the other as a ze ke-neged ze—face-to-face. For Levinas it is in this relationship that the contribution of Jewish thought to Western philosophical tradition, in particular to philosophy of history and political philosophy, is located: “Time itself refers to this situation of the face-to-face with the Other. . . . The situation of the face-to-face would be the very accomplishment of time; the encroachment of the present on the future is not the feat of the subject alone, but the intersubjective relationship. The condition of time lies in the relationship between humans, or in history.”63 Levinas points here to a messianic trope that I have called in my book Zeitbruch historiography as messianic hermeneutics.64 It means a reading of history through human action which, with full knowledge of being ignorant of the end or even of ultimate meaning of history, acts in the af al pi chen ve- lamrot hakol—“in spite of and because of everything”—Levinas would say of the other; it concerns the concrete situation of our lives, where we have power over others. Levinas explains this relationship of power through the relationship between father and son: “Paternity is the relationship with a stranger who, entirely while being other, is myself, who is not the less a stranger to me.”65 The categories of power, of ownership are inadequate here: “I do not have my child, I am in some way my child. It is through my being, not through sympathy, that I am my son.”66 Levinas recognizes this alterity first and foremost in the mother of the son, the woman, a reminder of the answer of Eve to Adam’s “Bones from my bones and flesh from my flesh”: kaniti isch et ha-elokim—I have gotten a man with the help67 of God. Where the other (Isch) and the Other (God) come together. Levinas’ journey in “Time and the Other” begins with the notion of death and ends, as he says, with that of the son. Death, sexuality, paternity, and power are, as in the Bible,

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interlinked with each other; Levinas argues that they “introduce a duality into existence, a duality that concerns the very existence of each subject.”68 Levinas’ notion of alterity comes to answer, and possibly to overcome, the inherent negative quality of duality in Western thought by relating it to power structures and the very notion of human freedom: “I have been bent on emphasizing that alterity is not purely and simply the existence of another freedom next to mine. I have a power over such a freedom where it is absolutely foreign to me, without relation to me. The coexistence of several freedoms is a multiplicity that leaves the unity of each intact.”69 The difference as differance of each human being is here crucial in order to transform relation into relationship. It does not mean the complementary side-by-side as a common ideal in Plato, which says “we,” that turned toward the intelligible sun, toward the truth, feels the other at its side and not in front of itself.70 In opposition to Buber, “where reciprocity remains the tie between two separate freedoms,” underestimating the character of isolated subjectivity, Levinas tries “to find the temporal transcendence of the present toward the mystery of the future.”71 Here Levinas does not aim at finding a term, be it a person, a truth, a work or a profession – but we encounter here the very core of Levinas’ Philosophy of the Other: tying Truth, Time, and the Other together: “It is a collectivity that is not a communion. It is the face-to-face without intermediary, and is furnished for us in the eros where in the other’s proximity, distance is integrally maintained, and whose pathos is made of both this proximity and this duality.”72 God as Ezer kenegdo—“Helper and against me”—thus becomes the paradigm of the knowledge of being—expressed in man and woman, revelation and tradition, text and commentary, where they both bear witness to the ethical truth of human wisdom. “The messianic age is often referred to as the epoch of conclusions,”73 as we quoted before. In his well-known critical essay, The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno exposes how German ideology and Heidegger in particular corrupts the notion of authenticity and its devastating effects: The armored man was so conscious of his unprotected places that he preferred to grasp at the most violent arrangement of arguments, rather than call subjectivity by its name. He plays tactically with the subjective aspect of authenticity: for him authenticity is no longer a logical element mediated by subjectivity but is something in the subject, in Dasein itself, something objectively discoverable. The observing subject prescribes whatever is authentic to the subject as observed: it prescribes the attitude towards death. This displacement robs the subject of its moment of freedom and spontaneity: it completely freezes, like the Heideggerian states of mind, into something like an attribute of the substance “existence” . . . the category of authenticity, which was at first introduced for a descriptive purpose, and which flowed from the relative innocent question about what is authentic in something, now turns into a mythically imposed fate . . .



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Jews are punished for being this destiny, both ontologically and naturalistically at the same time.74

The jargon of authenticity functions as an ideology of language, granting it an aura of dignity and death: “There was a time when the subject thought itself a small divinity, as well as a law giving authority, sovereign in the consciousness of its own freedom.”75 This freedom is now sacrificed on the altar of Being, as the core of Heidegger’s new metaphysics.76 Sacrifice means farewell from the existent on the way to the preservation of the favor of Being. Nevertheless, sacrifice can be prepared in the working and effecting (Leisten) within the existent, yet such action can never fulfill the sacrifice. The fulfillment of sacrifice stems from the urgency out of which the action of every historical man rises—by means of which he preserves the achieved Dasein for the preservation of the dignity of being.77

Here, historical man is instrumentalized for the purpose of an eternal and true goal: “Sacrifice is at home in the essence of the event. In the form of the event being claims man for the truth of Being.” There is no room for human judgment or calculation of any kind since it “disfigures the nature of sacrifice.” All considerations and desires for a higher or lower purpose must be suspended for the sake of the “clarity of the courage for sacrifice, which is marked by an awe which really fears; and which has taken upon itself to live in the neighbourhood of that which is indestructible.”78

CONCLUSION The people of Israel stands today—as it did at Mt. Sinai, on the plains of Moab, and especially, after gaining entrance to Israel, on Mount Gerizim and on Mount Ebal—six tribes against six tribes. In Levinas’ Talmud reading “The Pact,” this scene is dramatically illuminated through the rabbinic reading. In the 27th chapter of Deuteronomy Moses orders the Ceremony of the Covenant: “Six tribes are to stand on Mt. Gerizim ‘to bless the people’ and six others ‘shall stand upon Mount Ebal for the curse’ . . . . Throughout the ceremony anticipated here, all the members of the society will be able to see each other.”79 In Joshua 8, we read how for each commandment of the Torah the formulas for cursing and blessing are repeated after Joshua obeys Moses’ order to write them on large stones. The Mishna (32a) comments on this scene in the following way: They turned their faces to Mount Gerizim (Joshua 8) and opened with the blessing: “Blessed be the man that maketh not a graven or molten image” and both

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parties responded “Amen” (quotation from Deuteronomy). Then they turned their faces towards Mount Ebal and opened with the curse: “Cursed be the man that makes a graven or molten image” and both parties respond “Amen.” (So they continue) until they complete the blessings and the curses. After that, they brought the stones, built the altar and plastered it with plaster and inscribed thereon all the words of the Torah in seventy languages, as it is said very plainly (be’er hetev).80

“A message,” says Levinas, “addressed to humanity as a whole! The real meaning of this apparently particular ceremony, performed by a people, whose members can all look upon another, a community which one gaze can encompass, is that all human beings are included in the legislation in whose name the pact is concluded.”81 Be’er hetev means, I believe, not only the translatability of this message into many languages, but its confirmation as a blessing or a curse as a pact between Israel and the Nations, where particularism is the very condition for universalism, a guarantee of human values. It is here that, for Levinas, in the wake of the Shoah Judaism and the Western tradition encounter rupture and continuity. In his essay, “Nameless,” Levinas laments the fact that, despite the atrocities of the twentieth century, mankind persists in bloodshed, ruthless racism, imperialism, and exploitation, conditions that have even worsened since his death more than twenty years ago. In the end, Levinas reflects on the Jewish condition as a paradigm of finding strength in isolation and fragile consciousness: When temples are standing, the flags flying atop the palaces, and the magistrates donning their sashes, the tempests raging in individuals’ heads do not pose the threat of shipwrecks. They are perhaps but the waves stirred by the winds of the world around well-anchored souls within their harbors. The true inner life is not a pious or revolutionary thought that comes to us in a stable world, but the obligation to lodge the whole of humankind in the shelter—exposed to all the winds—of conscience. . . . But the fact that settled, established humanity can at any moment be exposed to the dangerous situation of its morality residing entirely in its “heart of hearts”, its dignity completely at the mercy of a subjective voice, no longer reflected or confirmed by any objective order—that is the risk upon which the honor of humankind depends. But it may be this risk that is signified by the very fact that the Jewish condition is constituted within humanity. Judaism is humanity on the brink of morality without institutions.82

Morality and mortality are here indeed at stake, not only for the Jewish people but for each human being. Con-science is indeed fragile, since all science breaks through in the truly subjective voice of each human being who chooses to stand, as Emmanuel Levinas did, on the intersection between Being, Time and the Other.

Appendix

The scope of this contribution allows, unfortunately, only brief comments on two other chapters in this volume. In contrast to other contributions dealing with the Heideggerian notion of Being and Jewish thought, I tried to show the fundamental critique of the Western Tradition by Emmanuel Levinas from the perspective of the sources of Judaism in the tension between religion and modernity. The question of whether Martin Heidegger’s thought is seinsgeschichtlich or metaphysisch anti-Semitic, stems, to my mind, from the confrontation between Hellenism and Hebraism as the two roots of Western Tradition. In my view, there is no doubt that Martin Heidegger, like Franz Rosenzweig before him, raised one of the most central questions in modernity, and it is for this reason that Franz Rosenzweig chose Judaism over Christianity. Rosenzweig after the First World War and Levinas after the Second World War, deeply sensing the crisis of their times, raised philosophical and theological questions concerning notions such as Being, truth and time, confronting Athens with Jerusalem. Deeply influenced by Franz Rosenzweig, Levinas weaves the threads of secular and religious concepts into a new Weltbild in which, to use Rosenzweigian terms, Seinsdenken, Sprachdenken, and Geschichtsdenken emerge in a new light. The various contributions of this volume reflect, to my mind, a prism of ways in which Heideggerian and Jewish thought are shattered in the light of the recent publication of the Black Notebooks, which testify to Heidegger’s continuous anti-Semitic attitude toward Jews and Judaism. Thus I can only underscore the statement of Donatella di Cesare in her contribution “Being and the Jew: Between Heidegger and Levinas,” stating that the Jew is at the heart of Heidegger’s philosophical thought and that 103

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anti-Semitism, the cornerstone of National Socialism, is indeed not merely a political issue, but the core of Heidegger’s philosophy of being. The relationship between Being and the Jew remains a tension between Athens and Jerusalem, both from a secular and from a religious point of view.83 The contribution of Elliot Wolfson comparing Heidegger’s Seyn/Nichts and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof, is also illuminating. It corresponds indeed to Heidegger’s concept of the Lichtung or “clearing”: “The word designates in the connection we are now thinking, free openness” as “a ‘primal phenomenon’ [Urphänomen]. . . . We would have to say ‘primal matter’ [Ursache] . . . This means that the phenomenon itself, in the present case of clearing, sets up the task of learning from it while questioning it, that is, of letting it say something to us” (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” 442). The notion of unconcealment is introduced by Heidegger here as Aletheia. It is, as he states, “well-rounded because it is turned in the pure sphere of the circle in which beginning and end are everywhere the same. In this turning there is no possibility of twisting, distortion, and closure . . . it means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, means the place of stillness that gathers in itself what first grants unconcealment. That is the clearing of what is open. . . . [In that clearing rests possible radiance, that is the possible presenting of presence itself]” (ibid., 443). Heidegger describes Aletheia as the clearing that allows being and thinking to meet in a Zwischen. It is to a kind of revelation—Er-denken—where “gods and human beings come to mutual recognition.” To my mind, what we encounter here is a re-cognition of origin. The place where concealment and unconcealment in reality meet is free of metaphysics, of a preconceived notion of an a priori: where the thinker becomes the sole master of his questions and his answers regarding the fate of the world, escaping the eternal circle of returning to the origin as sameness, and an escape from eternal return. It means the opening of the mind to originality, the very origin of origin where the self, the master of his fate for good or for bad, meets Otherness.84 The question is: is there a way to interrupt the circle of the es gibt, the “there is”? This is the place where Emmanuel Levinas’ Philosophy of the Other, as a critique of Heidegger, is rooted. The demand of the search “for presencing, for presence,” lies in the rupture caused by the “face of the other” as a presence where the totally Other— God—and the totally other—my neighbor—become one.85 In the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas we could thus paraphrase the title of his book “Of God Who Comes to Mind” as “The Other Who Comes to Mind.” It is for this reason that I have chosen Den Anderen Denken as the title of my essay on Being, Time, and the Other, comparing Levinas and Heidegger. In this light, the thrust of my own scholarship has been to develop a fundamental critique of the Western tradition from the sources of Judaism and to



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establish Jewish thought as one of the founding traditions of Europe as a paradigm that allows us to address the question of the current crisis of the humanities in a broader context. NOTES  1 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 180.   2 Catherine Chalier, “Levinas and the Talmud,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 100–19.  3  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, Gifford Lectures, delivered at Edinburgh University in 1901–1902 (NY: Random House, 1902).   4 Emannuel Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in The Levinas Reader, 196.  5 Cf. Eveline Goodman-Thau, Zeitbruch. Zur messianischen Grunderfahrung in der jüdischen Tradition (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1995).   6 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 180.   7 Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” 207.   8 Levinas, “Prayer without Demand,” in The Levinas Reader, 231 (italics are mine).   9 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 181. 10 In the words of Franz Kafka: “I can only assume a mandate that no one has given me.” Cf. “The Test,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken, 1995). 11 Gen. 2,19. 12 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 182. 13 See p. 104 of this essay. 14 Ibid., 182f. (italics are mine). 15 Cf. Hermann Cohen, “Einleitung,” in Religion der Vernunft, aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig: Fock, 1919). 16 Levinas, “Revelation in Jewish Tradition,” 192. 17 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. 18 Cf. Hermann Cohen, Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie (Gießen: Ricker Verlag, 1915). 19 See Lev. 19, 18. 20 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 167. 21 Ibid., 185, emphasis mine. 22 Ibid., 186. 23 Ibid. 24 Walter Benjamin, “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie”, in: Ders., Gesammelte Werke, Bd. II, 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 157–171. 25 Ibid. 26 Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” 198. 27 Ibid.

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28 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 186. 29 “Ich denke an Heidegger, selbst dann, wenn ich nicht will,” cf. Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich: Gespraeche mit Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Derrida, Rita Thalmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Leon Poliakov, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Luc Rosenzweig (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1994), 120. 30 Ibid. 31 Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, 76. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 77. 34 Ibid., 77f. 35 Ibid., 82. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 85; cf. also Franz Kafka, “Das Wort sein hat zwei Bedeutungen, Dasein und Ihmgehören,” in Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlass, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980), 33. 38 “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 85. 39 Ibid., 87. 40 Ibid., 82. 41 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’Idée (Paris: Librairie Philosophique Vrin, 2000); cf. Eveline Goodman-Thau, Fremd in der Welt zu Hause bei Gott (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002), 50. 42 Levinas, “Substitution,” in The Levinas Reader, 100. 43 Lamentations 3:13 44 Levinas, “Substitutions,” 101 (italics mine). 45 That is, a sanctification of God’s name. 46 Cf. prophet Ezekiel. 47 Levinas, “Substitutions,” 101. 48 Ibid. (italics mine). 49 Ibid., 101f, emphasis mine. 50 Ibid., 107. 51 Ibid., 106; (italics mine). 52 Ibid. 53 Cf. Abraham’s hineini (Gen. 22), answering for everything and everyone. 54 Levinas, “Substitutions,” 104. 55 Ex. 33, 21–23. 56 Gen. 3, 9. 57 Ex. 32, 16. 58 Cf. Eveline Goodman-Thau, “Gott auf der Spur. Biblischer Humanismus in der Philosophie des Anderen von Emmanuel Levinas,” in Vergegenwärtigung des zerstörten jüdischen Erbe. Franz-Rosenzweig-Gastvorlesungen Kassel 1987–1998, ed. Wolfdietrich Schmid-Kowarzik (Kassel: Kassel University Press, 1997). 59 Cf. Rashi: Before Adam and Eve had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, they could name the world, but they did not know the difference between Good and Evil. 60 Cf. Kierkegaard. 61 Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 83.



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62 Ibid. 63 Levinas, “Time and the Other,” in The Levinas Reader, 45. 64 See footnote 4 in this essay. 65 Ibid., 52. 66 Ibid. 67 Gen. 4, 2. 68 Ibid., 53. 69 Ibid. 70 Cf. Noah und Abraham: et haelohim hithalech, “Noah Walked with God and Abraham”; hithalech lephanav, “Abraham walked before God.” 71 Levinas, “Time and the Other,” in The Levinas Reader, 54. 72 Ibid. 73 “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” in The Levinas Reader, 198. 74 “Judgement,” Adorno illustrates, “is passed according to the logic of that joke, about the coachman who is asked to explain why he beats his horse unmercifully, and who answers that after all the animal has taken on itself to become a horse, and therefore he has to run”: Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2002), 126–27. 75 Ibid., 160. 76 Cf. Hans Jonas, “Immortality and the Modern Temper” and “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” in Mortality and Morality. A Search of the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 122–23, 131–43. 77 Ibid., 161 (italics are mine). 78 Cf. Adorno on Heidegger in The Jargon of Authenticity, 162. 79 The Pact, in The Levinas Reader, 214. 80 Ibid., 217. 81 Ibid. 82 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 122. 83 Cf. Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason: Out the Sources of Judaism (1919) as a reply to Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der reinen Vernunft. 84 Cf. Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance in: Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967). 85 Cf. Lev. 19:18.

Chapter 7

Groundlessness and Worldlessness: Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism and Jewish Thought Dieter Thomä

PROLOGUE It could be said that the chapters assembled in this volume, including my own, are meditations on the quotation mark. Heidegger talks about the “Jews” and interacts with Jews, thinkers who are Jewish or non-Jewish—or classified as “Jewish” or non-“Jewish”—make statements about “Jewish” or non-“Jewish” (e.g., “German”) thought, and so on. The many uses of quotation marks seem to be part of an arcane art. Whatever is said about the Jews inevitably prompts the question of what it has to do with the Jews. In logic, this transition is called disquotation. The innocuous textbook example for this procedure runs as follows: If a person says “The sun is shining,” and if she is right, then the sun is indeed shining. In this clearly defined framework, disquotation transforms a proposition into a fact. Many philosophers are in love with disquotation, as they are professionally in love with truth. This enthusiasm is understandable, but it prescinds (1) from the pitfalls of disquotation—and (2) from the appeal of quotations. (1) Disquotation does not take place in a narrow logical realm only but whenever statements attain some kind of performative force—their truth notwithstanding. This is the case when, for example, Heidegger’s claim that “Jews” are “criminals” gets converted to a political practice treating them as criminals. (2) Those who want to single out and pin down ideological slogans put them in quotation marks and insist on their lacking confirmation. If quotation marks indicate that something is (merely) said, they can also emphasize the fact that a phrase is a communicative act: a gesture directed by a speaker at an addressee. In this sense they run against Heidegger’s 109

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understanding of philosophy as an “Insight into That Which Is” and serve the purpose of giving language a human face. (This is why Paul Celan said that certain “words . . . seem to smile through invisible quotation marks.”1) Initiating a philosophical exchange on Heidegger and Jewish thought in the wake of the Black Notebooks is a daring attempt to take statements as statements (and not as weapons in political infighting). This approach entails a resurrection of quotation marks. They make statements accessible to critique; they may even initiate a dialogue by leading back from statements to speakers. In the case of Heidegger, the controversy on statements stays in the shadow of catastrophe and the human faces attributed to them do not always bear a smile. The contributions to this volume critically address Heidegger’s construction of “Jewry” (Di Cesare, Cohen/Zagury-Orly, Fried, Trawny), they draw connections between Heidegger’s utterances and anti-Semitic politics (Brumlik), they discuss Jewish—or “Jewish”—thinkers and compare their particular readings of the Jewish—or “Jewish”—tradition to Heidegger’s thought in general and to his misrepresentation of “Jewry” in particular (Babich, Dolgopolski, Fagenblat, Goodman-Thau, Hadad, Herskowitz, Wiese, Wolfson). My own chapter is meant to contribute to these equally daunting tasks. ATTITUDINAL, INTENTIONAL, AND UNASSERTIVE ANTI-SEMITISM Is Heidegger’s early philosophy—Being and Time, the lecture-courses from the 1920s and related writings—pervaded and tainted by anti-Semitism? In order to answer this question I will formally distinguish between three readings of anti-Semitism applicable to this particular case: The early Heidegger could be regarded as an attitudinal, intentional, or unassertive anti-Semite (“Attitudinal, Intentional, and Unassertive Anti-Semitism”). I will then turn to the texts themselves and scrutinize his early (anti-Semitic?) discussion of worldlessness and groundlessness (“On the Proving Ground of AntiSemitism: Worldlessness and Groundlessness”). In conclusion, I will present a panorama of (mostly) Jewish thinkers who seek to employ the conceptual repertory used or abused by Heidegger in an independent manner. Here the focus will be on groundlessness (“Groundlessness in Jewish Thought”). The attitudinal anti-Semite. Quite a number of anti-Semitic remarks is to be found in letters and other miscellaneous texts by Heidegger dating back at least to the year of 1916.2 As they are made only in private or semiprivate communications, their discovery did not create the same outcry that



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has followed the publication of the Black Notebooks. We shrug off a dead person’s opinions, whereas we do care about texts conveying a general viewpoint that we are invited to adopt. Those early remarks reveal an attitude. It is safe to say that there is no firewall between personal attitudes and theoretical arguments—and no total merger either. Thus it should be regarded as an open question to what extent attitudes are consciously appropriated and reflected and how they connect to theoretical reflections and unfold on a philosophical level. Heidegger was indeed an attitudinal anti-Semite, but different conclusions can be drawn from this fact. Either anti-Semitism plays a dominant, obtrusive role in Heidegger’s texts from the 1920s, or it remains muffled and obtuse. He can be regarded as an intentional anti-Semite or as an unassertive anti-Semite. (For different accounts of Heidegger’s later anti-Semitism, see Donatella di Cesare’s and Micha Brumlik’s contributions to this volume.) The intentional anti-Semite. Those who depict Heidegger as an intentional anti-Semite claim that anti-Semitism plays a prominent role in Heidegger’s theater of the mind and a formative role in his philosophy from very early on. By giving Heidegger’s attitude an intentional twist, they reach the verdict that Being and Time and other early texts are pervaded by ideological messages or even serve as instruments for promoting an anti-Semitic agenda. They do acknowledge the fact that Heidegger’s early philosophical writings do not contain any overt anti-Semitic statements, but claim that he scantily disguised his true intentions and meant y when he said x. These critics heavily rely on assumptions on the personality of the author when assessing the texts. Yet they are scrupulous enough to know that reading the mind of an author—who is not an open book but rather a black box—is prone to obfuscation. In order to track down hidden anti-Semitic messages they apply a refined hermeneutic and turn to the text as well as to its context. When focusing on the text they seek to detect suspicious messages by claiming that generic descriptions contain concealed denotations. Linguists would describe this as a step from the semantic to the pragmatic level of language. Accordingly, Heidegger does not just present philosophical analyses, but portrays social groups and targets particular people. He slaps the Jews in the face and makes them invisible at the same time. They are victimized without being acknowledged as victims. Certain descriptions in Being and Time are said to obliquely denote—and denigrate—the Jews or to denote— and elevate—a “people” which cannot be but German and non-Jewish. (See Yemima Hadad’s contribution to this volume.) This hermeneutic is complemented by the contextual strategy of establishing connections between Heidegger’s implicit statements and other positions with a more explicit, straightforward anti-Semitic record. Ideally, such connections should go beyond mere similarities and consider sources which have exerted some influence on Heidegger. Based on such circumstantial evidence,

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Heidegger’s early philosophy appears as an integral part of a broad discourse promoting a racist, totalitarian agenda. As this section is confined to formal, methodological considerations, I do not want to already evaluate the findings presented by this intentionalist reading. Suffice it to say that this account is exposed to a danger. It is tempting to switch strategies in case one does not make sufficient progress on one front. Whenever the discursive thicket of attributions, associations, connotations, and so on gets impenetrable, whenever the search for denotations does not yield any unequivocal results, one can still take refuge to the alleged fact that Heidegger as a person has a straightforward ideological agenda anyway. This works the other way around as well: When such firm intention is questioned, one can put Heidegger into an environment populated by authors with a straight anti-Semitic record. The combination of alleged intention, textual and contextual evidence may generate a coherent picture that still remains disturbingly superficial. The unassertive anti-Semite. The intentionalist reading is guided by a rhetorical question: how can a work remain unaffected by the fact that its author is an attitudinal anti-Semite? Those who oppose this view actually doubt that this question is merely rhetorical. They feel that those describing Heidegger as an intentional anti-Semite are overplaying their hand. They do find it extremely useful and, in fact, mandatory to search for hidden meanings in Heidegger texts and contexts. But they dismiss the idea that hidden anti-Semitic meanings can be identified by going back from a text to an author’s alleged intention. This cautionary measure is based on the skeptical argument that any shortcircuiting between attitudes and arguments, life and work is futile. They do take as given that Heidegger was an attitudinal anti-Semite but abstain from streamlining personal attitudes for the sake of a clear-cut intention. The image emerging from this reading shows Heidegger as an unassertive anti-Semite. This label seems to be appropriate as the semantic realm of the word “unassertive” provides some helpful clues for gaining access to Heidegger’s texts from the 1920s. This semantic realm comes to the fore when we turn from unassertiveness to assertion and explore its double meaning. On the one hand, assertion is related to achievement, accomplishment, and confidence. On the other hand, assertion means statement or proposition. This double meaning is still in play in “unassertive,” even though here the first aspect seems to be predominant. Based on the two layers of unassertiveness, two complementary versions of unassertive anti-Semitism come into the picture. The first version is simply based on the finding that anti-Semitism does not show in Heidegger’s assertions or propositions and then goes on to look for it, as it were, underneath. As mentioned previously, this approach gives ample opportunities for detecting hidden meanings and for examining the textual and contextual evidence. As it does not rely on a preconceived agenda of the author, it is more cautious than the intentionalist reading when it comes to identifying anti-Semitic implications.



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The second version takes its starting point from the idea that unassertiveness in the sense of a lack of assertions may be linked to an unassertiveness in the sense of a lacking ability to assert oneself: a lack of confidence, a certain reluctance or insecurity. Again, this claim runs against the reading that Heidegger acts as an intentional anti-Semite. Now it is said that Heidegger does not talk about the Jews in a straightforward manner because he does not really know where to put them and how to deal with them philosophically. (A further claim would be that Heidegger reaches this point only in the late 1930s.3) It is safe to say that Heidegger did not shy away from assertiveness. After moving to Marburg, the newly appointed professor scheduled his classes at 7 o’clock in the morning—a provocative move directed against his colleague Nicolai Hartmann, who had the habit of assembling his students late in the evening. The students had to make a choice whether they wanted to spend the nights with Hartmann or the mornings with Heidegger. The latter won and envisaged his victory in advance: “I will—in the manner of my presence—make hell hot for him,” that is, for Hartmann.4 Heidegger practiced philosophy as a martial art, and in order to do so, he had to be assertive. This agonistic approach is incompatible with claims lacking originality, with positions marked by dullness and clumsiness, with preoccupations affectively charged but lacking articulation. According to those who regard Heidegger as an unassertive anti-Semite his relation to Jewry is an example falling into this category. Unassertive anti-Semitism thus means: It does not make it to the level of assertions, it is unfitting for a bold move of self-assertion and marked by a low level of elaboration, reflectivity, and discursiveness. This can still mean—as we will see in the next section—that Heidegger’s early texts contain anti-Semitic insinuations. But they remain elusive and quirky. I have distinguished two different strategies for locating anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s early writings—two strategies which are both based on the view that he was an attitudinal anti-Semite indeed. The first pictures him as an intentional anti-Semite, the second as an unassertive anti-Semite. (If one wanted to add name tags to them, one could choose Emmanuel Faye, among many others, as representing the first and the author of this chapter, among many others, as representing the second strategy.) The question of which strategy is more conclusive and convincing cannot be decided in an abstract manner. It is time to turn to concrete examples and inspect the mess. ON THE PROVING GROUND OF ANTI-SEMITISM: WORLDLESSNESS AND GROUNDLESSNESS Several concepts from Heidegger’s writings before 1933 are suspected to carry oblique anti-Semitic allusions, among them “worldlessness” (Weltlosigkeit)

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and “groundlessness” (Bodenlosigkeit). According to Emmanuel Faye, they are to be regarded as “key concept[s] of Heideggerian anti-Semitism.”5 In an entry to the Black Notebooks probably stemming from 1938 both terms are indeed attributed to the Jews (GA 95: 96–97). Does that mean that Heidegger already aims at the Jews when using them earlier? It is always nice to connect the dots in a straightforward manner, but in this case some caveats are in place. In this section, I will discuss Heidegger’s usage of those terms in the early writings—including the concepts they are derived from, that is, Welt and Boden. (As the translation of Boden is already controversial, I stay with the original.) After elucidating Heidegger’s own exposition of those concepts, I will turn to the question of whether and how they carry anti-Semitic connotations. The answer to this question will involve a comparison of the different readings outlined in the previous section: the reading of Heidegger as an intentional or as an unassertive anti-Semite. Worldlessness. In Being and Time and in the lecture-courses from the 1920s, Heidegger uses the term “worldless” in fairly different contexts. Two such uses are particularly prominent; the critique of Descartes’ “worldless subject” in Being and Time and related writings, and the theory of the “worldless” material object in his lecture-course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics from 1929/1930. (a) In Being and Time, “worldless” appears as an epithet of the Cartesian subject. It is called worldless because the res cogitans establishes itself by severing all ties to external beings and by retreating from practical involvements (Being and Time, 254).6 Heidegger turns against the dominance of an epistemological model introducing an artificial separation between the “isolated subject” and the “external world” (ibid., 249).7 According to Heidegger, it does not do justice to the primordial coexistence or entanglement of the human being and the world. The Cartesian account leads to a misconception both of the “I” and the thing. Heidegger develops an alternative view in the lecture-course from 1919, where he expands on “the environmental experience.” “In this experiencing, in this living-towards, there is something of me: my ‘I’ goes out beyond itself” and encounters “something environmental” (Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 62). This rapprochement of I and thing competes with the theoretical attitude of a subject objectifying things. Heidegger complains that “the worldly is here extinguished.” This affects both the thing, which gets “re-moved” from me and loses the wealth of its qualities, and the purified “I” which “is no longer I myself” indulging in “vital experience” (Er-leben) but a subject suffering from “de-vivification” (Ent-leben) (ibid., 62).8 (b) The second major appearance of worldlessness in Heidegger’s early writings is in the lecture-course from 1929/1930, where he famously



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distinguishes between the “world-forming” (weltbildend) human, the “poor in world” (weltarm) animal, and the “worldless” (weltlos) stone (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, 177). It is rather awkward that Heidegger attributes the term “worldless” equally to subject and stone. They are obviously very different. The worldless subject stands for a deprived, impoverished self, that is, for an entity linked to a historical process. Whereas the worldlessness of the subject has come into being and can be overcome, there is no making or unmaking of worldlessness imaginable in the case of a stone. It is worldless by essence. As it does not have the capacity of “ ‘having’ world,” it cannot lose it either (ibid., 118–19, 183). Whereas worldlessness is regarded as a shortcoming or misdeed of the subject, it does not represent “some kind of lack” in the case of the stone (ibid., 197). The problem with the subject consists in the fact that it willfully adjusts to the stone in the sense that it gives up the opportunity of “access” to the world and gets reduced to an isolated being. The disentangled, unencumbered subject has an ontological status emulating that of the worldless stone. It boasts about its unrelatedness or “non-indigence” (Unbedürftigkeit) instead of embracing its sum cogito as an acknowledgment of the fact that “I-amin-a-world” (The History of the Concept of Time, 172–74, 216). Do Heidegger’s considerations on worldlessness and the world confirm the suspicion that he launches an anti-Semitic agenda? Emmanuel Faye says yes. “The Heideggerian existentiale of Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein) can be used by its author as a discriminatory concept serving an anti-Semitic purpose.”—“During the 1920s, Martin Heidegger has begun to propagate an anti-Semitic world-view which serves as a basis for his conception of Dasein.”9 Faye reads Heidegger as an intentional anti-Semite in an exemplary manner. A theoretical “conception” is said to be anteceded and steered by a “world view” (see discussion earlier). Philosophy appears as a means to an end defined by a “program.”10 It remains unclear how Faye can know for sure that anti-Semitism plays such an overarching, pervasive role in Heidegger’s theater of the mind. And it remains to be seen how he connects the author’s agenda to the texts, that is, whether he provides textual and contextual evidence for the claim that “worldlessness” denotes the figure of the “Jew.” In order to avoid an overload of references and philological technicalities, only one of these contextualizations will be discussed in detail and taken as a test case for Faye’s reading. It could be called the scandalization of Umwelt. Roughly speaking, Faye introduces the following opposition: On the one hand, he reinstalls the subject that is not to be blamed for being worldless but regarded as a bulwark for individual freedom and autonomous judgment; on the other hand, he suspects Umwelt to be constricted, particularistic or

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worse. Is there any contextual evidence for an anti-Semitic subtext of Umwelt in Heidegger? Faye contends that Heidegger did not coin the term Umwelt, but adopted it from Jakob von Uexküll’s biology. He reminds us of the fact that Uexküll was a long-time friend and supporter of the racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain and an anti-Semite himself. Faye also says that “before Heidegger” turned to Umwelt in 1925, this term played an important role in the book The Nordic Soul by the racist and phenomenologist Ludwig Clauß, and insinuates that this book from 1923 served as a source of inspiration for Heidegger.11 Umwelt thus appears to be a cornerstone of a biologist, racist, collectivist ideology eagerly adopted by Heidegger. Faye’s circumstantial evidence is, at best, weak. One could also say that it is brazenly sloppy. He gets the chronology wrong—and the content as well. The lecture-courses in which Heidegger introduced the concept of Umwelt for the first time—and quite extensively—were given in 1919 (see above) and in 1919/1920 (Basic Problems, 31, 38, 41–49, 76; Towards the Definition, 59–64). Clauß’s book was not published back then—and Heidegger’s comment on his later book Race and Soul in 1927 is less than friendly: “The proper reply to Clauß’s impertinence is silence.”12 Chronologically speaking, Uexküll was already on the scene with, for example, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere published in 1909.13 But his writings are so different in content and focus that pairing them with Heidegger’s early lecture-courses does not make any sense. (Uexküll will become of interest to Heidegger only later; I will get back to that.) Faye has a point when he says that Heidegger does not coin the term Umwelt. But he gets the ancestry and genealogy wrong. In his exposition from 1919 Heidegger makes clear whom he regards as the copyright holder for this term. Heidegger situates Umwelt in a triangle: the resurgence of the philosophy of “life,” the importance of “history,” and the prevalence of a sphere of “meaning[s]” over an “objectivated sphere of things” (Basic Problems of Philosophy, 28; Towards the Definition, 18, 60, 64). This scheme is indebted to Wilhelm Dilthey. As a matter of fact, Dilthey helps introduce the term Umwelt in the German-speaking world: He uses it as a translation of Auguste Comte’s milieu. While adopting this term, Dilthey turns against Comte’s deterministic conception of milieu.14 It is safe to say that this genealogy of Umwelt does not lead to racist ideology. Heidegger gives Dilthey credit one more time in his Kassel lectures from 1925, where he expands on the concept of Umwelt by touching on life, history, and a sphere of meanings and references (“Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Current Struggle for a Historical Worldview,” 163). It does not sound as if this Umwelt created a racist, collectivist, biologistic realm. In the Kassel lectures we finally find a passage which could possibly refer to an author incriminated by Faye: Uexküll. “Life ‘has’ its world. Even



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in biology this kind of knowledge is slowly beginning to make headway” (ibid.).15 This still does not prove that Heidegger borrows Umwelt from Uexküll—rather the opposite. Heidegger welcomes the discussion in biology as a marginal confirmation for the potential of this term—a potential already recognized by Dilthey and further developed in his own work. Things seem to lighten up for Faye as Heidegger later, in 1929/1930, refers to Uexküll quite frequently (partly in critical, partly in sympathetic fashion). In order to comfort Faye, we could ponder the idea that Heidegger, when approaching the year of 1933, gets more and more racist, turns to Uexküll frequently, and joins forces with him. In an attempt to fabricate some contextual evidence for this claim, Faye seems to propose a classical syllogism: Premise 1: Uexküll is a racist. Premise 2: Heidegger refers to Uexküll. Conclusion: Heidegger is a racist. Yet those who think that Faye uncovers an infamous coalition should not forget that Uexküll’s research is also most generously discussed and used by Helmuth Plessner in 1928 and by Ernst Cassirer in 1929.16 The aforementioned syllogism does not apply to these two authors, and it does not apply to Heidegger either. There is a problem with Umwelt that does deserve special attention. It has to do with the fact that Umwelt obviously gives priority to the perspective of a person coping with her environment. This perspective is bound to particularity: In principle, the world disclosed to a person can become boundless, but its first manifestation is local, not global. This particularism could be regarded17 as a preparatory step to Heidegger’s falling back to the “people” at the end of Being and Time and as a prefiguration of Heidegger’s praise for the German Volk and its historical mission in 1933. Yet Heidegger’s early understanding of Umwelt does not really fit to a racist or proto-racist agenda. He addresses its particularity, but he does so in an unexpected manner. In his famous discussion of the lectern in 1919, Heidegger suggests that this lectern will be perceived and framed differently by a farmer from the Black Forest and by a student in Freiburg. It appears as part of a social, educational setting to the student and as a wooden box to the farmer (Towards the Definition, 60). This leads to a conclusion that is anything but suspicious or dangerous: Umwelt, life-world, and world are bound to plurality. Things are viewed and used in particular ways by different people. This finding about the plurality of worlds stays in a purely descriptive realm. What happens if we look at it from an evaluative, judgmental perspective? We then have the choice of embracing plurality or of singling out one particular word-view as privileged or somehow superior. Those who seek a spokesperson for the first option can turn to Johann Gottfried Herder. His defense of plurality comes with a critique of Western complacency, that is, of the Western attempt to universalize one particular life-style and to devaluate other civilizations.18 Herder stands at the beginning of a strain of thought

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that leads up to recent debates on pluralism in the fields of epistemology19 and cultural studies.20 Heidegger’s early discussion of Umwelt also belongs to this tradition. When discussing the different framings of the lectern he even includes the perspective of a “Negro from Senegal,” with no insinuation whatsoever that his perspective—or the aforementioned student’s or farmer’s, for that matter—is unworthy (Towards the Definition, 20). Heidegger grants the “Negro” his own tack in dealing with the lectern. It would be jumping to conclusions if we took the particularity of Umwelt as a straightforward prefiguration of völkisch exceptionalism. It can as well be taken as an invitation to choose a different path whose direction is somewhat enigmatically indicated by Heidegger himself: “I still assert that universally valid propositions are possible.” This means: Even if there is a plurality of worlds all those persons, the farmer, the student, and the Negro, have something in common: worldliness, that is, a way of dealing with a thing not as a “bare something,” but as a thing with a “meaningful character” (ibid., 61). The concrete meanings may differ, but the formal procedure of attributing meanings is shared by all humans. This generous claim is not Heidegger’s last word. He takes two further steps: a critical and an affirmative one. The critical step is linked to his abovementioned campaign against the worldless subject. As the subject is said to retreat from linguistic and pragmatic entanglements and to establish a neutralized, objectifying perspective, it is blamed for destroying the primordial Umwelt, the world or worlds where human beings find themselves in. To put it bluntly: this subject acts in an antihuman manner. This claim is debatable, yet anything but proto-totalitarian. Heidegger’s critical step is followed by an affirmative move. He looks for a historical actor fighting the subject that is said to neglect, bracket, and eventually destroy “Being-in-the-world.” He finds this actor in the Nazi movement and chooses the Germans for a world-historical, world-saving task. This reevaluation goes hand in hand with the devaluation of others. In 1934, Heidegger states that “history happens” when “an aircraft . . . takes the Führer from Munich to Mussolini in Venice”—and that “Negroes . . . have no history” (Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, 69, 71). The early admission of a plurality of worlds is limited or even revoked. Worldliness becomes a singular privilege. How does the “worldlessness” ascribed to the Jews in 1938 connect to Heidegger’s earlier discussion of worldlessness? Faye and others fall for the temptation to mainly focus on the distinction between “world-forming” humans, “poor in world” animals, and “worldless” stones from 1929/1930. This scheme is regarded as a preparatory step for later spurning the Jews as even less worthy than animals.21 Accordingly, the worldless stone serves as a role model for the reduction of human beings to physical material in



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the concentration camps. Alas, this juxtaposition distracts from the specific viciousness of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism in 1940. In this period he does not see the Jews as victims, but as perpetrators and agile “actors.”22 This is not what you expect from a stone. Those who fall for the tempting parallel between worldless stone and worldless Jew pick, as it were, the wrong kind of “worldlessness” from the early Heidegger’s repertory. If at all, the worldless Jews are followers of the worldless subject willfully denouncing and discarding “access” to an environing world. This is a crude, cruel move from description to denotation in the sense outlined in the first section of this chapter. Does this move already take place in Being and Time where wordlessness officially applies to Descartes’ subject? If this were the case, Heidegger did not (only) mean Descartes when talking about him. Descartes would just serve as a whipping boy for the absent others, namely, for the unnamable Jews. It would even mean that all those philosophers aligned in Heidegger’s history of Western metaphysics take the stage as dispositional or surrogate Jews. This allegation is based on a complete mismatch between explicit description and implicit denotation. It would be beside the point to call Heidegger’s “destruction” of metaphysics a cover-up story. His texts are absorbed by coming to grips with a tradition that does not just serve as a foreground for an (anti-Semitic) act in the back. Even if one generously assumed for the sake of the argument that Heidegger also alludes to the Jews when talking about the worldless subject in Being and Time, this would only mean that they belong to a large crowd of misdirected subjectivists. Anti-Semitism would lose its discriminatory edge. To sum up: Heidegger’s critique of the worldless subject is a perfect example for what I call unassertive anti-Semitism. His anti-Semitic inclinations do not make it to the level of assertions. The claim that Heidegger forms an invisible community with Uexküll, Clauß, and others in order to indirectly promote a racist conception of Umwelt is ill-founded. He talks about Descartes, he chooses his battles, and these battles are to be taken seriously by those who engage with Heidegger’s reading of modern rationalism and discuss its shortcomings and merits.23 The fact that his conception later evolves to a campaign against the worldless Jews and their “machinations” (GA 96: 56, 133, 243) does not devaluate Being and Time altogether. Yet it urges us to be on high alert when analyzing this work and the early writings. Groundlessness.24 The framing of “groundlessness” (Bodenlosigkeit) in Heidegger’s writings very much resembles the one of “worldlessness.” It is also attributed to the Jews in the Black Notebooks (see above), and it also appears in the early writings, for instance in relation to Hegel and, again, to Descartes (Being and Time, 497; GA 28: 208). In order to cover all bases it should be added that the epithet bodenlos in the Black Notebooks does not

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exclusively single out the Jews. Heidegger also complains about the “groundless hustle” (bodenlose Treiben) of narrow-minded Nazi supporters (GA 94: 223). But what about the use of bodenlos in his early writings? It is safe to say that this term is more conducive to anti-Semitic undertones than “worldless,” as it could connect to Blut und Boden. In the following, I will again begin with discussing the strategy of attributing a clear-cut anti-Semitic agenda to the early Heidegger before offering an alternative reading. As mentioned previously, Emmanuel Faye regards Bodenlosigkeit as instrumental for Heidegger’s anti-Semitic agenda. His translation of this term as “absence of the soil” has been challenged by Thomas Sheehan. He states that “groundlessness” in fact means the “unfoundedness of a philosophical position.”25 This issue is obviously crucial for the association between Bodenlosigkeit and Blut und Boden. Even though Faye’s translation is tendentious indeed, Sheehan’s suggestion strikes me as going too far. Heidegger frequently uses this term in the sense identified by Sheehan, but he also juxtaposes Bodenlosigkeit and Bodenständigkeit (Being and Time, 212). (The term Bodenständigkeit means something like “being down-to-earth.”) This opposition would not make any sense if the former meant unfoundedness only, which would require something like well-foundedness as its opposite. It could be said that, based on those mixed findings, Faye’s position is shaken, not shattered. In any case, we are still far away from any specific allusion to the Jews. Like in the case of worldlessness, Faye’s argument does not rest on a reference to a firm auctorial intention only but provides additional contextual evidence for anti-Semitic associations. He seeks to drive his point home by tracing Heidegger’s use of Bodenlosigkeit and Bodenständigkeit back to a supposedly poisoned source: Paul Yorck von Wartenburg’s letters to Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger, an avid reader of these letters, does not find the term Bodenständigkeit in them—as Faye erroneously states26—but he does find Bodenlosigkeit. Yorck, who was an anti-Semite, talks about the Jews lacking the “feeling for psychic and physical soil [Boden]” in a letter quoted by Faye (but not by Heidegger!).27 In Being and Time, Heidegger refers to two other passages from Yorck that are pertinent for Bodenlosigkeit. The first passage does not—as Faye insinuates28—refer to the Jews, nor does it—as Sheehan suggests29—criticize the aestheticized relativism of “certain historians.” Here Yorck talks about the “groundlessness” of “scientists” and alludes to a heated debate about Darwinism at the Berlin Academy of Sciences (ibid., 452).30 Bodenlosigkeit in this particular context means the attempt to scientifically analyze biological and historical genealogies and to escape from the “experience,” “attitude,” and “understanding” of life.31 This argument against objectivization is further developed in a second passage where Yorck characterizes philosophy as a “manifestation of life, and not as the coughing



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up of a baseless [bodenlosen] kind of thinking.” “Scientific-technological progress” is criticized for establishing the regime of “groundless ratio” (ibid., 454).32 According to Yorck, this one-sided account of human life inevitably prompts the outbreak of a suppressed “other,” that is, “animalism.”33 (These astounding considerations anticipate Heidegger’s later critique of the dualist animal rationale and Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment. For Heidegger’s analysis of modernity, see Gregory Fried’s contribution to this volume.) Yorck uses the term Bodenlosigkeit for various purposes and in different contexts. There is no indication for the fact that there is some kind of secret ranking and that the guiding principle behind all its uses is anti-Semitism. Faye’s sensationalist claim that Heidegger, when adopting this term, seeks to convey an anti-Semitic message is unfounded. Heidegger uses bodenlos in at least as many different contexts as Yorck. Beside the already mentioned references to Descartes and Hegel there is also a striking passage from Heidegger’s later essay on The Origin of the Work of Art where he claims that “the rootlessness [Bodenlosigkeit] of Western thought begins” with the translation and transformation of Greek philosophical concepts into Latin. Here the culprit is “Roman thought” (Poetry, Language, Thought, 23). This flagrant deviation from the anti-Semitic constriction of bodenlos eventually leads to a result resembling the one of the discussion of worldlessness: Heidegger’s framing of groundlessness is open to anti-Semitic associations, but it does not promote them by itself. He takes issue with a wide range of positions, among them rationalism, idealism, and Roman thought. Before turning from the early Heidegger to Jewish thought, I want to briefly comment on the question of anti-Semitism in a more general vein. Even if Bodenlosigkeit, Weltlosigkeit, and other suspicious terms used by Heidegger are unspecific when it comes to their targets, it could still be true that they resonate with a widespread mindset marked by a prejudice against Jews. I already hinted at this possibility in my concluding comments on the topic of worldlessness. This does not mean that Heidegger pursues a National Socialist agenda in the 1920s, but it suggests that he belongs to a large group of thinkers who more or less tacitly—unassertively!—approve of the marginalization and stigmatization of “Jewish” attitudes. To put it bluntly: It would be surprising if Heidegger did not belong to this group. One of the depressing findings from David Nirenberg’s impressive book Anti-Judaism is the fact that such attitudes are virtually omnipresent in Western societies. According to Nirenberg, many modern thinkers, poets, and activists choose the “Jew” as an enemy or give their enemies a Jewish face. They practice what I myself would call the sublimation or displacement of anti-Semitism.34 This means that these thinkers take part in a game which eventually leads to an uncanny coupling between the Jews and

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certain—supposedly “Jewish”—negative features. Just to give a blunt—and timely—example for this procedure: It is a well-known fact that greediness is used as an anti-Semitic cliché—and it is also true that unbridled capitalism is criticized for fueling such greediness. Is such a critique guilty of implicit anti-Semitism or not? My point is that there is no easy answer to this question. Sometimes the critique of greed retains anti-Semitic associations (like in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs or in Zola’s late novels—in spite of his support of Dreyfus), sometimes it doesn’t (like, hopefully, in the slogan “Greed Kills” popularized by Occupy Wall Street). When a discourse is stripped off of direct denotations, when, for example, people talk about greed without any reference to Jewry, it is hard to tell whether they play their game with an anti-Semitic card up their sleeves or not. Their overall behavior and its context need to be scrutinized in order to settle this question. Research on the most recent wave of anti-Semitism is very much concerned with this problem. It has uncovered that right-wing extremists use typical anti-Semitic clichés while carefully cleansing them of any direct reference to Jewry. Examples discussed in current research are the replacement of international Jewry of finance (Finanzjudentum) by international finance capitalism or the talk about “East Coast bankers” (implying that they are Jewish).35 It is as important to take these observations seriously, as it is admissible and necessary to still be able to talk about finance capitalism and the like without being suspicious of anti-Semitism. As certain patterns used in the political and theoretical discourse can or cannot entail side blows against the Jews, it becomes a major challenge to sort out these things and to separate the good and the ugly. Here is an example that leads back to Heidegger one more time—but not to him alone. In “Why Poets?” from 1946, Heidegger states: “The usual life of today’s man is the ordinariness of self-assertion in the defenseless market of exchangers” (Off the Beaten Track, 236). Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt claims—rightly so, I think—that Heidegger’s talk about Wechsler appeals to an anti-Semitic cliché very much present to most of his readers in post-war Germany.36 Yet such connotations and associations are tricky and disturbing. Here is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his first Inaugural Address as president of the United States on March 4, 1933: “The unscrupulous money changers . . . know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from the high seats in the temple of our civilizations. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”37 What do we make of those money changers roaming through Heidegger’s and Roosevelt’s texts? It cannot be denied that Roosevelt offensively alludes



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to a biblical scene which has played a paramount role in the history of antiSemitism: the scene when Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. We learn from current historical research that Roosevelt himself had a pretty straight record of condemning anti-Semitism from very early on.38 Yet we also learn from this research that an “omnipresent normative anti-Semitism” existed in the United States of this period.39 We do not really know what Roosevelt had on his mind when talking about the money changers. But even if he himself did not mean to be antiSemitic a large part of the public probably felt encouraged to indulge in their anti-Semitic views. Thus Roosevelt’s phrase is a case in point when it comes to drawing an important lesson from Goldschmidt’s argument mentioned previously: A statement can contain anti-Semitic implications which are to be unfolded or “ex-plicated” by its readers or listeners. The link between meanings and auctorial intentions is weak. This finding also applies to Heidegger’s unassertive anti-Semitism. He was pleasing an anti-Semitic crowd when talking about groundlessness. Yet the various contexts in which the early Heidegger uses this term do not yield any strong evidence for the fact that he offensively associated such groundlessness with Jewry. GROUNDLESSNESS IN JEWISH THOUGHT It is possible to unleash concepts and to relieve them from derogatory associations and racist denigrations. Worldlessness and groundlessness can be discussed in an open-minded, unprejudiced way. This task seems to be particularly tempting to Jewish thinkers as they take it as an opportunity for reappropriating and redirecting a discourse which has been used for labeling them from without. They feel the need to grapple with a heteronomous image of themselves which makes use of ascriptions like worldlessness or groundlessness. This particular setting already indicates how the term “Jewish thought” is used in this concluding section. It is obviously not defined by an intellectual, religious, or historical tradition but based on a social logic of separation and segregation. The group definition of “Jewish” thinkers as used in this section has come into being due to anti-Semitic stigmatization. Working with this definition is part of a horrific heritage. The first person who comes to mind when it comes to the task of reappropriating and revising worldlessness is Hannah Arendt. She makes use of this term in extremely different contexts: In her early book on Rahel Varnhagen and in The Human Condition she gives a critical account of worldless or “unworldly” love; in the latter book she also takes issue with Christian “worldlessness.”40 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, “worldlessness” is used for describing the marginalized and debased situation of the Jews persecuted

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by the Nazis.41 In an eerie manner, her considerations on worldlessness and the world are still very much indebted to Heideggerian premises. For lack of space, I cannot further discuss the problem of worldlessness in Arendt and beyond. This concluding section is confined to the problem of groundlessness. Many thinkers take up this issue. Some of them use groundlessness in a neutral way, that is, without any reference to Jewry, and regard it as a severe problem emerging in modern societies in general. Others, even more interestingly, turn the tables and take groundlessness as an asset or achievement in its own right. I will briefly mention two representatives of the first group and then turn to the second. (Hans Jonas, who belongs to the first group, will not be discussed here. For a more general reflection on “ground” and “territory,” see Sergey Dolgopolski’s and Michael Fagenblat’s chapters.) Those who analyze modern civilization and its discontents often highlight its disruptive powers which they literally find unsettling. In this sense, groundlessness equals the experience of a loss of place. In his essay “Those Who Wait” from 1922, Siegfried Kracauer describes the widespread phenomenon that “people lack ties and firm ground [Haft und Grund].” “Their spirit/ intellect drifts along without direction, at home everywhere and nowhere.” Kracauer takes Georg Simmel as a representative for modern “relativism, which, in its search for a solid foundation, ultimately came upon groundless and rootless life.” He concludes his essay by hinting at the possibility that “anyone who dwells as cut off from the absolute as does the person in empty space” may “move out of the atomized unreal world of shapeless powers and figures devoid of meaning and into the world of reality and the domains it encompasses. . . . He may . . . discover one or another of the ties within that reality”—a reality “neither . . . gauged by theoretical-conceptual means nor explained as merely the fruit of subjective arbitrariness.”42 (Kracauer, one of the most influential editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung, left Germany in 1933.) At the Davos conference in 1929, which serves as the stage for the famous encounter between Cassirer and Heidegger, Kurt Riezler gives a talk “On Bondage and Freedom of Contemporary Man.” He describes modern society as a “mechanism,” a “soulless apparatus” which deranges our “environment” (Umwelt) and gives rise to an “intellect” marked by a “painful, namely uprooted [entwurzelt] self-complacency.” Riezler still hopes that the “collapse of all traditional bonds, values and attitudes” will not bear negative results only, but release an energy fit for building a new world.43 (Riezler, administrative head of the University of Frankfurt and a wanderer between two worlds—Heidegger’s Freiburg and the Frankfurt School—was married to a Jew, the daughter of the painter Max Liebermann, went in exile in 1938 and later became professor at the New School for Social Research.44) I already alluded to the fact that groundlessness does not necessarily carry negative connotations. The fact that it can be salvaged and valorized in a new



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way comes to the fore when we turn to another—extremely heterogeneous— group of thinkers partly connected to Heidegger: Robert Ezra Park, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas, and Vilém Flusser. (Park, a non-Jew, is on this list not just because of his candid appraisal of the Jews, but also because it would be falling for disturbing dichotomies if such a thing as a compact body of “Jewish” thought were taken as given; see discussion earlier.) Robert Ezra Park, founder of the Chicago School of sociology, writes a seminal article in 1928 titled “Migration and the Marginal Man.” He states: “The movement and migration of peoples, the expansion of trade and commerce, and particularly the growth, in modern times, of these vast meltingpots of races and cultures, the metropolitan cities, has loosened local bonds, destroyed the cultures of tribe and folk, and substituted for the local loyalties the freedom of the cities.” This transformation gives rise to a new personality type: “The emancipated individual invariably becomes in a certain sense and to a certain degree a cosmopolitan. He learns to look upon the world in which he was born and bred with something of the detachment of a stranger.” Park frequently refers to Georg Simmel’s essay “The Stranger” and claims that this figure is impersonated by the “emancipated Jew” who “was, and is, historically and typically the marginal man, the first cosmopolite and citizen of the world.” Yet Park emphasizes that this marginality is by no means limited to Jews. The experience of feeling “unsettled” attributed to the marginal man is familiar to anybody who goes through “periods of transition” and unrest. These periods can be linked to migration in the classical sense, but also to some kind of internal migration or transformation. “It is in the mind of the marginal man—where the changes and fusions of culture are going on—that we can best study the processes of civilization and of progress.”45 Park by no means belittles the painful experience of having no place in society, but he embraces internal and external unsettledness as a signature feature of modern societies.46 The ups and downs of such groundlessness are still very much discussed in more recent debates on communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. Ludwig Wittgenstein rarely reflects on his Jewish descent, which has not played much of a role during his upbringing either. At one of these rare occasions, in 1931, he toys with the idea that his particular philosophical style is an example for “Jewish reproductive thinking.” In this instance of selfhate, he employs the cliché of a parasitic existence suffering from a lack of self-reliance. This self-description is bound to groundlessness: In the same year, Wittgenstein notes that “the Jew must. . . ‘make nothing his business’ ” hereby quoting Goethe’s line “Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.”47 He sees himself “on a swaying raft rather than on solid ground”48 and “as an alien in the world.”49 In this period marked by a painful philosophical crisis and by his exile in Cambridge (self-chosen until the annexation of Austria), Wittgenstein resembles Park’s marginal man, except for the fact that his unsettledness

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is still darkened by nostalgia. With the following remark, he would also fit in Kracauer’s panorama of figures weary of relativism: “Culture is like a great organization which assigns to each of its members his place, at which he can work in the spirit of the whole. . . . In a time without culture, however, forces are fragmented and the strength of the individual is wasted through the overcoming of opposing forces & frictional resistances.”50 The late Wittgenstein manages to shake off his nostalgia. In the theory of language-games and lifeforms he questions the very idea of a firm ground. Shortly before his death, in On Certainty, he states: “I have arrived at the rock bottom [Boden] of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.”51 This remarkable observation stands for a subversion of the logic of ground and building or for a therapy against the futile longing for a ground. Wittgenstein does not give up the idea of a ground—of deep convictions, unshakable premises, and so on—but he makes clear that this ground obtains stability from the reiteration of practices, from the processual reconfirmation of successful interlocutions and interactions: “Only in the stream of thoughts and life do words have meaning.”52 “You must bear in mind that the language-game is not based on grounds.”53 The metaphor of the stream is further developed in On Certainty, where Wittgenstein talks about the relation between the “movement of the waters” and the “river-bed” and hints at the fact that the latter is actually created by the former.54 It could be argued that Heidegger’s comments on Hölderlin’s Wanderer embrace an openness of this kind, but I still feel that his reading of Hölderlin is prone to privilege an “origin.” (On Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, see Lapidot’s and Fagenblat’s contributions to this volume.) Wittgenstein’s reliance on fragile, moveable language-games qualifies him as a true counter-figure to Heidegger. Paul Celan receives the Literature Prize of the City of Bremen in 1958, ten years before his sad encounter with Heidegger, which will not be discussed here.55 Celan’s speech in Bremen56 begins with a scene of remembrance, a “topographical sketch” reimagining the “landscape” of his childhood. The loss of this landscape is the loss of a home or, if you will, a ground. The one thing still “reachable, close and secure amid all losses” is—“language.” In “this language,” that is, in the language abused by the Germans for “murderous speech,” Celan still seeks to “orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.” He describes his poems as part of a “dialogue,” a gesture directed at others or “a letter in a bottle.” The “movement” hints at a ground of a different kind: The “letter in a bottle” may one day reach a “shoreline [Land],” perhaps even a “shoreline of the heart [Herzland]” where it finds and meets a humane human. This land does not depend on the fact that it offers a firm ground, but on the fact that it is a place welcoming the poem and its author. In the Bremen speech, Celan calls the



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poet “unsheltered” or, literally speaking, tent-less (zeltlos). He does not have a house or a tent, nor is he canopied by the sky. This poet is “headed . . .  toward something open,” in an uncanny or “terrifying way [auf das unheimlichste] . . . racked by reality and in search of it.” Two years later, in his famous speech The Meridian, Celan describes a similar setting: “Perhaps poetry . . . moves with the oblivious self into the uncanny and strange to free itself. Though where? in which place? how? as what?” The poem “searches” for a “place,” it is “en route.” Its very existence depends on the other, the “you” who is “far out” there and bears the promise of “a kind of homecoming.”57 Again, this homecoming is understood as an encounter, not as settling down. Groundlessness and also worldlessness are taken as given or—as I daresay—as a gift. This idea is condensed in one of the most beautiful lines from Celan’s poetry: “Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen.”—“The world is gone, I must carry you.”58 Emmanuel Levinas offers a late variation of his year-long, incisive critique of Heidegger’s philosophy in the essay “No Identity” from 1970. Like Park’s “marginal man,” like Wittgenstein who is “an alien in the world,” like Celan who moves “into the uncanny and strange” (see discussion earlier), Levinas attributes the lack of a firm ground to the experience of strangeness or estrangement and quotes, for this purpose, from Psalm 119: “I am a stranger on the earth.”59 (Georg Trakl’s “Something strange is the soul on the earth” seems to be inspired by this phrase; see discussion here.) Interestingly, Levinas still sides with his former teacher’s critique of the Cartesian subject that does not provide a firm ground and thus remains worldless. But he distances himself from Heidegger’s attempt to regain such ground. The first step taken jointly with Heidegger is described in the form of a question: “Are not we Westerners . . . foreigners in the world, but in a way that owes nothing to the certainty of the cogito, which, since Descartes, is said to express the being of entities?” (See Eveline Goodman-Thau’s contribution to this volume.) The second step turning away from Heidegger comes right after that: “The end of metaphysics does not succeed in dissipating this foreignness to the world.” Levinas does not see any remedy in Heidegger’s “return to a fatherland on the earth.”60 Instead he insists on strangeness and even “increase[s]” the experience of not being “seated in the world,” of the “foreignness to every site.” This experience is the basis for being “closer to the others,” for being approachable to their demands and appeals.61 In a setting totally different from Wittgenstein, Levinas still makes a similar point by replacing the search for a ground by the reliance on our being in common with or related to others. (For a complementary account of Levinas’ situated philosophy, see the concluding section of Donatella di Cesare’s contribution to this volume.) Vilém Flusser, the media theorist and philosopher, publishes his book Bodenlos, an autobiography, in 1992. In his introduction, he hints at the fact

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that “groundless” literally means the same as “absurd.” It is linked to “meaningless” in the sense that it lacks a “reasonable foundation.” (This point also comes up in the controversy between Faye and Sheehan on the translation of Heidegger’s Bodenlosigkeit; see the section titled “On the Proving Ground of Anti-Semitism.”) Flusser says: “The experience of groundlessness is familiar to everybody. . . . But there are human beings for whom groundlessness is a situation in which they find themselves objectively.”62 Here Flusser obviously hints at the experience of exile. He gives a moving account of his childhood in Prague, the loss of relatives and friends who were killed in the gas chambers, the flight to Brazil, and so on. He then wonders whether the “freedom of the migrant” has forced him to embrace the freedom of a “ ‘spirit’ wavering above all places”—a freedom frequently attacked by anti-Semitic propaganda. In his “turnaround from expulsion to freedom” Flusser then takes a step beyond “solipsistic” unboundedness and pleas for a more ambitious and comprehensive notion of freedom that includes the creation of new bonds. In the light of this new freedom, the groundedness of his childhood loses its nostalgic charm: I was thrown into my first homeland by birth without being asked for my consent. The bonds linking me to other people back then were, to a large extent, forced upon me. In my newly gained freedom, it is me myself who creates bonds to others, in collaboration with them. . . . The migrant becomes free not by repudiating his relation to his lost homeland but by sublating it.63

In a first step, Flusser seems to follow Park’s praise of the “marginal man’s” mobility. In a second step, he seeks to overcome unsettledness and takes on the task of recreating a home or of breaking new ground. This task includes the affirmation of “habits,” “codes,” and so on, without granting them “sacrosanct” authority. (This claim is very much in line with Wittgenstein’s observations on the reliability and changeability of life-forms.) According to Flusser, the immigrant has a perturbing effect on his new fellow men, as they are confronted with the view that their own way of life is open to “change” as well.64 As Flusser insists on the necessity of a home, he does not draw a line from the migrant to the cosmopolitan “citizen of the world” (like Park does). In his view, freedom still comes with the need for locality or “dwelling”—a dwelling open to the experience of fragility and uncommonness.65 (Flusser is obviously inspired by—and deviates from—Heidegger’s late considerations on “dwelling.”66) Park, Wittgenstein, Celan, Levinas, and Flusser turn the necessity of marginalization, exile, and uprootedness into a virtue: the virtue of being unbound and searching for a newly built realm of reliability. This virtue or, to use a less moralistic vocabulary, this accomplishment is dismissed by Heidegger. He distorts the experience of strangeness and unboundedness by taking it as a mere preparatory step unmistakably leading to a firm ground.



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Heidegger has no access to conceiving land as landing, as the source of a welcoming gesture. Heidegger distorts strangeness while still obstinately exposing himself to this experience. Eventually, strangeness remains alien to him even when it is right in front of him—like in Georg Trakl’s poem “Springtime of the Soul”: “Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden.”—“Something strange is the soul on the earth.”67 NOTES  1 Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Caracnet, 1986), 54.   2 There is no need for quoting these meanwhile notorious passages one more time; the earliest is from a letter to his fiancée from October 18, 1916; cf. Gertrud Heidegger, ed., “Mein liebes Seelchen!” Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride, 1915–1970 (Munich: DVA, 2005), 51.   3 Dieter Thomä, “Wie antisemitisch ist Heidegger? Über die Schwarzen Hefte und die gegenwärtige Lage der Heidegger-Kritik,” in Martin Heideggers “Schwarze Hefte”: Eine philosophisch-politische Debatte, ed. Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 211–33; ibid., “The Imperative Mode of Heidegger’s Thought, National Socialism, and Anti-Semitism,” in A Dialogue About Heidegger’s Politics, ed. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, in preparation).  4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. R. R. Sullivan (Cambridge [MA]: MIT Press, 1985), 12–15. The quote is from a letter to Jaspers on July 14, 1923; Walter Biemel and Hans Saner, ed., The Heidegger-JaspersCorrespondence 1920–1963 (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2003), 46.   5 Emmanuel Faye, “La ‘vision du monde’ antisémite de Heidegger à l’ombre de ses Cahiers noirs,” in Heidegger: le sol, la communauté, la race, ed. Emmanuel Faye (Paris: Beauchesne, 2014), 310–11.  6 Being and Time citations are to the John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). For other comments on the “worldless subject” cf. 236, 363, 417, 440.  7 Cf. The History of the Concept of Time, 239: “Dasein is far from being first only a worldless subject and an ‘interior’ to which the world is added.”  8 Cf. The History of the Concept of Time, 118–19, 183.   9 Emmanuel Faye, “La ‘vision du monde’ antisémite de Heidegger,” 312, 319. 10 Faye, “Kategorien oder Existenzialien: Von der Metaphysik zur Metapolitik,” in Martin Heideggers “Schwarze Hefte”: Eine philosophisch-politische Debatte, ed. Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 120. 11 Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 14. 12 Martin Heidegger and Karl Löwith, Briefwechsel 1919–1973, ed. Alfred Denker (Freiburg: Alber, 2017), 137–38.

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13 Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Justus Springer, 1909). 14 For the discussion of milieu and Umwelt cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 182–83 (the English translation renders both Milieu and Umwelt as “environment”); for the critique of Comte’s concept of milieu cf. Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. I: Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 156. 15 Cf. Faye, Heidegger, 14. 16 On Uexküll cf. Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin/Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1928), 245–61. Cassirer had a working relationship with Uexküll in his Hamburg years and frequently referred to his writings. In spite of Uexküll’s ideological bias, his “ingenious and original scheme” plays a prominent role in a book by Cassirer first published in 1944; Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 41. Cassirer already refers to Uexküll in his Davos lecture from 1929; cf. Ernst Cassirer, Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 17: Davoser Vorträge. Vorträge über Cohen, ed. Jörn Bohr and Klaus Christian Köhnke (Hamburg: Meiner, 2014), 16–21. Krois assumes that Heidegger was actually inspired by Cassirer to turn to Uexküll, as the lecture-course from 1929/1930, where Uexküll is mentioned for the very first time, was given after their meeting in Davos; cf. John Michael Krois, “Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Biology,” in Bildkörper und Körperschema: Schriften zur Verkörperungstheorie ikonischer Formen, ed. Horst Bredekamp and Marion Lauschke (Berlin: Akademie, 2011), 115–30, here 116–17. The Heidegger-Cassirer connection is certainly important, but it is likely that Heidegger learnt about Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt earlier. A prominent source close to Heidegger is a book by Scheler first published in 1913/1916; cf. Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, ed. Maria Scheler (Bern: Francke, 1954), 174–75. 17 This argument is made by Livia Profeti in “Heideggers Daseinsontologie und die Zerstörung der Gleichheit,” in Martin Heideggers “Schwarze Hefte.” Eine philosophisch-politische Debatte, ed. Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 162. 18 John Godfrey Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, ed. T. Churchill (London: Johnson, 1800), 224: “Though it has been for centuries the object of united Europe, to erect herself into a despot, compelling all the nations of the Earth to be happy in her way, this happiness-dispensing deity is yet far from having obtained her end. . . . Ye men of all the quarters of the Globe, who have perished in the lapse of ages, ye have not lived and enriched the Earth with your ashes, that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European civilization: is not a proud thought of this kind treason against the majesty of Nature?” I am aware of the fact that Herder was praised as a forefather by National Socialists, but the above quotation does not lend a hand to this reception. 19 Cf., for example, Nelson Goodman, Ways of World-Making (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978).



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20 Cf., for example, Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 295–310. 21 Faye, “La ‘vision du monde’ antisémite de Heidegger,” 311–12. 22 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Banality of Heidegger, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 18–21. 23 “Heidegger’s discussions of subjectivity and the Faustian aspirations of modernity are not utterly without merit”; Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” Philosophy Today 55 (2011): 219–52, here 234. 24 In the section on “groundlessness,” I take the liberty to partly use material from another paper; cf. Thomä, “The imperative mode of Heidegger’s thought, National Socialism, and Anti-Semitism.” 25 Thomas Sheehan, “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy?” Philosophy Today 59 (2015): 383. 26 Faye, “From Polemos to the Extermination of the Enemy: Response to the Open Letter of Gregory Fried,” Philosophy Today 55 (2011): 257, 261. Bodenständigkeit comes up in other writings by Yorck first published in 1956. As Farin has shown in his critique of Charles Bambach’s interpretation, these writings do not develop a straightforward racist ideology either; cf. Ingo Farin, “Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg,” http://www.plato.stanford.edu/entries/yorck, note 8, accessed on 1/24/2017. 27 Wilhelm Dilthey and Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, Briefwechsel, ed. Sigrid von der Schulenburg (Halle: Niemeyer, 1923), 254; cf. Faye, Heidegger, 12. 28 Faye, “La ‘vision du monde’ antisémite de Heidegger,” 310. Sheehan, “Emmanuel Faye,” 385. Yorck does refer to such historians—like 29  Ranke—at other occasions, but not in the passage on Bodenlosigkeit; cf. Dilthey and Yorck, Briefwechsel, 59–60, 143. 30 Dilthey and Yorck, Briefwechsel, 39. 31 Dilthey and Yorck, Briefwechsel, 39, 128. The debate on Darwinism in 1883– 1884 was triggered by Emil du Bois-Reymond, “Darwin und Kopernikus,” Reden. Zweite Folge (Leipzig: Veith & Comp., 1887), 496–502. 32 Dilthey and Yorck, Briefwechsel, 250. 33 Dilthey and Yorck, Briefwechsel, 66, 128. 34 Nirenberg himself talks about a “powerful confusion of the figural and the real” and the “resonance between the critical disciplines of modernity and the anti-Semitic ideologies of the same era,” David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking (New York: Norton, 2013), 437, 455, cf. 465–66. A case in point that receives particular scrutiny from Nirenberg—and rightly so—is Karl Marx’s essay on “The Jewish Question.” See Peter Trawny’s contribution to this volume. 35 Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz, Die Sprache der Judenfeindschaft im 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 37, 109–10. 36 Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, “Heidegger et la langue allemande III: Le problème de la technique et le vocabulaire de la philosophie,” Lendemains 119–20 (2005): 264. Cf. Faye, “La ‘vision du monde’ antisémite de Heidegger,” 311. 37 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “First Inaugural Address,” in The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed. John Gabriel Hunt (New York and Avenal: Gramercy, 1995), 31.

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38 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Did FDR Betray the Jews? Or Did He Do More Than Anyone to Save Them?” in FDR and the Holocaust, ed. Verne W. Newton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 160. Some scholars make the—disputed—claim that the belated reaction to the incoming information on the holocaust had to do with anti-Semitic attitudes on the side of the administration or Roosevelt himself. Cf. Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 95; David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 (New York: New Press, 1984), 312. 39 Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 6. Cf. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 457–58. 40 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 113, cf. 88; id., The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 242, 54. Arendt’s account of Christian “worldlessness” is not only indebted to Heidegger, it seems to directly refer to Max Weber’s description of religious “acosmism” in general and the “acosmic love” of Christian brotherliness in particular; Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 330–40. 41 In the English version of the book on Totalitarianism Arendt talks about a totalitarian “threat” to “our political life,” whereas the corresponding German version uses the more philosophical term Weltlosigkeit; cf. Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totalitärer Herrschaft (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1986), 470; id., The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 302; cf. 477: “Self and world . . . are lost at the same time.” Cf. Dieter Thomä, “Passion Lost, Passion Regained: How Arendt’s anthropology intersects with Adorno’s theory of the subject,” in Arendt and Adorno. Political and Philosophical Investigations, ed. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012), 107–8. 42 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 131–32, 139–40. 43 Kurt Riezler, Über Gebundenheit und Freiheit des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Bonn: Cohen, 1929), 12, 16. In the translation of Riezler’s title, I follow Peter E. Gordon, The Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 96. 44 It goes without saying that the non-Nazi discourse on groundlessness is not a Jewish domain only. Here are some additional examples. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga criticized bodenlosen Kosmopolitismus in a lecture given in German; Huizinga, “Die Mittlerstellung der Niederlande zwischen West- und Mitteleuropa,” Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Kurt Köster (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1954), 355. (Shortly after this lecture he caused a tumult by sharply criticizing a Nazi professor at a conference in 1933. Huizinga opposed anti-Semitism and was persecuted by the Nazis during occupation.) The socialist theologian Paul Tillich wrote in 1930: “Being held [Getragenheit] ist primordial. Only on this ground [Boden]



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the human being in its endangeredness and fatality is at all possible.” Tillich, Religiöse Selbstverwirklichung (Berlin: Furche, 1930), 193. (Tillich went in exile directly after Hitler seized power.) The theologian Ernst Troeltsch stated in 1918: “If at all a new beginning takes place based on historical cultivation [Bildung], it has to primarily rely on our own [German] history. This history alone makes us gain and establish the groundedness [Bodenständigkeit] that we are longing for.” Ernst Troeltsch, Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1925), 206. (Troeltsch was one of the few renowned professors adamantly defending the young German republic after the First World War. The numerous political articles published by Troeltsch from 1918 until his untimely death in 1923 are still a good read.) 45 Robert Ezra Park, “Migration and the Marginal Man,” American Journal of Sociology 33 (1928): 888–90; 892–93; 887. 46 For an extensive discussion of the “marginal man,” cf. Dieter Thomä, Troublemakers: A Philosophy of “Puer robustus” (London: Polity, forthcoming). 47 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 16. 48 Wittgenstein, Public and Private Occasions, ed. James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 101. 49 Quoted from an as yet unpublished diary in Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1990), 516. 50 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 9. 51 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 33E (§ 248). 52 Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 31E (§ 173). 53 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 73E (§ 559). 54 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 15E (§§ 97–99). 55 Cf. Denis Thouard, Pourquoi ce poète? Le Celan des philosophes (Paris: Seuil, 2016), 19–36; James K. Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 56 The following quotations are from Paul Celan, Collected Prose, 33–35. 57 Celan, Collected Prose, 44, 49–50. 58 Michael Hamburger, ed., Poems of Paul Celan (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 267. A more comprehensive account of Jewish thinkers addressing groundlessness and worldlessness would need to include Jacques Derrida who famously referred to this line by Celan; cf. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 141, 149, 158–61. 59 Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 148. 60 Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 148. 61 Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, 149–50. 62 Vilém Flusser, Bodenlos: Eine philosophische Autobiographie (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999), 9, 11.

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63 Flusser, Bodenlos, 252–53. 64 Flusser, Bodenlos, 253–54. 65 Flusser, Bodenlos, 260–61. 66 Flusser was very much interested in Heidegger’s philosophy. He found it partly “masterful” but thought that “there was something wrong” with it; Flusser, Bodenlos, 124. 67 When commenting on Trakl’s poem, Heidegger immediately turns from strangeness to the willingness of “following the call” and finding “the way into its own [in sein Eigenes].” Cf. On the Way to Language, 161, 163.

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Heidegger’s Judenfrage Babette Babich

Heidegger contended that he sought to raise one question, the so-called Seinsfrage, but in recent years, scholars challenge this monotone claim. Some scholars contend that Heidegger was more concerned with “meaning” (Tom Sheehan) and others suggest that Heidegger was absorbed with the politics of fascism and in this context, the question that preoccupied Heidegger was the Jews.1 Heidegger would thus be more concerned with the Judenfrage than the Seinsfrage, not only given the studies of Victor Farias and Emmanuel Faye but also Peter Trawny’s careful characterization of Heidegger’s seinsgeschichtlicher Anti-Semitismus.2 Here, and increasingly, critical reflection challenges Heidegger’s articulation of his own program to raise questions and counterpoints. It has long been observed that Heidegger leaves out key aspects of the philosophic tradition in his attention to his one question. Thus, rather exactly in the way that Heidegger is singularly blind, as most Aristotelians are, to women and the quickening of air, as well as to life of animals (although not utterly blind, as most Aristotelians are not, to the life of plants), a further scotosis, antiSemitism for some readers, anti-Judaism for others, seems clear in the wake of the Black Notebooks scandal. Heidegger with all his emphasis on Greek, contra Latin and languages other than German, excludes Jews from the history of philosophy, notably excluding his contemporaries as well, including his own students. Thus François Vézin, who translated Sein und Zeit into French,3 wonders if Heidegger ever studied Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption?4 For Vézin “Heidegger ‘ignores’ Jews. He doesn’t merely ignore Moses Mendelssohn or Max Liebermann, he ‘ignores’ the fact that six million were murdered in atrocious fashion.”5 Vézin does not engage the fact Heidegger ignores any more than Heidegger does; for Vézin what matters is that this inattention is 135

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part of a systematic inattention to names we ourselves might wonder about, like “Kafka, and Chagall or Gershom Scholem.”6 Thus for Vézin, Heidegger, could speak “of Beckenbauer yet not of Edith Stein.”7 At issue here is the difference between what Heidegger talks about and what we would have him say. At issue then is a certain convicted sense that Heidegger, qua anti-Semite, excludes certain names from his work owing to the world-historical constellation of events surrounding his Rectorate and crystallized in text in his Black Notebooks. And then there is apocrypha, of which we have a good deal. Perhaps the most famous of Heidegger’s Jews is not the Hannah Arendt that would ensure, at least in Agamben’s eyes, that Being and Time would be written under the aegis of love,8 or at least erotic glimmerance, but Edmund Husserl. Thus and as opposed to standard interpretations that have Heidegger eliding his title dedication to Edmund Husserl— in “friendship and admiration”—for reasons of Nazi politics and revelatory of his own anti-Semitism,9 that the reasons for this may be less world-historical than, overdetermined as everything in life tends to be, typically all-too-human given the banality of academic recognition and the rites of deference. As Dermot Moran puts the point from Husserl’s side, noting Husserl’s own reservations with respect to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, gnomically expressed in a handwritten note repeating Aristotle’s departure from his own teacher (the relation would be reversed in Husserl’s case), “ ‘amicus Plato, magis amica veritas’ (Plato is a friend but truth is a greater friend).”10 As Moran reminds us, Husserl felt that Heidegger was doing philosophical anthropology and had completely misunderstood the crucial step of the transcendental reduction. Furthermore, in his account of Dasein as transcendence he had trivialized the essential meaning of intentionality.11

Husserl found Heidegger’s first book lacking: so much anthropology (and in Being and Time Heidegger takes repeated pains to distance himself from anthropology). But this would also entail that Husserl would not find the dedication in keeping with friendship, much less admiration. Hence if Heidegger himself later will say that it was under pressure from his publisher, Max Niemeyer, he removed the dedication in 1941, one can understand, given Husserl’s criticism, why Heidegger would have wished to remove the dedication in recognition of this criticism in the wake of Husserl’s death in 1938. Afterward, when Husserl would no longer be disturbed by the suggestion of an alliance between their thinking, Heidegger would restore it. Indeed, given the literature that swirls and foams around the Black Notebooks, one could argue that we have never had so much philosophical anthropology of a certain kind as we do today. But it is also certain that the



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recipient of a book’s dedication will not always be grateful to find themselves foregrounded in association with the book. Thus Bill Richardson, to whom Tom Sheehan dedicates his book, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (“For William J. Richardson, S.J., Gentleman and scholar sans pareil, In respect and gratitude”12) found the dedication’s expression of “respect and gratitude” (not to mention the admixture of English, French, and Greek), so frustrating that he literally spent the last years of his life talking about it and attempting to write a text that would express his fury in cogent arguments against the book. He was not, he would repeat, flattered by the dedication: to the contrary. As with Aristotle vis-à-vis Plato, and latterly, Sheehan and Richardson, so it might go with Husserl and Heidegger. Still the relation between teachers and students is not the focus of our current preoccupation with philosophical anthropology. We are concerned with Heidegger and his Jews; hence we are not concerned with Heidegger’s relation to Husserl qua teacher, but as a Jew, even if Husserl lived his own life as a standard Lutheran, with a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, nor indeed with Heidegger’s relation to Hannah Arendt as a student, and ultimately, as a lover, but as a Jew alone. The point is an earnest one: disattention to Jewish philosophers is engrained. Thus Vézin asks, rightly, insightfully, whether in and through the context of Heidegger’s life in the wake of fascism, the Shoah, after the cold war, after studies had been published on totalitarianism and the human condition and the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, “Heidegger ever knew that Hannah Arendt had dedicated a profound study to the case of Adolf Eichmann?”13 Elsewhere, I argue that Heidegger had trouble paying attention to Hannah Arendt’s work.14 Indeed, I also argue that Heidegger faced similar challenges in bringing the work of Arendt’s own first husband Günther Stern to his notice despite the overlaps in their own concerns especially with respect to what Heidegger called the question concerning technology.15 To this day, we tend not to know Anders at all, though the reason for this may not be attributed to Heidegger’s inattention to him—in an Anglophone context, my own teacher Don Ihde’s opposition to the translation of Anders work has more to do with this,16 but one must also say that Anders is, if anything, more radical still, than Heidegger, more questioning of technology than his teacher, and we mostly like to imagine that we can get technology in hand, have our technological cake and eat it too, so that although all of us should know the name of Günther Anders we do not: most Anglophone philosophers, even those who work in the philosophy of technology, continue to disattend or even, as in the case of a recent Heidegger and Arendt inclusive anthology of the philosophy of technology edited by Robert Scharff and Val Dusek, to exclude his work.17 But to leave Anders out is to leave out the author of two volumes on technology, the first volume of which, The Obsolescence of Humanity: On the Soul

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in the Age of the Second Industrial Revolution, appeared in 1956.18 Anders, greatest claim to fame is more commonly his relations to other more famous names, like Hannah Arendt (as her ex-husband) or else as Walter Benjamin’s cousin or else as the son of William Stern, inventor of the IQ test. Indeed, it is significant that Anders, who studied with Heidegger from 1921 to 1924, does not manage to rate a mention from Vézin, even to excoriate Heidegger for his own inattention. So many metonymies of memory and influence: who are we to consider, who should we bring to our attention as wrongly ignored? Who may we safely “ignore,” to use Vézin’s language here? Anders is ignored today and yet we do tend to suppose that our inattention isn’t owing to anti-Semitism. To be sure, like Adorno and like Arendt, and like Marcuse, and even like Jonas, Anders would not square at all with the theories of those like Richard Wolin who have argued that Heidegger’s critique of technology is itself a covert anti-Semitism. Anders radicalized Heidegger’s critique of technology, likewise Herbert Marcuse, and indeed more broadly still, Hannah Arendt, in addition to (although here one needs a more careful account to trace a connection with Heidegger) Max Horkheimer, as well as, likewise in connection with Heidegger and filtered through Anders on music and radio, Theodor Adorno. Here the point is only that most of us today, just like Heidegger, manage not to read Anders. So too, if for different reasons, another forgotten Jewish phenomenologist of sound, like both Anders and Adorno, F. Joseph Smith,19 expert on the musical philosophy of Jacques de Liege and the phenomenology of listening, indeed a founding member of the U.S. Heidegger Circle, ought by rights, that is to say, for accuracy’s sake, to be counted among Heidegger’s Jews. Heidegger never mentions Smith’s work, though he might have. In this regard, Heidegger resembles most members of the U.S. Heidegger Circle today, the same Circle that “ignored” the letter Smith wrote to the annual meeting of the Circle at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, announcing the retraction of his membership and, invoking Heidegger and his egregious relation to National Socialism and not less his anti-Semitism, asking that the Circle strike his name from the list of the Circle’s founders. The circle had nothing to say about Smith’s reason for his request. I never met Smith, but I did hear his letter as I was at the meeting where this directive was read. I thought the lack of interest and discussion odd but I thought no more about it, even though I knew (and I cite) his work owing to my research on the phenomenology of sound (and music) for The Hallelujah Effect. A bit later Smith would be sufficiently inspired by yet another Jew Heidegger never mentions: Jacob Taubes, whom I knew from my student days in Berlin, to write a letter to me as editor of New Nietzsche Studies,



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toward the end of his life. There, in a shaky hand, Smith wrote to ask that I write more in the voice in which I had written on Jacob Taubes: on what it meant to be a Jew, to be adequately Jewish, or as in my case, deficiently so, as I attested in my editor’s preface, “Ad Jacob Taubes.”20 To this day, exceeding even Anders whose fortunes are beginning to change for the better, Smith continues to be forgotten save by musicologists interested in Jacobus and the Speculum musicae and phenomenologists interested in the difference between phenomenon and Smith’s coinage: akoumenon.21 This is more than a matter of detail, counting names in the canon. For, I argue that had we been reading Anders all along, or indeed, and this is still more radical for Heideggerians, had we precisely as Heideggerians been reading, as Heideggerians do not care to read, Anders and Adorno and in general: had we been more concerned with technology (as in France Jacques Ellul was concerned with what Heidegger meant by the question of “technique” along with and to be sure Dominique Janicaud), we could find ourselves better equipped to read between the charges of anti-Semitism and Heidegger’s indictment of calculation, Machenschaft central to Heidegger’s indictment of technology and thoughtlessness.22 But this is contrary to factual circumstance. We did not read Heidegger together with such themes, nor did we read Heidegger alongside either Anders or, indeed, Adorno. Adorno opposed Heidegger (and of course and for good measure: Jaspers as well) and Heideggerians do not mesh with Adornians. And Adorno is a hard case, especially when it comes to understanding his relation to Heidegger. But Anders is more patently a Heideggerian thinker, even if he himself wrote one of the first critiques of Heidegger on technology. Had we not “ignored” Anders we might have had a different phenomenologico-­ hermeneutic philosophy of technology. If so, we might have been in a position to read Heidegger’s critique of calculation without reducing it to anti-Semitism, and we might have had a different philosophy of science, one that would not merely attempt to read traditional philosophy of science, one that could find itself under way to thinking. HEIDEGGER AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY In Heidegger’s postwar reflections he makes the claim that “[t]he organizations of social life, rearmament in moral matters, the grease paint of the culture enterprise none of them any longer reach what is.”23 Horkheimer offers a parallel insight into the cinematic ideal of the Übermensch.24 Thus where Heidegger alludes to theater; Horkheimer argues that the filmic ideal of the Übermensch was a calculated product of the culture

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industry itself. Here the point is the generation and development of the culture industry as such, creating the consumer as target of marketed desire: The hypnotic spell that such counterfeit superman as Hitler have exercised derives not so much from what they think or say or do as from their antics, which set a style of behavior for men, who stripped of their spontaneity by the industrial processing, need to be told how to make friends and influence people.25

As Horkheimer argues previously in The Eclipse of Reason, Heidegger contends that: we shall never find the superman as long as we look for him in the places of remote-controlled public opinion and on the stock exchanges of the culture business all those places where the last man, and none but he, controls the operation. The superman never appears in the noisy parades of alleged men of power, nor in the well-staged meetings of politicians. The superman’s appearance is likewise inaccessible to the teletypers and radio dispatches of the press which present that is, represent events to the public even before they have happened.26

For us today, details of the fascist vision of the overhuman tend to be opposed to the marketable product ideal of the transhuman. But Heidegger’s critique of technology bears on today’s “transhuman” condition in connection with not only the merging of human body and technological apparatus of whatever kind including the coming (but still as yet little debated) proliferation of spare body parts that are currently bred or “cultured” in human-pig mosaics. Today’s “humanity 2.0” turns out to be a kind of Überschwein, bred for industrial-level manufacture of organ transplants.27 As Jason Koebler tells us, the CEO who developed Sirius satellite radio, “Martine Rothblatt Wants to Grow Human Organs in Pigs at This Farm.”28 This is not new news, so it is a little fake as this is already a done deal as Joachim Müller-Jung’s makes fairly clear, “Das Schwein, dein Spender. Vermenschlicht: gentechnisch veränderte Ferkel aus München.”29 So too, the BBC medical correspondent Fergus Walsh reported the “US Bid to Grow Human Organs for Transplant Inside Pigs.”30 In other news, the focus is on more general moral concerns, ecological and political, as highlighted by the recent article headline in The Guardian, “Industrial Farming is One of the Worst Crimes in History.”31 The theme could not be more obvious ethically speaking, yet talking about it is difficult not just because we eat meat and milk and eggs and wear leather and wool but because none other than Martin Heidegger defined industrial agriculture as the “manufacture of corpses” (which it is, as George Bernard Shaw explained to the English reading public), as Heidegger offers a horrific analogy in cadence: comparing this



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manufacture of corpses to the gas chambers, blockades of cities, the hydrogen bomb, whereupon our moral sensibilities collapse, which fainting does nothing to resolve the moral question. In addition to Heidegger’s own scandalous equation of industrial agriculture as “the same” as the manufacture of corpses, the language of sameness recurs in the Black Notebooks, writing: From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, the same menacing technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man. In an era where the last corner of the terrestrial globe has been submitted to the domination of technique, and has become economically exploitable.32

It can be easy to overlook the insistent reference to media in Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, as he quickly counts off the influence of telephones and newsreels and film, of recordings and especially of radio, the very themes that occupy Benjamin in his 1935 characterization with respect to “art” in the age of technological reproducibility. For Heidegger: —when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Being of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?”33

This is not the confession of a typical fan of National Socialism. The “boxer” who “counts as the great man of a people”—what people is that if it is not the German people precisely under National Socialism? where “the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph”—what triumph is that if not for National Socialism? what “uproar” and what “specter” if not that of National Socialism? Heidegger took his Nazism on his own terms, pretty much the way he took his Nietzsche. And although I am far from having reached a judgment on it, it may well be that quite contra the standard doctrine that Heidegger subscribed to the cliché anti-Semitism of his day, Heidegger no doubt had his own antiSemitism as well. The problem, as Heidegger teaches, is that we—meaning by that his students under National Socialism, and I would say, likewise we ourselves today—take ourselves to know Nietzsche and thus we think we know his “elitist swaggering,” as Rorty speaks of it,34 and we think, egregious in our error in so thinking, that Nietzsche was a Darwinist,35 just as many

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transhumanist Nietzscheans joyfully suppose this, and not dissimilarly the Nazis were confident that Nietzsche might make biological arguments useful for the party. Heidegger disagrees with this, as we know, and yet he does not offer his disagreement by telling us what arguments Nietzsche did make but gives a hermeneutic for beginning to pose the question for ourselves: one cannot read Nietzsche in a haphazard way; . . . each one of his writings has its own character and limits; and that the most important works and labors of his thought, which are contained in his posthumous writings, make demands to which we are not equal. It is advisable, therefore, that you postpone reading Nietzsche for the time being, and first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years.36

From Nietzsche to the notion of thinking—the subject matter of Heidegger’s 1951/1952 Freiburg course—we suppose ourselves to know the theme, the subject matter in question. Likewise we suppose ourselves to know what “world historical” questions are, and thus we take ourselves to understand whatever Heidegger might be speaking about when he speaks of Weltjudentum (GA 96: 262) in the world-historical context Peter Trawny distinguishes for us. Reading Nietzsche and his last man as Heidegger did prior to, as during, and also, again, after the war, we do not undertake the kind of hermeneutics Heidegger enjoined, not that we believed him then, not that we believe him today, that we do not think. Thus we do not ask, as Heidegger asks: What is Called Thinking? and even more than that: we discount anyone who asks such questions. ON DESERTS AND THE GROWING WASTELAND Heidegger quotes Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the first university lecture he gives after the war: “The wasteland grows. Woe to him who hides wastelands within!”37

Heidegger writes: what is “Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking.”38 The claim is highlighted for students of philosophy who have learned from their Aristotle as they could also have learned from Plato, that man is defined as “the rational animal” (nota bene: this is never extended to woman. Hence I elect to emphasize “man” and the male pronoun and if I had the time here, I would argue that nothing in philosophy is about women, not Nietzsche’s misogynistic rants, not gender studies, not feminism). Excluding women, Heidegger also does not seek to address today’s arbiters of rationality, the scientists, but that also means that he is not seeking,



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as today’s cognitive-science minded philosophers do, to address today’s neuroscientists and their dependency on the university practice of vivisection,39 when Heidegger names animals “world-poor.” Thus if, as suggested by the previous reference to current biotechnology, the current industrial scale venture of cultured teratology, breeding human-pig mosaics to manufacture to order, as it were, a steady stream of harvestable organs for transplant (presumably in addition to eating), what has this to do with anything in Heidegger and how does it bear on Heidegger and his Jews? Heidegger leaves both women and animals out of his lecture course just as he excludes Jews in the same context. He goes further, repeating throughout his What Is Called Thinking? that we “still” do not think, reflecting on nothing less than his own repetition: “Even so, it remains strange, and seems presumptuous, to assert that what is most thought-provoking in our thoughtprovoking time is that we are still not thinking.”40 To make his point still clearer, Heidegger goes foregrounds the acme of scholarly ratiocination: declaring that science does not think. Our collective scholarly ears bristle: anti-Semitic, Heidegger is also antiscientific. He tells us that we are not thinking and in the Black Notebooks— notebooks that, seemingly, he already, calculatedly, plans to publish as the culminating section of his collected works—he insists on talking about calculative thinking, that same principle by which, as he claims, the Jews happen to have lived “for the longest time” and which same principle, so he similarly claims, dominates National Socialist race policy and which same principle continues to rule our most common endeavors. Irrationalism, anti-science, in sum: anti-philosophy is as much the problem as anti-Semitism. It seems for Heidegger, that we, all of us, do not think. But for us, as academics, especially as professors of philosophy, especially those of us who teach thinking, even critical thinking as we call it, it seems that Heidegger could not be more wrong. Heidegger argues that we are cast, to borrow Jacques Ellul’s language as he heard Heidegger here, regarding the wager played, “l’en-jeu,” the Ge-schick of Geschichte, the events of history, beyond calculations, beyond planning. What is in play in la technique is not the latest device. So what are we talking about when we attempt to question, that is, even to raise a question in the wake of technology? Here, given the initial reference to Vézin, who links Einstein with Chagall, we might parallel Vézin to ask, although Pierre Duhem was not a Jew, if we today would bother to read German Science?41 Are we interested in history and philosophy and sociology of science? Is there any connection between the political geography of theory in science and hermeneutic reflection? With respect to Heidegger, how many of us are inclined to question science, much less technology? Do we not tend to leave science to the scientists,

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unless they challenge us as some scientists like Stephen Hawking have recently argued that “philosophy is dead”?42 Otherwise we leave those in power unquestioned. But this was not the case for Duhem in 1916. Criticizing the German turn of mind as it finds expression in a theorist of mathematical physics, Gustav Kirchoff, Duhem’s critique seems importantly Husserlian: “We can and will posit [poser] . . . Wir können und wollen setzen.”43 Note here that this stipulation recalls the mathematician David Hilbert’s own watchword for the so-called Göttingen program.44 As Duhem argues, contra Hertz’s explicitly deductive construction of mechanics,45 the problem is not that the postulate is arbitrary but acontextual and ahistorical, articulated, “imperiously” so as Duhem says, as if for the first time: “Sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. [I will it thus, I order it thus; let my will stand in the place of reason.]”46 But Duhem simply sought the inclusion rather than the exclusion of French science. Later the torch would be taken up by Bachelard and Canguilhem toward the goal, finally, to be admitted along with German science: “Scientia germanica ancilla scientiae gallicae.”47 Duhem cites Nietzsche’s contemporary, the fellow philologist, Hermann Diels: “The German is, here and now, on this earth, the sanctuary in which the principle of order takes refuge.”48 Here Duhem cites Ostwald: Germany wants to organize Europe which, until now, has not been organized. I shall now explain to you the great secret of Germany. We, or perhaps rather the German race, have discovered the factor of organization. Other people still live under the regimes of individualism, when we are under that of organization.49

Where Duhem asks if “Scholasticism [was] not essentially, as German science is, a work of the mathematical mind,”50 he seems to approximate Heidegger’s Machenshaft, as Heidegger writes in the Black Notebooks. One of the most secret forms of the gigantic, and perhaps the oldest, is the tenacious skillfulness in calculating, hustling, and intermingling through which the worldlessness of Jewry is grounded. (GA 95: 97)

Or, still more troublingly, Heidegger writes: the temporary increase in the power of Jewry has its ground in the fact that the metaphysics of the West, especially in its modern development, served as the hub for the spread of an otherwise empty rationality and calculative skill, which in this way lodged itself in the “spirit” without ever being able to grasp the concealed domains of decision on its own. The more original and inceptive the coming decisions and questions become, the more inaccessible will they remain to this “race.” (GA 96: 46–47)



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This last preludes the most egregious of these quotes: That in the age of machination, race is elevated to the explicit and specially erected “principle” of history (or just of historiology) is not the arbitrary invention of “doctrinaires” but a consequence of the power of machination, which must cast down beings, in all their domains, into planned calculation. (GA 96: 38)

Note here, that what Duhem calls “German science” will correspond to what comes to be named “Jewish science.” Jewish science, German science, is there no difference? Must there be one? There is a politics of what we suppose to be le mot juste just as there is a lack of readerly “conviviance”—beyond what Taminiaux calls connivance51(I am trying with “conviviance” for a new word here, for the generosity of sympathy Ivan Illich named La convivialité)—but there can be no such word. Rather than a “word only,” there is only the slow reading we learned from Nietzsche and which slow reading Heidegger, in order to become Heidegger, applied in his work. If we still need such reading is needed, today, this is well known, we read too quickly. At best we can be philologists, or maybe we need a better word, because philologists must also be, as Nietzsche said, attuned to the slow, the fine grain, the subtleties of motes. It is not by reading but by searching and clicking, by “hunting” for the text, that we find the key to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. Beginning with Heidegger’s world-historical, onto-historial anti-Semitism, we end with his anti-Semitism tout court. We are all, as Adorno pointed out, as Sartre points out, anti-Semites in one way or another (but we protest), we are all, as Heidegger points out in Being and Time, already guilty, implicated in advance (and we protest). Thus the kind of reading that would allow us to read the Notebooks is lost to us not least because we begin our reading as readers who have always already skipped the context. It is a silencing of Jewish names, and Hannah Arendt had far more cause to complain in the same measure and even to the degree, as I have argued,52 that many of her texts included coded (but hardly so coded that one cannot see them) references, as if directed to and for Heidegger’s eyes. Indeed, and our thoughts on this can be inspired in the wake of Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 film, Hannah Arendt, we can read the correspondence between Arendt and Jaspers as a surprising amount of this correspondence included reference to Heidegger, thus we might ask if she did this to test or to see, as friends who are writers do with old friends who are writers and readers in the same or overlapping field, if one is read at all. I argued elsewhere (this is not a difficult argument to make) that Heidegger failed every “love test” Arendt ever set to him. And it is indisputable that he would have failed, just as we noted above that Vézin argues, every reading

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test as well. To which failure Arendt responded as lovers do, by loving him still, quand-même, as she argued in her dissertation on Love and Saint Augustine that that was what love did. Does philosophy, named as it is for love, still love? Does philosophy remain love when it is reduced, as it has been, to analytic triviality? Or if it is practiced by functionaries who have lost their love for both thinking and questioning, for the sake of the jobs they hold or (and this applies to the young more than they suppose), for the sake of the jobs they plan to hold? Heidegger is infamous for what he does negatively with his nonsupport of Jews in letters he writes. And this is so. But Heidegger was also enormously supportive of Jews, those will be like Arendt the exception he loved or else those he admired and liked, as in the case of Werner Brock who wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1928 in Göttingen on Nietzsche53 and whom Heidegger helped to gain a position in Cambridge where he taught as of 1934.54 But support is not the way we are inclined to read Heidegger, thus as we can find in his correspondence on Brock allusions to both his normative selfreference and the anti-English sentiment that is part of the concern here, such as we may read in Heidegger’s to Kurt Bauch (January 4, 1938), of Brock’s troubles he encountered in sharing some of Heidegger’s (and of course Husserl’s) ideas at Cambridge, noting that most of Brock’ interlocutors seemed to be enmired in a fascination with “moraline thought” and a predilection for “mathematical tricks” as what the English suppose to be philosophy.55 Brock represented the intersection between Jaspers and Heidegger that also drew some of Heidegger’s most intense negativity in many regards— Existenzphilosophie—and yet and this is the point with respect to Heidegger’s Jews, not in Brock’s case. Part of the reason had to do with Brock’s ability to combine, as did Heidegger, the ability to read Nietzsche as well as a philosophical and critical conversance with the natural and modern technologically adumbrated sciences. Inasmuch as, and this ought to go without saying, Heidegger was a philosopher of technology and science, provided we may take, as Heidegger did take, “modern technology” to include both train and bus routes, streets and kiosks, passenger covers against the rain, overhead street lamps, all in addition to fountain pens and plotters, as well as the intersected course of the trajectory of raw materials from harvested forest and field to the conditions of using cellulose in production for fabric and for manufacturing paper, including media dissemination of all kinds along with the directing influence of civic opinion, a directing or framing that is usually associated with Adorno’s critique of the “culture industry.” We read Heidegger as a black forest romantic or worse, to speak with Richard Rorty, a “redneck”56 because Heidegger pays attention to trees, to the life of plants, to the life of the mountain, and apart from environmental or applied philosophy, we do not expect those who teach us to ask after Being to reflect on the technical



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deployment of the forester who plots the path of what we today call “sustainable” forest “development”:57 manufacturing paper along the way less to building, dwelling, or what Heidegger called thinking, than what Chomsky, echoing Horkheimer but also Edward Bernays called manufacturing “consent.”58 What connected Heidegger and Brock was Nietzsche and science and what Heidegger, in his letter to Bauch, could call “our philosophy.”59 Elsewhere I’ve sought to frame and to contextualize Adorno on this theme: One speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. But it was not a threat— Auschwitz was this relapse, and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored this relapse continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror. The societal pressure still bears down, although the danger remains invisible nowadays. It drives people toward the unspeakable which culminated on a world-historical scale in Auschwitz.60

At issue for Adorno is what “drives” human beings because the problem is that Nazis are human beings and what drove them still threatens us as it still drives us today. Neither Adorno nor Arendt ever lost sight of this. This same concern, the most significant fact of the insoluble cipher that was Nazism, echoes in a different spirit the trajectory of Heidegger’s language of the throw [Wurf] that Eugen Fink took back to a better and more Greek image of the spirit child of eternity [Aeon] at play on the beach of the world. For Adorno this sheer, invisible horror remains: this “the unspeakable which culminated on a world-historical scale in Auschwitz.”61 ON DYING ONE’S OWN DEATH: HUMAN AND ANIMAL DASEIN The problem, singulare tantum, as Adorno emphasizes this, is the fact of barbarism. Thus Adorno writes that Auschwitz is no kind of looming threat that might or might not come to pass, something that awaits us if we do not conduct our affairs as we should. For Adorno, Auschwitz was. This having been, this that we as human beings have done, is the stone fact. Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz. It was the barbarism all education strives against. One speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. But it is not a threat—Auschwitz was this relapse, and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue largely unchanged.62

What is problematic then is not only that Heidegger managed not to name the names of the Jews we would say that he should have named, nor indeed

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that his constant reference was a narcissistic preoccupation—most professors, pacé Vézin, do this; everyone who does not care to “do” footnotes, does this (with or without meaning to do so). Scholars are careful who they mention because mentioning names takes the focus off their ideas qua their own ideas, and not having footnotes helps to underwrite the conviction that one has been the first person ever to think a given thing. We each of us live the reasons why we might not care to cite others (those would be our own “Jews,” excluded from our own discourse), and Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of academic distinction and intellectual capital tells us why we do this, if we are in search of foundation for our enterprise of philosophical anthropology. But the problem as Adorno underlines it, in ways that echo Heidegger, is far from the failure to name Jewish philosophers by name: the problem is Kristallnacht in Freiberg and everywhere else; the problem is the Shoah, the Holocaust. It is “genocide” as Adorno speaks of it, the loss of a people, the loss, if we read Heidegger together with Adorno, of “the death” of these beings, as it was their death as such that was in the Shoah taken from them along with everything else expropriated. Thus Heidegger writes, “Many never manage to die their death, others die it frequently” (GA 96: 51). We can turn what Heidegger says here into an argument on behalf of the calculative principle he otherwise denounces, in this case via Carl Schmitt: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. When Heidegger defines the “power of machination” as he does by explication here as “the destruction, indeed the godlessness, the dehumanization of the human into the animal, the using up of the earth, the calculation of the world” (ibid.: 52). Heidegger’s argument parallels Adorno as the problem of reducing the human to animal, as Derrida underscores this double flattening, and Adorno echoes Heidegger’s own invocation of military administrative slang (“liquidation,” “polishing off”) to speak of the deaths of those whose elimination justifies their existence: Genocide is the absolute integration, which is everywhere being prepared, where human beings are made the same, polished, as the military calls it, until they are literally cancelled out, as deviations from the concept of their complete nullity.63

Adorno has not forgotten the wartime context that allowed this, the context of the exception of the exception, here again as Schmitt would say, the authority of military law, justifying every means, and with that every justification as Heidegger outlines in his account of Machenschaft in the Beiträge. What we condemn in Heidegger in the awful quote from the Bremen lectures is also appropriated by Adorno who speaks of the same victims of



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the concentration camps as those who die a death that is not their own. Thus for Adorno as for Heidegger, “they do not die.” What these victims lose as they lose their life is their own death: the death they once might have died is removed such that that they only die in the order of mechanized extermination. This machinal, organized, ordered death is the force of Heidegger’s analogy with mechanized agriculture, an analogy brought to the level of animal life by Heidegger with a force of compulsion, repeated again and again in the Black Notebooks. What is taken from an animal “put down”—even for the sake of kindness—is the animal’s life and the animal’s death. This we call (and we lie when we say this) euthanasia. And in philosophical and medical ethics it is purported to be a good death as deaths go for animals, but also for the old, for the sick, and some would say, for the handicapped. The prisoner condemned to death is treated in the same way: already dead. It is as if we were so many devotees of a cult of Clotho, as if we knew that the one thing that could never be remedied, ever redeemed, ever restored, compensated for or forgiven would have to be a death at the wrong time. In the same way, Adorno writes, The last, the poorest possession left to the individual is expropriated. That in the concentration camps, it was no longer an individual [Individuum] who died but a specimen—this is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure.64

Arendt herself bears witness to this, and we can lose this sense of survival death in life, as my father I am dead, said Nietzsche, if we only speak of survivor’s guilt. Forty-four years after Nietzsche’s death at the turn of the century, Sartre wrote in Anti-Semite and Jew: “The blood of the Jews falls on all of our heads” [Le sang juif retombe sur toutes nos têtes].65 And we know, this is part of the dynamic Sartre psychoanalyzes, that, Jew or not, bad or good at being a Jew or not, ontic or onto-historial anti-Semite or what have you, we are anti-Semites, all of us. And to say this horrifies us because part of what we mean to do in this engagement with Heidegger is to separate the goats from the lambs, to count some in, and to count others out. Only some of us are anti-Semites, we suppose, if it is also true that I have not read a single philosophical defense (or condemnation of Heidegger) advanced as a praise of anti-Semitism. The same Nietzsche who asked, speaking of Christian and Jews in On the Genealogy of Morals, What Do the Names Matter? also wrote in his Nachlaß that a Christian is only a Jew of a broader confession. Nietzsche’s point underscores that whether we hold ourselves to be Jews or not, we can be of a narrower or a broader confession (and in his comments Nietzsche includes

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Arabs for good, human-all-too-human measure: he speaks of circumcision). If we read Adorno, as indeed reading Nietzsche at the start of his Human, All-Too-Human, in the first aphorism of the section entitled “On First and Last Things,” we are also as living, a species of the dead. As those who are bound to ask the question of Heidegger and anti-Semitism, Heidegger and the Jews, we remained condemned to choose, in all Beauvoir’s, all Sartre’s ambiguity—and that, as Jacques Taminiaux reading Arendt also reminds us, is nothing other than the meaning of authenticity, and that is life. NOTES   1 This chapter draws on an essay written as a lecture originally presented at the Bibliotheque National in Paris in January 2015. A version of that lecture appears as a chapter in Babich, Un politique brisée. Le souci d’autrui, l’humanisme et les juifs chez Heidegger (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016). An earlier version of the present chapter was published as “Heidegger’s Jews: Inclusion/Exclusion and Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 47, no. 2 (2016): 133–56.  2 Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2014), 31f. Already made available in French within a year of publication and in time for the conference held at the start of 2015, Trawny’s book is available in English as Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).  3 See Heidegger, Être et temps, trans. François Vézin (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). Indeed the challenges of translating Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit have been compared to the challenges of translating Luther and thus to a reflection on translation as such. As one scholar observes, such translations might be said to have “compelled the French language and French philosophy to undergo the kind of modification allowing for the narrativization of unfamiliar ideas.” Pierre Legrand, “Issues in the Translatability of Law,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 30.   4 François Vézin, “L’étendue du désastre” (open letter, published online: August 8, 2014).  5 Ibid.  6 Ibid.  7 Ibid.  8 See, for references and discussion, my review “Daniel Mayer-Katin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (New York: Norton, 2010),” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 29, no. 4 (Summer 2011): 189–91, as well as Babette Babich, “Thinking on Film: Jaspers, Scholem, and Thinking in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt,” German Politics and Society 118, 34, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 77–92.



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 9 Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 19. 10 Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2002), 207. 11 Ibid. 12 Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). 13 Vézin, “L’étendue du désastre.” 14 See for a discussion, again, Babich, “Thinking on Film,” as well as “Jaspers, Heidegger, and Arendt: On Politics, Science, and Communication,” Existence 4, no. 1 (2009): 1–19. 15 See further on Günther Anders, including discussion of Heidegger, Babette Babich, “Angels, the Space of Time, and Apocalyptic Blindness: On Günther Anders’ Endzeit—Endtime,” Etica & Politica—Ethics & Politics: Potere e violenza in Günther Anders—Power & Violence in the Thinking of Günther Anders XV, no. 1 (2013): 144–74 and “O, Superman! or Being Towards Transhumanism: Martin Heidegger, Günther Anders, and Media Aesthetics,” Divinatio (January 2013): 83–99. 16 This is changing and it is auspicious that part of Anders’ 1956 book, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Bd. I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1956), appears as the first part of (and inspiring the title of) Christopher John Müller, Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture, Obsolescence (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 29–125. 17 Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek, ed., Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: An Anthology, 2nd Ed. (Oxford: Wiley, 2014). 18 Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. I discuss Anders along with Heidegger and technology in several essays, including Babich, “Geworfenheit und prometheische Scham im Zeitalter der transhumanen Kybernetik: Technik und Machenschaft bei Martin Heidegger, Fritz Lang und Günther Anders,” in Die Neugier des Glücklichen, ed. Christoph Streckhardt (Weimar: Bauhaus Universitätsverlag, 2012), 63–91. 19 The philosopher of music based in Nice, Daniel Charles writes on Smith, Husserl, and Heidegger in his essay, “Singing Waves,” ed. E.-B. Mâche, Music, Society and Imagination in Contemporary France, Contemporary Music Review 8, no. 1 (1993): 57–70. I discuss Smith in The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and Technology (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). See too Smith’s chapter: “Cartesian Theory and Musical Science,” in his The Experiencing of Musical Sound: Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), 119–42. 20 Babette Babich, “Ad Jacob Taubes,” in Debra B. Bergoffen, Babich, and David B. Allison, eds., New Nietzsche Studies: Nietzsche and the Jews 7, no. 3–4 (Fall 2007/Winter 2008): v—x. 21 Thus Don Ihde quotes from Smith’s unpublished essay, “Heidegger and Insights Leading to a Phenomenology of Sound”: “Speech Is a Thing of Sound, Not a Phenomenon but an Akoumenon,” in Don Ihde, Sense and Significance (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973), 31. See too F. Joseph Smith, Experiencing of

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Musical Sound: A Prelude to a Phenomenology of Music (London: Routledge, 1979). There is a large research project to be initiated here. For some initial efforts see Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Babette Babich, The Hallelujah Effect: Music, Performance Practice and Technology (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013). 22 Paul Virilio has his own line on this, as did Jean Baudrillard, and in part, but in different ways, Friedrich Kittler and Sloterdijk too, among not too many others. 23 Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wick and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 36. 24 See again, Babich, “O, Superman! or Being towards Transhumanism.” 25 Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 113. 26 Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 72. Earlier, Heidegger had noted that “The overhuman constitutes a transformation and thus a rejection of man so far. Accordingly, the public figures who in the course of current history emerge in the limelight are as far from the overhuman’s nature as is humanly possible” (ibid., 70). 27 For to be sure, practical hitches remain: the seamless fantasy of switchable, upgradable body components is hardly at hand, but the market for pig-human hybrids, and a profitable side market in drugs and anti-rejection drugs is already in sway. See for further references and discussion, including Heidegger, Babich, “Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis: Expropriation of Death or the Patient as Voyeur of His Own Death in the ‘Age of the Show,’ ” Nursing Philosophy 18 (2018): in press. 28 Jason Koebler, “Martine Rothblatt Wants to Grow Human Organs in Pigs at This Farm,” Motherboard/Vice, June 24, 2015, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/ article/martine-rothblatt-wants-to-grow-human-organs-in-pigs-at-this-farm. 29  Joachim Müller-Jung’s article makes this fairly clear: “Das Schwein, dein Spender,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 23, 2009, but see too Walter Weder, Jörg Seebach, and Ruth Baumann-Hölzle’s more functionally precise and academic report “Ersatzteillager Mensch,” Uni-Magazin Zürich, April 4, 2015. 30  Thus Fergus Walsh reported the “US Bid to Grow Human Organs for Transplant Inside Pigs,” BBC News, June 6, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/ health-36437428. See too Michael Le Page, “Human-Pig Chimeras Are Being Grown—What Will They Let Us Do?” The New Scientist, June 6, 2016. 31 Yuval Noah Harari, “Industrial Farming Is One of the Worst Crimes in History,” The Guardian, September 25, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ sep/25/industrial-farming-one-worst-crimes-history-ethical-question. See for a discussion of this in connection with Heidegger as well as the title focus: Babette Babich, “Adorno on Science and Nihilism, Animals, and Jews,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2011): 110–45, as well as Babette Babich, “ ‘The Answer Is False’: Archaeologies of Genocide,” in Adorno and the Concept of Genocide, ed. Ryan Crawford and Erik M. Vogt (Amsterdam: Brill, 2016), 1–17. 32 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 40. 33 Ibid.



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34 Richard Rorty, “Taking Philosophy Seriously, Heidegger et le Nazisme by Victor Farias,” The New Republic, April 11, 1988: 33. 35 I write about this in many places. See for one brief text, Babich, “Nietzsche and/ or/versus Darwin,” Common Knowledge, Common Knowledge 20, no. 4 (Fall 2014): 404–11. 36 Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 73. The reference to Aristotle is of course a literal one; cf. 72–73. 37 Ibid., 95. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 However else would we know about the brain if it were not for the brains of dogs and the brains of the macaque monkeys we continue to capture, slave-trade for our laboratories, in the wild? See for further discussion and references, Babette Babich, “Science—On Laboratory Life for a Wired Object: Mirror Neurons and the New Red Peter,” in The Animal Inside, ed. Geoffrey Dierckxsens, et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 215–27. 40 Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? 5–6. 41 See my discussion of Duhem and German/French science, Babette Babich, “Early Continental Philosophy of Science,” in The New Century Volume Three: Bergsonism, Phenomenology and Responses to Modern Science: History of Continental Philosophy, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Alan Schrift (Chesham: Acumen, 2010), 263–86. 42 Although this does upset us, thus Bill Nye, after echoing Hawking, has recanted, and now sees that analytic philosophy might be, as the English say, a “good thing.” But see my “Are They Good? Are They Bad? Double Hermeneutics and Citation in Philosophy, Asphodel and Alan Rickman, Bruno Latour and the ‘Science Wars’,” in Das Interpretative Universum, ed. Paula Angelova, Andreev Jaassen, and Emil Lessky (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017), 259–90. 43 Pierre Duhem, “Some Reflections on German Science,” in German Science (Chicago: Open Court, 1991), 92. 44 I discuss this with attention to the time that was the first few decades of the twentieth century in the philosophy of science (and mathematics) in “Early Continental Philosophy of Science,” in The New Century Volume Three: Bergsonism, Phenomenology and Responses to Modern Science: History of Continental Philosophy, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Alan Schrift (Chesham: Acumen, 2010), 263–86. 45 Cf. Duhem: “Let us agree that this point—which is itself nothing but an algebraic expression, only a world of geometric consonance take to designate an ensemble of n numbers—changes, from one instant to another, by an algebraic formula. From this convention, so perfectly algebraic in nature, so completely arbitrary in appearance, we deduce, with perfect rigor, the consequences that calculation can draw from it, and we say that we are setting forth mechanics” (German Science, 93). 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 112. 48 Pierre Duhem, “German Science and German Virtues,” here cited by Nietzsche’s contemporary, Hermann Diels, in Internationale Monatsschrift, November 1, 1914: 122.

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49 Duhem, “German Science and German Virtues,” 122. 50 Ibid., 123 51 Jacques Taminiaux, “On Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Will to Power as Art,” New Nietzsche Studies 3, no. 1–2 (Winter 1999): 1–22. 52 See, for example, my “Arendt’s Radical Good and the Banality of Evil: Echoes of Scholem and Jaspers in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt,” Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Politics, Religion and the Arts 9, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 13–26. 53 Werner Brock, Nietzsches Idee der Kultur (Bonn: Bouvier, 1930). Heike Delitz, “Brock, Werner Gottfried,” in Biographisch-Bibliographisches 54  Kirchenlexikon, vol. 28 (Nordhausen: Bautz, 2007), 252–58. 55 Martin Heidegger and Kurt Bauch, Briefwechsel 1932–1975, ed. Almuth Heidegger (Freiburg im Breisgau.: Karl Alber Verlag, 2010), 51. 56 Rorty, “Taking Philosophy Seriously,” 33. It is worth noting the historical Jesus parallel Rorty sets up to contextualize this epithet: “Jesus was indeed, among other things, a charismatic kook, and Heidegger was, among other things, an egomaniacal, anti-Semitic redneck. But we have gotten a lot out of the Gospels, and I suspect that philosophers for centuries to come will be getting a lot out of Heidegger’s original and powerful narrative of the movement of Western thought from Plato to Nietzsche.” 57 Heidegger und Bauch, Briefwechsel, 51. 58  See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988) as well as Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1923). I discuss Heidegger in this context, along with Günther Anders and the political theorist of media, Dallas Smythe, in “Constellating Technology: Die Gefahr, The Danger,” in Babich and Dimitri Ginev, ed., The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Frankfurt am Main: Springer Verlag, 2014), 163–65. 59 Ibid. 60 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” in Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Vorträge und Gespräche mit Hellmuth Becker 1959–1969, ed. Gerd Kadelbach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 92. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz,” 92. 64 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 362. 65 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 98.

Chapter 9

Heidegger as a Secularized Kierkegaard: Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann Read Sein und Zeit Daniel Herskowitz

In this chapter I explore a moment in the reception of Heidegger’s philosophy among Jews in the 1930s.1 By focusing on the two highly influential and critical analyses of Heidegger’s early work put forth by Martin Buber and Hugo Bergmann, and in particular on their reading of Heidegger as a “secularized Kierkegaard,” I hope to show that a central prism through which Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit was initially registered by Jews was theological. By this I mean that from the very outset, his philosophy was perceived as both reflecting and promoting a theologically charged framework. The trope of interpreting Heidegger as a secularized Kierkegaard was characteristic of the immediate confessional readings of Sein und Zeit by Christian theologians as well. As we shall see, however, unlike the Christian readings, Buber and Bergmann approach Heidegger from their decidedly Jewish point of view, and in so doing, they offer reflections on the theological charge of Heidegger’s philosophy, on the Jewish–Christian difference, and on the purported contribution Judaism, as they construct it, can offer the modern world struck by crisis. KIERKEGAARD, HEIDEGGER, AND SECULARIZATION Associating Heidegger with Kierkegaard should come as no surprise to anyone even slightly familiar with Heidegger’s early thought. Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel’s all-encompassing idealism, his reworking of the notion of ‘existence’ and expression of the individual’s existential plight, powerfully reverberated among many of the younger generation in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century, who were fed up with the hyperrational and all-explanatory systems that were preached at them in their university lecture halls.2 The words of a fresh doctor of philosophy from the University 155

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of Heidelberg named Hanna Arendt seem to aptly capture the prevailing temperament: “Kierkegaard speaks with a contemporary voice; he speaks for an entire generation that is not reading him out of historical interest but for intensely personal reasons: mea res agitur [this thing concerns me].”3 The young Heidegger too was caught up in this intellectual and cultural atmosphere. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s impact on Heidegger in the creative years leading to the publication of Sein und Zeit is undeniable. The Dane’s championing of factical life experience was conducive in Heidegger’s early theological quest after authentic Christian existence in his early 1920/1921 lecture series on Paul. In a 1923 summer-semester lecture, Heidegger admits that “strong influences on the explication presented here” of Dasein’s factical being-in-the-world “come from Kierkegaard’s work” (GA 63: 30).4 Sein und Zeit itself is spotted with many concepts and terms that are traceable back to the Danish thinker, such as anxiety, repetition, curiosity, das Man (Kierkegaard’s “crowd”), and the Moment, to mention only a few. This deems Heidegger’s later tendency to minimize Kierkegaard’s role in his intellectual development indefensible.5 Despite this, Kierkegaard is famously mentioned by name in this work only three times, all in footnotes, and all bearing a similar ambivalent tone. He is credited for being “the man who has gone farthest” in thinking through existential phenomena and categories, and doing so “in a penetrating fashion” or “with the most penetration” (Sein und Zeit, 190, 235, 238).6 At the same time, Heidegger considered Kierkegaard’s main imperative of expressing the paradoxical stance of the individual believer in the face of God to be confined to the ontic, existential [existentielle] sphere of Christian theology, which is of derivative philosophical importance. Heidegger’s concerns, on the other hand, are ontological, namely, to sketch out the structures of existence, above all of human existence, that disclose how being manifests itself. That many Kierkegaardian categories are employed in Sein und Zeit means not only that they undergo what Heidegger would consider ontologization, but also secularization, that is, a stripping of religious content and context.7 Without entering into the complex role of theology in Heidegger’s scheme, it is noteworthy that despite the fact that Sein und Zeit is fraught with theologically impregnated notions of Christian origin, Kierkegaardian and others, and despite the fact that he is not always consistent in this regard, Heidegger insisted on the theological neutrality of his philosophy: “The ontological interpretation of Dasein as Being-in-the-world does not decide either for or against a possible Being-towards-God [Sein zu Gott],” he announced in 1928 (GA 9: 159 n. 56).8 He contended that his fundamental ontology is theologically neutral because it is ontologically prior to, and thus undergirds, any ontic Christian (or non-Christian) doctrine. Indeed, from early on Heidegger reworked the theological tradition committed to the radical externality of God championed by Luther, Kierkegaard, and Overbeck (among others) and vouched for a methodological a-theism, maintaining that the question



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of God must be bracketed out from phenomenological investigations. While this a-theism does not necessary entail atheism, the operative outcome is in this case similar: God is absent as the horizon of the interpretation of human existence.9 The appearance of religious vocabulary and themes in Heidegger’s 1927 masterpiece attracted a considerable theologically inclined readership. Few, however, would concur with Heidegger’s claim for neutrality. As Eduard Baring demonstrates, with very few exceptions, the Catholic and Protestant theologians (mainly Jesuits and associates of dialectical theology) who participated in the initial debate over Sein und Zeit found in it determinative theological inflections which effectively deny its purported neutrality. One recurring trope in this debate was the claim that Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein was an inverted, secularized version of Søren Kierkegaard’s theistic reflections. Through the reading of Heidegger as a secularized Kierkegaard, Baring shows, these Protestant and Catholic theologians projected their respective understandings of secularization as a perverted process rooted in, and indebted to, certain religious traditions and conceptualities.10 For both sides, Heidegger’s godless framework bears an implied theological claim. One point made by theologians from the Catholic tradition, centering on the condition of possibility of the secularization of Kierkegaard by Heidegger, is pertinent to our discussion. For them, it is the Protestant doctrine of the unbridgeable distance between God and the world that gives itself to such a secularization in the first place. That God is so radically external and removed, that there is, as Kierkegaard famously proclaimed, an “infinite qualitative difference” between God and the world, means that He is all but irrelevant to worldly affairs, and for all intents and purposes, human existential structures can be articulated on their own terms, with no direct recourse to God. In this respect, Heidegger’s a-theistic methodology itself, the godlessness of Dasein’s existence and the lack of any reference to Dasein’s being-from or -toward God—in other words, Heidegger’s secular explication of Dasein’s existence—is the ultimate fruition of the God-world dualism informing Kierkegaard’s religious account. On the other hand, from the contesting Catholic point of view, not only is a godless existence reprehensibly tragic, there is simply no sense in which the human’s being can be considered without accounting for the role of God in its very constitution. JEWISH READINGS OF THE HEIDEGGER-KIERKEGAARD CONNECTION Like many of their generational peers, Kierkegaard powerfully captivated the imagination of young Jewish intellectuals.11 Once Heidegger exploded

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onto the German philosophical scene, they confronted and responded to his stimulating and challenging philosophy as well. And analogously to their Christian counterparts, some did so through the interpretive trend of reading him as a secularized Kierkegaard. One such instance can be found in a 1936 essay by the liberal rabbi and philosophy instructor Albert Lewkowitz. Surveying some of the main tropes of Heidegger’s philosophy, Lewkowitz also mentions its animating theological presuppositions. “As it is in Christian theology,” he maintains, “also for Heidegger death, guilt and conscience are deeply intertwined.”12 Specifically, Lewkowitz points to Kierkegaard as the source of much of Heidegger’s terminology: “The terms care, anxiety, guilt, conscience, Augenblick, remembrance, repetition, in which Heidegger records the essence of existence, are central concepts for Kierkegaard and through them a deep influence of Kierkegaard on Heidegger is recognized.”13 The integration of originally theological Kierkegaardian conceptuality into Heidegger’s distinctively nonreligious program is also admitted. “It cannot be overlooked,” Lewkowitz observes, “that these concepts are completely rescinded in Heidegger from the atmosphere of Pauline theology which permeates Kierkegaard.”14 Conceiving of Heidegger as a secularized Kierkegaard is similarly stressed in the analyses of Heidegger’s early work presented by Martin Buber in his “What Is Man?” and by Hugo Bergmann in his Hogey Hador.15 These two analyses are worthy of special attention for a few reasons. First, they are the most lengthy and elaborate explorations of Heidegger’s philosophy by Jewish thinkers in the 1930s. Second, both are attuned to the theological quality of Heidegger’s work, especially with respect to Kierkegaard. Third, it is difficult to exaggerate the impact of these analyses on the intellectually inclined Jewish public at the time. Both Buber and Bergmann were highly esteemed figures: Buber, whose reputation transcended well beyond Jewish circles, was perhaps the most famous Jewish intellectual of his generation, and Bergmann was the central philosophical figure in Palestine at the time and the first rector of the Hebrew University. Parenthetically, it should be noted that Bergmann’s book still offers many Israeli philosophy students entrance into the intricacies of Heidegger’s program,16 and even relatively recently, Buber’s analysis of Heidegger was—debatably—celebrated as a certified “Jewish response to Heidegger.”17 We will first discuss Buber and then turn to Bergmann. MARTIN BUBER Buber’s 1938 lecture series entitled “What Is Man?” constitutes his first programmatic address of Heidegger’s philosophy.18 It is striking that it took Buber so long to seriously address Heidegger, whose Sein und Zeit



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immediately left its mark on the intellectual world in which Buber operated. This prolonged silence is particularly noteworthy if we take into account that Heidegger had recorded some critical remarks regarding Buber’s Ich und Du already in his early academic lectures in the 1920s.19 Taking its title from Kant’s famous fourth question, this lectures series surveys what Buber sees as a chronicle of failed attempts, by ancients and moderns alike, at formulating a satisfying philosophical anthropology. Ultimately, Buber posits his own dialogical philosophy, with its stress on the “between” of human existence, intersubjectivity and relationality, as the long sought-after response to the question: What is man? In this survey, the discussion dedicated to Heidegger’s existential anthropology is by far the longest and most detailed. In Buber’s interpretation, Dasein does not denote concrete human existence, but rather an abstract extraction of one’s relation to one’s own being. Heidegger’s scheme deals with merely a partial element of human existence, and thus inherently neutralizes the possibility of a genuine encounter with the other, which involves one’s being in its actuality and wholeness. As such, Heidegger upholds an enclosed, self-relating account of human existence. While he is aware that Heidegger insists that Dasein is in-the-world and with-others, Buber nevertheless claims that the relations of “solicitude” [Fürsorge] of which Heidegger speaks are merely functional, not “essential” relations—a distinction that holds strong correspondences to his I-It and I-Thou relations.20 Dasein, it is determined, is a solipsistic construction, unable to experience genuine encounter with anyone outside itself. In short, “Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’ is monological.”21 A substantial portion of the reading of Heidegger in “What Is Man?” is made in the light of and in a comparison to Kierkegaard. From the very outset, Buber establishes that Heidegger has “taken over Kierkegaard’s mode of thinking,” by which he means the focus on the individual’s existential experience in her strive for realization in faith. Yet Buber is quick to add that not only has Heidegger continued Kierkegaard’s general trajectory, he has also “broken off its decisive presupposition,” namely, its theological orientation. Indeed, twice Buber explicitly states that Heidegger “secularizes” Kierkegaard.22 To best understand what is meant by this, it is crucial to first recount Buber’s interpretation of Kierkegaard. In a slightly earlier work “The Question to the Single One” [Die Fragean den Einzelnen] (1936), Buber distinguishes his own existential account of the Single One from Max Stirner’s (1806–1856) and especially from Kierkegaard’s.23 In Buber’s rendition, for Kierkegaard, being a Single One is the ultimate realization of the individual’s existence before God, the fulfillment of the faithful Christian’s spiritual development as a faithful Christian. Importantly, for Buber’s Kierkegaard, the goal of becoming a Single One is “the entry into a relation.”24 However,

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this is an exclusive relation to God, one which excludes all other relations. Becoming a Single One necessitates a renouncing and distancing of oneself from the “crowd” in order to “stand alone before God.” The Single One’s relation with the divine “is the relation which in virtue of its unique, essential life expels all other relations into the realm of the unessential.”25 This view is harshly criticized by Buber, for whom God resides in and through the meeting with the other person. Distinguishing between the two relations, as does Kierkegaard, is a woeful existential and theological mistake: “The man who loves God and his companion in one . . . receives God for his companion,” he affirms.26 Tellingly, Buber frames the contrast between Kierkegaard and his own view as that between a biblically informed Jewish position, and a distorted Christian position. The principle that “God and man are not rivals,” Buber informs, is drawn from the Old Testament, and is similarly proclaimed by the exemplary Jew Jesus, Kierkegaard’s purported “master.”27 This interpretation of Kierkegaard—both highly influential and fiercely rebuked—is the background for the discussion of Heidegger in “What Is Man?.” The relational structure of human existence, the hallmark of Buber’s thought, is retained in Kierkegaard, and thus “Kierkegaard’s Single One is an open system, even if Open solely to God.”28 On the other hand, in Heidegger, whose thought system is founded upon Nietzsche’s word “God is dead,” this relational structure is absent. Thus, the secularization of Kierkegaard by Heidegger comes to mean that “he severs the relation to the absolute for which Kierkegaard’s man becomes a Single One.”29 In other words, the only “essential” relation in Kierkegaard’s scheme, the individual’s relation to God, “is completely lacking in Heidegger.”30 Kierkegaard’s Single One can pronounce “Thou,” but “in Heidegger’s world there is no such Thou.”31 If Buber’s contestation of Kierkegaard is that for him the Religious is distinct from and superior to the Ethical, then the problem with Heidegger is that he rejects both. Buber’s conclusion is therefore that Dasein “is a closed system.”32 While Buber finds the exclusivity of the bond with God in Kierkegaard’s scheme problematic, he nevertheless affirms the conception of the human as a self-transcending, relational creature, who makes sense of its being through a genuine dialogical exchange, which for Buber is proper Jewish religiosity. In contrast, what remains of Dasein in Heidegger’s depiction is a short-circuiting, absolutized, and self-relational inwardness, an “anxiety and dread before nothing.”33 A full treatment of the bearings of I-Thou and Mit-sein, as well as an inquiry into how Buber both acknowledges and dismisses Heidegger’s claims that Dasein is in-the-world, with-others, and care-full, go beyond the limitations of the present essay.34 I will only note in brief that condemning Dasein to monadic solitude and overlooking Heidegger’s insistence on Dasein’s transcending, ecstatic, and co-historicizing character reveals that Buber



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discounts the “ontological difference” that Heidegger found so important, and attributes to Heidegger the ontology of presence that the latter sought to problematize. This implicit point is made explicit in a later account, where Buber—­displaying a debt to Kierkegaard’s novel understanding of “existence”—confesses with respect to Heidegger’s ontological project, “for me a concept of being that means anything other than the inherent fact of all existing being, namely, that it exists, remains insurmountably empty [unüberwindlich leer].”35 Commenting on Heidegger’s assertion that “Being is the nearest thing,” Buber continues, “if by the last sentence, however, something other is meant than that I myself am, and not indeed as the subject of a cogito, but as my total person, then the concept of being loses for me the character of genuine conceivability that obviously it eminently possesses for Heidegger.”36 Buber’s reprimand of Heidegger’s program is philosophical insofar as it attacks what it perceives as a deficient existential depiction of human existence. There is also a clear social and ethical aspect to the critique of Dasein’s solipsism. But also discernable is what can be termed (perhaps against Buber’s wishes) an implicit theological impulse. For it becomes apparent that the issue raised in the Christian discourse regarding the implicit urge toward secularization in the Lutheran doctrine of the radical externality of God, as displayed in Kierkegaard and reflected in Heidegger, is taken up by Buber from his own idiosyncratic perspective. The Danish thinker, Buber argues, promotes not only an asocial but also an “acosmic [akosmische] worship of God,” and thus Kierkegaard’s world is for all intents and purposes bereft of God.37 This accusation pertains to Buber’s more general understanding of Kierkegaard as typifying a Gnostic sensitivity inherent in Christianity, a sensitivity to which his understanding of Judaism stands in stark opposition.38 As the heritor of Kierkegaard, Heidegger is also associated to the Gnostic tradition, as illustrated in the godless world he depicts. Partial confirmation of this designation is found in Buber’s identification of a dualistic Gnostic resonance in Dasein’s absorption in das Man. According to Buber, the concept of the self as fleeing from itself and the implied imperative to “fetch itself back” from its dispersal in das Man is “a gnostic concept by which the gnostics meant the concentration and salvation of the soul which is lost in the world.”39 Here, in an undeveloped manner, Buber anticipates Hans Jonas’ more famous identification of Heidegger as a modern Gnostic.40 Of course, any discussion of Heidegger and Gnosticism must take into account that in contrast to the Gnostic radical devaluation of history, for Heidegger, the centrality of the dimension of history as the site of eignetliche Existenz cannot be exaggerated. In Buber’s eyes, of course, Heidegger’s godless history cannot uphold actual authenticity. But this point allows us to further deduce that, in accordance to Buber’s presuppositions, Heidegger is to be seen as the logical outcome of Kierkegaard. For insofar as the encounter with the human Thou and

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the Eternal Thou is concomitant, as it is for Buber, then the Kierkegaardian radical rift between God and man and the exclusion of relations with other people for the sake of a relation with the absolute decouples the coexistence of the inter-human and human-God moment. It follows that, according to Buber, rather than safeguarding the relation to the divine from earthly relations, this split harmfully severs the possibility of enacting either relation. Thus, insofar as God is achieved in and through the meeting with the other qua Thou, then the denouncing of this relation by Kierkegaard leads to an increased distancing of God from man. This tendency is adopted and radicalized by Heidegger. It can be argued that, from Buber’s perspective, if we flesh out the underlying logic of Kierkegaard’s pious Single One to its ultimate conclusion, we reach the double isolation of Dasein’s monological existence. For Buber, therefore, that Heidegger secularizes Kierkegaard means not only the stripping of religious content, but more importantly the impediment to the possibility of a dialogical relation between man and God. It involves the adoption of the structure of the solitary individual standing vis-à-vis God, without the relational comportment toward God and hence without God. Buber, for example, is aware that Heidegger’s appropriation of the Kierkegaardian notion of “crowd” in his notion of das Man involves the dislodging of religious content and context. But more important than this for him are the implied ramifications for relationality and dialogue.41 This understanding of secularization dovetails what Buber will later call “the eclipse of God,” which is not the death or disappearance of God, but rather the emergence of an obstacle between God and man.42 Secularization, in Buber’s conception, is inseparably bound to a monological account of human existence. The overall tenor of Buber’s reading of Heidegger is no doubt critical, but it is important to notice that Buber not only perceived himself as leveling a critique, but also as offering an alternative, a Jewish alternative, to Heidegger. Indeed, the entire lecture course was understood by many as a response to major strands of the German philosophical tradition, performed by the Jewish philosopher, forced to escape Germany in the eve of horror.43 In particular, Buber’s dialogical principle—exemplified, in his view, primarily in the Jewish bible and the Hebrew prophets, as well as in exalted milestones in Jewish history (Jesus, Essenes, Hasidism)—is pitted against the monological existence promoted by Heidegger. This is apparent, for example, in Buber’s comment on Heidegger’s highly significant composite character of the notion of Dasein. Buber implies that the exaggerated weight put on the abstract Sein causes Heidegger to inadequately attend to the actuality and specificity of da. In Buber’s understanding, only when I encounter with all my being the presence of someone who is not myself, “only then am I ‘really’ there: I am there [Ich bin da] if I am there [da], and where this ‘there’ is, is always determined less by myself than by the presence of this being which



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changed its form and its appearance.”44 Significantly, Buber alludes to the biblical call of Ayequa, Where art thou?, and to the reply Hineni, I am here— Ich bin da—to express the biblical-dialogical alternative to Heidegger’s Call of Consciousness. Buber thus adopts Heidegger’s terminology only to then turn it against its origin: Heidegger’s conception of Dasein does not fulfill its purported standards, because only the relational I in its encounter with a Thou is correctly conceivable as Dasein. The consequence of this line of thought is that not Heidegger and his monological godless framework, but rather Buber and his biblically attuned dialogical account offer a portrayal of the human’s being that should be rightly termed “Dasein.” Certainly, this critical comment manifests the typical ontic vantage point from which Buber reproaches Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, a fact that generates a repeated misrepresentation of the latter’s position.45 It also demonstrates that the two thinkers have a shared, rather than divergent, set of philosophical presuppositions. But above all, it illustrates Buber’s belief that his own dialogical framework is better equipped than Heidegger’s philosophy to correctly account for the actual nature of human existence.46 HUGO BERGMANN Bergmann, a classmate of Franz Kafka’s and pupil and friend of Buber’s, emigrated to Palestine already in the 1920, yet he remained remarkably up-to-date with contemporary European philosophical strands. As attested in his personal notes, already in 1931 and perhaps even earlier, Bergmann seriously engaged with Heidegger’s thought. A file in Bergmann’s archive, entitled “Heidegger, Sein u. Zeit,” holds a notebook of comments and reflections on this work.47 Heidegger also occupied the main portion of a lecture course on existential philosophy Bergmann delivered in the academic year of 1931/1932. As testified by typed Hebrew and English transcripts, this course consisted of five lectures on Kierkegaard, two on Dilthey, and seven on Heidegger.48 This is a little-known but striking historical fact: one of the first places in the world were Heidegger’s thought was taught in an academic setting as an important philosophical milestone was the newly established Hebrew University in Palestine. In his first major book, Hogey Hador (Contemporary Thinkers) (1935), Hugo Bergmann surveys recent philosophical attempts to reinstate a new conception of reality in the wake of the overall disorientation prompted by Kant, who unsettled previous understanding of our point of contact with reality.49 As with Buber, here too the longest and most elaborate chapter is dedicated to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, read as a manifesto of existential philosophy. Originally published as a three-part essay in 1933–1934, this

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chapter eloquently reviews the main themes of Heidegger’s magnum opus. In its opening paragraph, Bergmann declares that “a deep religiosity” animates Heidegger’s program, yet it is a secularized religious impulse, for “the gates of the heavens are not open for this kind of religiosity. The painful spur of religion drives it, yet it does not accept religion’s consolations.”50 Throughout the extensive overview of Sein und Zeit, Bergmann repeatedly specifies the de-theologized moments in Heidegger’s existential analysis. For example, the quest for existential meaning and authenticity is interpreted religiously, as a desire for transcendence. Yet this desire will remain unfulfilled, Bergmann maintains, in the cold, technical, and godless Heideggerian world, marked above all by solitude and finitude. That Sein und Zeit sketches a world in which “the gates of the heavens are locked shut, no path leads upwards” is illustrated by the fact that Dasein is thrown into the world, yet “who threw him into this world and what is found beyond his birth and death? To this question there is no answer, and the question is not even asked in the first place.”51 Similarly, the “Call of Consciousness” is described as a form of existential repentance. The religious overtones of this notion are further exemplified by the two biblical examples culled to highlight the direct and personal character, and awakening effect, of the Call. “We can remind here how God calls “Abraham” in Genesis,” or in the book of Samuel: “Again the Lord called, ‘Samuel’!”52 These biblical references notwithstanding, Bergmann nevertheless makes clear that we should not mistakenly conclude that the Call “comes from another world” or confuse it with a “divine epiphany [bat kol].”53 Bergmann is aware that Heidegger says this call bears eine fremde Stimme (SZ, 277), while at the same time it is one which Dasein calls sich selbst. He is similarly aware that explaining the call through recourse to “divine forces or theological explanations” is to misrepresent Heidegger’s intentions. For what is offered is an immanent, secularized account of revelation wherein God’s external call from transcendence is replaced by Dasein calling upon itself. This de-theologized interpretation of Heidegger is further exhibited in Bergmann’s explication of the notion of Guilt (Schuld) in terms of existential sin. Inauthentic Dasein “can err,” Bergmann asserts, “but it is unworthy of sin.” Conversely, “only whoever resolves its authentic being can also bear sin. . . . Sin in this respect is a unique privilege of man, a privilege that is abandoned with the fleeing into das Man. Sin is the testimony for the ability of Dasein’s being-itself.”54 This secularized existential notion of sin is unrelated to the believer’s being-toward-God or to divine law. In Heidegger, “sin does not originate in a particular action or lack of a particular action.” Rather, “it is an existential predicate pertaining to the very root of existence, because existence in its foundation is knotted in negation. The ‘no’ is an inseparable element of man.”55 Specifying the origin of the overarching negation looming



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over Dasein’s fallen existence, Bergmann confirms that it is “the Christian teaching, and in particular the Protestant Christianity idea of original sin that is bequeathed from Adam finds its philosophical expression here. Man is sinful in his essence.”56 Bergmann’s chapter makes clear that Heidegger’s habit to secularize theological categories is most evident when he is put up against Kierkegaard. Bergmann explicitly affirms that the mark of “Kierkegaard and Protestant religion in general” is obvious in Heidegger’s early work.57 Specifically, two moments are singled out. The first is Heidegger’s appropriation of Kierkegaard’s notion of Repetition [Gjentagelsen] for his notion Wiederholung, both of which indicate a resolute taking over of the imposed present reality in a moment of existential fulfillment. Yet a radical transformation takes place in Heidegger’s conceptual adoption: “Kierkegaard’s thought is entirely fastened to faith, while Heidegger constructs his system without a God.”58 The recognition of the all-encompassing divine grace that lay in the heart of Kierkegaard’s notion of Repetition is completely absent in Heidegger, for whom even Dasein’s freedom of choice and resoluteness “cannot brighten the dark element of our existence, the passive root, and does not eliminate the nothing, the negation, for we have been thrown into life.”59 The second moment is the reworking of Kierkegaard’s concept of the Moment [Øieblikket] in Heidegger’s Augenblick. “In Kierkegaard,” Bergmann observes, “this notion has a theological meaning: the moment is eternity penetrating into temporality.” On the other hand, in Heidegger’s world, in which the denial of such an eternity is implicit, this moment pertains to Dasein’s freedom, from within its finite and immanent existence, to fulfill itself. It should be noted that while Bergmann is aware of the thoroughly Christian character of Kierkegaard’s thought—in later explications he will highlight the gap between Kierkegaard and Judaism60—it is nevertheless noteworthy that the biblical references presented in relation to Kierkegaard are all from the Old Testament, and the multitude of invocations of the New Testament and other Christian sources that permeate the Danish philosopher’s writings go unmentioned. The impressions of the discrepancies between Heidegger and Kierkegaard the reader is left with are not only of those between a Christian theologian and a secular philosopher, but of those between a biblically oriented existentialist and an atheist existentialist. It is thus strongly implied that while Heidegger secularizes Kierkegaard, his philosophy is pitted, by extension, against the biblically anchored Jewish faith as well. However, at the same time, and more forthrightly, it is clear that it is the Protestant framework of Kierkegaard that Heidegger secularized, as noted earlier with respect to his incorporation of the Protestant understanding of the Original Sin and human fallenness. In Bergmann’s analysis, then, Kierkegaard represents both the theologically inadequate Protestant-Christian position that lies in

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the heart of Heidegger’s godless and negative depiction of human existence, and the positive position of biblical faith. The juxtaposition with Kierkegaard stresses Heidegger’s Christian heritage and lack of theological neutrality, but it also highlights through contrast the deficient, secularized Heideggerian worldview. What is in any event clear is that in Bergmann’s view the philosophical formulations that emerge from Heidegger’s secularized Christian-Protestant assumptions are deeply flawed. While “the profound seriousness of [Heidegger’s] system is due to this religiosity,” it nevertheless promotes a defective “religiosity without God.”61 By secularizing Kierkegaard, Heidegger essentially adopts the negative moments of Protestant anthropology—the fallen, sinful, guilty, finite, and anxiety-fraught human existence—without its complementing affirmative moments of glory and redemption in divine eternity. Heidegger retains, in a philosophical register, this tradition’s account of original sin and overarching “no” marking human existence, but rejects the elevation of life in faith. “Existence is essentially sinful, because it is damned in the curse of negation.”62 Death hovers over Dasein’s fallen being, but the promised life and salvation in God is absent.63 Bergmann’s descriptive intent does not allow him to present an alternative to Heidegger in this chapter, although this does not mean that an alternative is not offered. As he admits in the introduction to the book, the problematic bequeathed by Kant has actually found its satisfactory solution in the idea of the “correlation” between the human and the divine that has been introduced by Hermann Cohen in his late Jewish work, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (1919, second edition, 1929), to which the final chapter is dedicated. “The problem of knowing, that is, of according the world and our reason, can be solved only by the view that the world and human reason were both created by divine reason. We can know the world and reason because the world was created, and we were created in the image of God.”64 In Bergmann’s existentially focused interpretation, the discordance between the world and human reason that comes to bear in the Kantian problem of knowing produces a sense of existential alienation, an expulsion from an initial and fundamental sense of belonging and concord in and with the world. Cohen’s philosophical resolution allows to bridge the existential gap and thus carries with it redemptive qualities. This later development in Cohen’s thought, Bergmann makes clear, is one profoundly tied to his return to Judaism. The Kantian schism between man and world can be overcome through the Jewish teaching of their shared divine origin. This is a contribution to philosophy from the sources of Judaism, manifesting that Judaism “still bears a message to the entire world.”65 This point is emphasized, for example, when Bergmann states that not the younger Cohen, engulfed by Kant’s antireligious idealism, but only “the elderly Cohen, who returned to his Judaism,” would



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have dared to formulate the fundamental correlation between God and man, upholding without compromise divine otherness and human worthiness. He further explains the idea of “the creation of human reason by divine reason” through recourse to the Jewish prayer book: “You graciously endow knowledge to man and teach understanding to mortals” [Ata ḥonen la’adam daat u’melamed le’enosh bina]. In his presentation, Bergmann follows Rosenzweig’s influential interpretation of Cohen’s Religion der Vernunft as representing a break in his thought. Unlike Cohen’s earlier idealism, in which religion was ultimately subsumed into ethics, now he signals toward a unique and irreducible status of religion in the system of philosophy. As a matter of fact, Bergmann actually goes further than Rosenzweig and claims that Cohen has not been radical enough and that in fact the notion of “correlation” exceeds the boundaries of philosophy and enters squarely into the realm of religion. However, while Bergmann to a large extent follows Rosenzweig’s interpretation of Cohen, it is noteworthy that he does not share his assessment of Heidegger. In a short essay entitled Vertauschte Fronten (1929), Rosenzweig claims that Heidegger advocates for “a philosophical position [that is] precisely our position, that of the new thinking.”66 In this newspaper article, Rosenzweig makes no mention of the possible theological charge of Heidegger’s existential anthropology, and his enthusiastic self-affiliation with the German philosopher does not, at the very least, rule out a possible link between Heidegger and Jewish thought. In contrast, by highlighting its religious undertones and by depicting it as a secularized account of Kierkegaard’s thought, Bergmann evidently positions Heidegger’s philosophy in opposition to Judaism.67 Over against Heidegger’s secularized Protestant program, wherein Dasein’s existence is inextricably marred by negation and can be made sense of without any recourse to God, Bergmann posits a modified version of Hermann Cohen’s late Jewish account, according to which human existence is not only unintelligible without a definite reference to God but is also categorically affirmed by its correlation to God. In terms of the content and structure of Bergmann’s Hogey Hador, Heidegger’s secularized Christian anthropology is rejected in the stead of an improved account of Cohen’s Jewish thinking, which he takes to be a philosophically coherent and religiously stimulated Jewish humanism. EPILOGUE The recent publication of Heidegger’s personal notebooks makes clear that already in the 1930s he perceived the monotheistic tradition and specifically Judaism as a manifestation of and contributor to the overall nihilistic march of the West. Jewish teachings, such as the creator God, and Jewish attitudes,

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such as the calculative tendency toward being, hold sway over the West and keep it blind to what is most urgent. From these notebooks we also learn that Heidegger perceived his own philosophy to be the antidote to this crisis. Mirroring this mindset, part of the early Jewish reception of Heidegger, as demonstrated by Buber and Bergmann, diagnosed the godless world depicted by Heidegger as a manifestation of the ubiquitous modern spiritual crisis. And similarly, they both posited what they plainly took to be the Jewish approach, be it Buber’s dialogical existence or Bergmann’s improved account of Cohen’s late Jewish philosophy, as its antithesis and cure. In their understanding, the modern spiritual crisis represented by Heidegger is rooted in, among other things, the theological defects embedded in his philosophy. This insight is captured in the reading of Heidegger as a secularized Kierkegaard: his philosophy reflects the godless, albeit secularized, condition of the modern person. In this respect, these Jewish readings echo the dominant strand of Heidegger’s early Christian reception and its denial of Sein und Zeit’s alleged theological neutrality. This secularization, moreover, has been made possible by the presuppositions of a specific theological tradition that attempts to make sense of the human’s being without direct recourse to God. Indeed, it is implied that philosophizing about human existence without taking God into account, as Heidegger does, will inherently generate an erroneous account of human beings. Following this misleading theological tradition results, for Buber, in the monological existence of Dasein, and for Bergmann, in the incorrigibly forsaken and negative depiction of human being. Unlike their Christian counterparts, Bergmann and Buber counter Heidegger’s philosophy and its secularized adoption of dubious theological precepts with their respective constructions of Judaism, which they take to be both impervious to these shortcomings and an adequate alternative to them.68 We may add that Lewkowitz, who was briefly mentioned above, makes a similar point: that Heidegger’s godless world, in a similar fashion to the world portrayed by Karl Barth and by Friedrich Nietzsche, leads to nihilism, and that the Jewish message, preaching “to understand and shape the world out of God” and that the path to true being implies “the knowledge of the good, the knowledge of God,” can serve as its remedy. There is much more that can be said about the early Jewish reception of Heidegger, its complex ties to the reception of Kierkegaard, and its more general reflection of the way the Christian–Jewish difference was framed at the time. I will conclude, however, with the following point: the early Jewish reception of Sein und Zeit is thoroughly conditioned by the pressing historical, political, and cultural situation of Jews in Germany. Evidently, it is embedded in the “discourse of contribution” that was characteristic of Jewish modernity in Europe and particularly dominant in the Jewish grappling with the deterioration of their condition and status in the 1920s and 1930s.69



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Through their critical engagement with Heidegger, Buber and Bergmann exhibit the view shared by many of their fellow Jews, according to which the impact of Judaism transcends national and confessional boundaries, for it is Jewish religiosity and the specific notions or sensibilities it harbors that holds the salvific key to the exacerbating decadence of the European spirit as a whole. The episode of the early encounter with Heidegger’s philosophy, therefore, serves as a site in which Jewish thinkers justify and advocate for the relevance of Judaism, as they construct it, for the modern world. NOTES   1 This essay has benefited from thoughtful comments by Ido Ben-Harush and Asaf Ziderman, to whom I wish to extend my thanks.   2 On Kierkegaard’s reception in the German speaking world, see the highly informative essay by Heiko Schulz, “A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 307–419; Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), especially 339–92; Samuel Moyn, “Anxiety and Secularization: Søren Kierkegaard and the Twentieth-Century Invention of Existentialism,” in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 279–304; Edward Baring, “Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism before Sartre,” History of European Ideas, 41, 4 (2015): 470–88; for Kierkegaard in association with Heidegger, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Existentialism and the Philosophy of Existence,” and “Marburg Theology,” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanely (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994).  3 Hannah Arendt, “Søren Kierkegaard,” Frankfurter Zeitung, January 29, 1932, reprinted in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt, 1993), 44.   4 Cf. John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 169, as well as 150–54, 166–76, 181–99. Unless noted otherwise, the translations from German and from Hebrew are my own.   5 There is nevertheless much scholarly debate over the nature of Kierkegaard’s role in Sein und Zeit. Cf. for instance John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 60–92; Vincent McCarthy, “Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and in Full View,” in Kierkegaard and Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 95–125; Patricia J. Huntington, “Heidegger’s Reading of Kierkegaard Revisited: From Ontological Abstraction to Ethical Concretion,” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 43–65; Jörg

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Disse, “Philosophie der Angst: Kierkegaard und Heidegger im Vergleich,” Kierkegaardiana, 22 (2002): 64–88; Judith Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 71–75.  6 Quotes from Sein und Zeit are taken from Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 2008). Henceforth “SZ.”   7 Fritz Heinemann maintained in his influential analysis of contemporary philosophy that the Protestant framework shared by Kierkegaard deeply animates Heidegger’s existential anthropology, and that the portrayal of Dasein is the outcome of an integration of a secularized Kierkegaard and Dilthey. Thus in Heidegger’s account, unlike Kierkegaard, the main question is not “how can a person become a Christian again, but: how can a man become a man again?” Fritz Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1929), 373.  8 This view is repeated in his 1946 Brief über den Humanismus. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenologie und Theologie” (GA 9: 45–77).  9 Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 151–68. 10 Edward Baring, “A Secular Kierkegaard: Confessional Readings of Heidegger before 1945,” New German Critique 124, 42, no. 1 (February 2015): 67–97. The title of the present essay is deliberately in dialogue with Baring’s essay, to highlight that early confessional readings of Heidegger were not limited to Christian circles alone but rather consisted of Jewish engagements, which participated in similar discourses and employed shared conceptual frameworks, as well. 11 This is true with respect to Gerhard Scholem, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Joseph Soloveitchik, to mention only a few. On this see, for instance, Joanna Nowotny, “Kierkegaard und das ‘jüdische Denken’: Die Rezeption Sören Kierkegaards in der jüdischen Moderne im Kontext des Orientalismus,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1 (2016): 235–56. Worthy of note is Scholem’s early enthusiasm of Kierkegaard, which led him to declare in his diary on May 21, 1915, “Kierkegaard is a Jew!” This enthusiasm gradually diminished, and finally Scholem retracted his previous announcement and acknowledges that “I erred grievously when I believed that Kierkegaard had been a Jew.” See Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913–1919, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 53, 146. 12 Albert Lewkowitz, “Vom Sinn des Seins. Zur Existenzphilosophie Heideggers,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, 80 (1936): 194. 13 Ibid., 193. 14 Ibid. 15 Another, slightly later example is Max Brod, who adds Franz Kafka to a Kierkegaard-Heidegger-Judaism triangle comparable to the one advanced by Buber, in his Diesseits und Jenseits (Winterthur: Mondial Verlag, 1947), vol. I, 230–40, 269, and vol. II, 179–83, 322–33. Brod’s discussion builds on and develops his earlier analysis in Christentum, Judentum and Heidentum (München: Kurt Wolf Verlag, 1921). 16  Professor Yirmiyahu Yovel, whom I approached for his recollections of Heidegger’s reception in the early decades of Israel, noted to me that it was



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Bergmann’s book that “was the source I as a teenager and others first learnt about Heidegger’s philosophy” (e-mail communication with author, April 23, 2016). 17  David Novak, “Buber’s Critique of Heidegger,” Modern Judaism, 5, no. 2 (May 1985): 125–40. 18 Published in German initially as Martin Buber, “Die Verwirklichung des Menschen: Zur Anthropologie Martin Heideggers,” Philosophia, 3, no. 1–4 (1938): 289–308; republished later in Das Problem des Menschen (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1943), 94–126, and in Hebrew as Peney Adam: Behinot Beantropologia Philosophit (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1962), 63–84. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotes here will be taken from the English edition, Martin Buber, “What Is Man?” in Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), 118–205. 19 In a forthcoming essay, entitled provisionally “Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber: Early Encounters,” I discuss Heidegger’s early critical comments on Buber and argue that an early, albeit brief, critique of Heidegger can be found already in Buber’s 1929 essay “Zweisprache.” 20 Martin Buber, Ich und Du, in Werke, vol. 1, 77–170. 21 Buber, “What Is Man?” 168 (translation amended). 22 Buber, “What Is Man?” 174, 179. 23 Buber, “Die Frage an den Einzelnen,” in Werke, vol. 1, 215–65. The quotes here will be taken from the English edition: Buber, “The Question to the Single One,” Between Man and Man, 40–82. Kierkegaard’s presence is noticeable throughout Buber’s development as a thinker. A helpful overview of Buber’s reception of Kierkegaard is Peter Šajda, “Martin Buber: ‘No-One can Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself’,” Kierkegaard and Existentialism, 33–61. 24 Buber, “The Question,” 50. 25 Ibid. This critique of Kierkegaard’s exclusivism and the superiority he grants to the religious over the ethical is already alluded to in Buber’s Ich und Du, 124. It is also repeated in his “Gottesliebe und Nächstenliebe,” in Die chassidische Botschaft, Werke, 3 (1963): 861–79; Der Chassidismus und der abendländische Mensch, in ibid., 935–47. An upfront confrontation with Kierkegaard is found in “Von einer Suspension des Ethischen,” in Buber, Gottesfinsternis, in Werke, vol. 1, 589–93. 26 Buber, “The Question,” 65. 27 Ibid., 51. 28 Buber, “What Is Man?” 171. 29 Ibid., 174. 30 Ibid., 178. 31 Ibid., 172. 32 Ibid., 171. 33 Ibid., 172. 34 An elaborate discussion of the two thinkers can be found in Meike Sigfried, Abkehr vom Subjekt: Zum Sprachdenken bei Heidegger und Buber (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2010). Haim Gordon’s The Heidegger-Buber Controversy: The Status of the I-Thou (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001) does not, I believe, provide a helpful account on this matter.

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35 Buber, “Religion und Modernes Denken,” Gottesfinsternis, in Werke, vol. 1, 557–58. Quote here taken from Buber, Eclipse of God (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 73. 36 Ibid., 74. 37 Ibid., 52. 38 Cf. Rémi Brague, “How to Be in the World: Gnosis, Religion and Philosophy,” Martin Buber: A Contemporary Perspective, edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 133–47; Yaniv Feller, “From Aher to Marcion: Martin Buber’s Understanding of Gnosis,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, 20 (2013): 374–97; Robert Erlewine, Judaism and the West (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), 78–104. 39 Buber, “What Is Man?” 174. 40 Jonas reached this conclusion only in the early 1950s, although he constructively drew on Heideggerian conceptuality for his analysis of ancient Gnosticism in his dissertation, supervised by Heidegger and partially published in 1934 as Gnosis und spätantiker Geist. And see Yemima Hadad’s essay in the present collection, “Fruits of Forgetfulness: Politics and Nationalism in the Philosophies of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger.” 41 Buber pairs Kierkegaard’s “crowd” and Heidegger’s Das Man once again in his 1958 essay “Dem Gemeinschaftlichenfolgen,” although the reference to Heidegger is for some reason omitted in Maurice Friedman’s English translation. Compare Buber, Werke, vol. 1, 471, to Buber, “What Is Common to All,” The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays, trans. Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988), 96. 42 Cf. Buber, “Religion und Realität,” Gottesfinsternis, Werke, vol. I, 511–21. 43 Novak, “Buber’s Critique.” 44 Buber, “What Is Man?” 166. 45 Buber’s analysis of Heidegger’s notion of “guilt” (Schuld) suffers from a similar flaw, as does his analysis of death, wherein he accuses Heidegger of holding the exact position regarding death to which he, Heidegger, objects. See “What Is Man?” 164, and compare to SZ §48, 245. For a general critique of Buber’s understanding of Heidegger, see Jeffrey Goldstein, “Buber’s Misunderstanding of Heidegger: Being and the Living God,” Philosophy Today, 22, no. 2 (1978): 156–67. 46 Yemima Hadad correctly points in her essay in the present collection to the structural analogy between Heidegger’s Seinsvergessenheit and what she calls Buber’s Dialogsvergessenheit. Of course, this “narrative of historical forgetfulness” was widely prevalent at the time, and is in fact a recurring theme among many of Heidegger’s (Jewish) students in their construction of a response and alternative to his thought: Leo Strauss spoke of the forgetting of political philosophy, Hannah Arendt of the public sphere, Emmanuel Levinas of the other, Hans Jonas of the notion of Physis, and so forth. 47 Shmuel Hugo Bergmann Archive, 4*1502 04 101b, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. The handwriting, alas, is barely decipherable. 48 Ibid. I have thus far been unable to determine whether the lecture course continued in 1933, and if so, whether the discovery of Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies has



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had any effect on its presentation or content. For comparison, in France, Georges Gurvitch’s lectures on phenomenology at the Sorbonne between 1928 and 1930 included an initial presentation of Heidegger’s philosophy. Alexandere Kojève’s famous seminar on Hegel in the École - Pratique des Hautes - Études - between 1933 and 1939 (initiated by Alexandere Koyeré in 1932), discussed Phenomenology of Spirit but was saturated by his philosophico-anthropological reading of Sein und Zeit. See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 15–18. In the United States, the systematic teaching of Heidegger was a postwar phenomenon. I wish to thank Martin Woessner, author of Heidegger in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), for this information. Tellingly, Heidegger’s philosophy was researched and taught in Japan even before the publication of Sein und Zeit by various Japanese students who studied with him in the early 1920s in Freiburg. I wish to thank Hamauzu Shinji for his permission to consult his unpublished paper, “Phenomenology and Analytical Philosophy in Japan: A Historical Study.” 49 Hugo Bergmann, Ho’gay - Ha’Dor (Tel Aviv: Mitspa Publishing House, 1935). 50 Bergmann, Ho’gay - Ha’Dor, 122. 51 Ibid., 122–23. 52 Ibid., 151. Cf. Genesis 22: 11; 1 Samuel, 3: 4–8. 53 Bergmann, Ho’gay - Ha’Dor, 123. 54 Ibid., 152. 55 Ibid., 153. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 123. 58 Ibid., 155. 59 Ibid. 60 Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Hogim - U’Maaminim (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1959), 111–37; Idem, Haphilosophia Hadialogit Mekierkegaard ad Buber (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1974), 22–163. Noting the exception that proves the rule, Bergmann suggests: “if I am not mistaken, we are permitted to see in this category of Repetition a very close proximity of Kierkegaard to Judaism, a proximity that is not usually present in his writings” (ibid., 113–14). 61 Bergmann, Ho’gay - Ha’Dor, 165. 62 Ibid., 164. 63 A similar assessment is put forth by Ernst Cassirer, “The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms” in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. IV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 206. 64 Bergmann, Ho’gay - Ha’Dor, 11. 65 Ibid., 224. 66 Franz Rosenzweig, “Vertauschte Fronten,” Der Morgen, 1 (April 1930): 85–87. In English: Franz Rosenzweig, “Transposed Fronts,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and ed. Paul Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000), 150. An updated bibliography of the scholarly trend of

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juxtaposing Rosenzweig and Heidegger can be found in Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 303–4n. 20. 67 Although in Palestine, it is unlikely that Bergmann was unfamiliar with Rosenzweig’s article. 68  Emmanuel Levinas is another contemporary paragon of this confrontational positioning of Judaism vis-à-vis Heidegger. See Samuel Moyn, “Judaism against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinas’s Response to Heidegger and Nazism is the 1930s,” History and Memory, 10, no. 1 (1998): 25–58. In a later work, Who Is Man? (1965), Abraham Joshua Heschel similarly confronts Heidegger’s philosophy through the framing of Jewish biblical thought versus paganism. On this see Daniel Herskowitz, “God, Being, Pathos: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Theological Rejoinder to Heidegger,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 26, no. 1 (March 2018) (forthcoming). 69 It is interesting that despite the fact that both Buber and Bergmann found Heidegger’s philosophy unacceptable, neither based their rejection on his infamous and by then widely known political affiliation. In fact, Heidegger’s Nazism plays no role in their respective analyses. In 1935, Bergmann mentions only briefly and in passing Heidegger’s ties to the “German revolution of 1933.” One finds nothing pertaining to Heidegger’s Nazism in Buber’s 1938 address, although we can infer from the fact that the lecture on Heidegger was published already in 1938, immediately and independently, five years before the rest of the lecture series, that Buber did wish it to be read in the light of present historical events. This will no doubt change in the future—both thinkers continued to wrestle, from a theological standpoint, with Heidegger’s philosophy and politics throughout their life. In his 1952 “Religion und Modernes Denken,” Buber openly traces Heidegger’s despised politics to theological shortcomings. On Bergmann’s complicated, theologically anchored response to Heidegger’s Nazism, as well as his efforts to bring Heidegger’s work to the Hebrew reader, see Daniel Herskowitz, “Heidegger in Hebrew: Translation, Politics, Reconciliation,” in New German Critique (forthcoming). Yet at least in this stage, it is telling that their dispute with Heidegger focuses strictly on philosophical and theological argumentation. There is much to be said about the shared völkish focus of Buber (and other Zionist thinkers) and Heidegger. At this point, it should be noted in brief that Buber’s orientation was humanistic and his Volk was ultimately to extend universally; this is not the case with Heidegger. In the present volume, Michael Fagenblat’s intriguing chapter brings together Heidegger’s national-historical project and Zionism.

Part III

HEIDEGGER AND JEWISH THOUGHT

Chapter 10

Heidegger’s Seyn/Nichts and the Kabbalistic Ein Sof: A Study in Comparative Metaontology Elliot Wolfson

In this chapter, I shall argue that Heidegger’s notion of Seyn, which is arguably one of the critical terms of his inceptual thinking, can be fruitfully compared to the theosophic speculation on the infinite nothingness attested in kabbalistic texts. Both Heidegger and the kabbalah can be viewed as embracing a path of thought radically open to the unthought, or in the language of Nicholas of Cusa, the not-other that is consummately other. What Heidegger calls Seyn is marked semiotically by kabbalists as Ein Sof, the name that names that which is beyond all names.1 Simply put, my hypothesis is that the nameless name posited by the kabbalists corresponds to Heidegger’s understanding of the nothing (Nichts) that is the beyng (Seyn) given in but always recoiling from the superfluity of beings (Seiende) that make up the world, what he referred to in Was ist Metaphysik? (1929) as the repelling gesture (abweisende Verweisung) of the nothing in relation to beings as a whole (GA 9: 114; 90).2 Here it is worth noting that in the Brief über den »Humanismus«, written to Jean Beaufret in 1946, Heidegger observed, “But if the human being is to find his way once again into the nearness of being [Nähe des Seins], he must first learn to exist in the nameless [Namelosen]” (GA 9: 319; 243), a passage that Derrida already compared to the kabbalistic idea regarding the “unnameable possibility of the Name.”3 And let us recall as well the comment attributed to the Inquirer—a literary cipher that clearly represents Heidegger—in Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache, written in 1953–1954 on the occasion of a visit by Tezuka Tomio (1903–1983) of the Imperial University of Tokyo,4 in response to why the terms “hermeneutics” and “phenomenology” were dropped from his philosophical lexicon: “That was done, not—as is often thought—in order to deny the significance of phenomenology, but in order to abandon my own path of thinking [Denkweg] to namelessness [Namenlosen]” (GA 12: 114; 29).5 The namelessness to which Heidegger alludes is the Seyn 177

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that is identical to the Nichts, the beyng that is nothing, which is not to be decoded as the identity of antimonies characteristic of the Hegelian dialectic, but as the belonging-togetherness (Zusammengehörigkeit) of what persists as irreducibly divergent. From Heidegger’s metaontological perspective, Hegel’s dialectic is still metaphysically conditioned to the extent that the nothing is delineated as the negativity of objectivity, which is the only negative than can be thought from within the identity of beingness and thinking. Heidegger thus criticized Hegel by arguing that his concept of negativity “is not a negativity because it never takes seriously the not [Nicht] and the nihilating [Nichten],—it has already sublated the not into the ‘yes’ ” (GA 68: 47; 37). To extricate oneself from this conundrum, one must be mindful of the fact that beyng is not to be construed as a being—according to the ontological difference between Seyn and Seiende—and, correspondingly, nothing is not something negative (weder negativ), a negativum, but “higher than everything ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in the totality of beings” (GA 65: 266–67; Rojcewicz and VallegaNeu, 209–10). To say, therefore, that beyng and nothingness are the same is not an affirmative declaration of their nondifference, the identity of their nonidentity, but a questioning of their juxtaposition, the bridging that sustains the distance of what is bridged. Nothingness, on this score, is no longer conceived as nonbeing (Nichtseiende) in the sense of a negative determination (negative Bestimmung); it is rather the nullity (Nichtiges) or negativity (Nichthaftigkeit) of beyng, the “highest gift” imparted as the “self-withdrawing” of the refusal (ibid., 246; 193–94). The nothing is the “essential trembling of beyng itself,” which “is more than any being [seiender als jegliches Seiende]” (ibid., 266; 209), the “nonbeyng” (Nichtseyn) that is the essence (Wesen) that occurs essentially in the nonessence (Unwesen), the “concealed gift” of “the nihilating in beyng itself” (das Nichtende im Seyn selbst), which “un-settles [ent-setzt] us into beyng and into its truth” (ibid., 267; 210). Only then do we “recognize that nothingness [das Nichts] can never be reckoned, or balanced, against beyng . . . because beyng (i.e. nothingness) is the ‘between’ [Inzwischen] for beings [das Seiende] and for divinization [die Götterung]” (ibid.). Quite remarkably, Heidegger deploys mythical and polytheistic language to depict the fissure (die Zerklüftung) “in virtue of which beyng is the realm of decision [das Entscheidungsreich] for the battle among the gods. This battle is waged over their advent [Ankunft] and absconding [Flucht]; it is the battle in which the gods first divinize and bring their god into decision [Entscheidung]. Beyng is the trembling of this divinization [die Erzitterung dieses Götterns]” (ibid., 244; 192). In the same spirit, Heidegger wrote in his notebooks, “Beyng—self-refusal as the trembling of the divinizing of the last god [die Verweigerung als die Erzitterung des Götterns des letzten Gottes]. The



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trembling is a keeping open [das Offenhalten]—indeed even the openness of the spatiotemporal field [Offene des Zeit-Spiel-Raums] of the ‘there’ [des Da] for Da-sein” (GA 94: 429; 311). Although this rhetoric seems distant from the kabbalists, Heidegger shares with them a disruption of the solipsism of the metaphysical ground of thought thinking itself, the Aristotelian description of God as the unmoved mover,6 a conception that had a huge impact on the philosophical-theological imagination of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as it evolved in the middle ages. In place of this relatively benign conception, Heidegger proffers a portrait of beyng that is decidedly belligerent: the primordial fissure inflames the spirit of struggle (Kampf) among the gods in which they divinize and bring their god into decision, the self-refusal of beyng, the trembling of the divinizing of the last god. On the surface, the word “divinizing” seems redundant, but the redundancy underscores that the combat itself is essential to the theopoetic act of decision that, ironically, results in the flight of the calculable gods (Götter) and the dawning of the incalculable essence of divinity (Gottwesen), a double concealment in virtue of which the nonbeing of being dissembles as the being of nonbeing and apparent divinities become indistinguishable from true divinities, the one as the other are present only in the absence of their presence and thus are manifest in the nonappearance of their appearance (GA 65: 406; 322).7 The trembling results, moreover, in the openness of the spatiotemporal field—the abyss as time-space—that makes possible the “appropriating event” that “destines the human being to be the property [Eigentum] of beyng” (ibid., 263; 207). To speak of Seyn as Er-eignis, and of the belongingness (Zugehörigkeit) of the latter as the property that is the distinguishing destiny of the human being, does not imply that the event can ever “be represented immediately and objectively. The appropriation is the oscillation between humans and gods and is precisely this ‘between’ itself and its essential occurrence which is grounded through and in Da-sein” (ibid.). What Heidegger wished to communicate is clarified by another comment in the Beiträge, “The inventive thinking [Er-denken] of beyng leaps into beyng as the ‘between’ [Zwischen] in whose self-clearing essential occurrence the gods and humans come to mutual recognition, i.e., decide about their mutual belonging. As this ‘between,’ beyng ‘is’ not a supplement to beings, but is what essentially occurs such that in its truth they (beings) can first attain the preservation proper to beings” (ibid., 428; 338). Heidegger thus emphatically denies that the notion of god should be equated with the nonmetaphysical event of beyng: “The god is neither a ‘being’ [»seiend«] nor a ‘nonbeing’ [»unseiend«] and is also not to be identified with beyng. Instead, beyng essentially occurs in the manner of time-space as that ‘between’ which can never be grounded in the god and also not in the human being (as some objectively present, living thing) but only in Da-sein” (ibid., 263; 207). The between into which the thinking of beyng leaps is the

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clearing wherein humans and gods come to the recognition of their mutual belonging, which implies the concurrence rather than the coincidence of what remains separate: The event consigns [übereignet] god to the human being by assigning [zueignet] the human being to god. This consigning assignment is the appropriating event [Diese übereignende Zueignung ist Ereignis]; in it, the truth of beyng is grounded as Da-sein (and the human being is transformed [verwandelt], set out into the decision of being-there [Da-sein] and being-away [Weg-sein]), and history takes its other beginning from beyng. The truth of beyng, however, as the openness of the self-concealing [Offenheit des Sichverbergens], is at the same time transposition [Entrückung] into the decision regarding the remoteness and nearness of the gods and so is preparedness for the passing by of the last god. The event is the “between” in regard to both the passing by of the god and the history of mankind. (ibid., 26–27; 23; emphasis in original)

Humanity and divinity thus meet in the space of the between that preserves their distinct identities such that they abide in the distance of intimacy (GA 95: 252; 195). That beyng is identified as the between—concurrently revealed and concealed by Dasein (GA 65: 31; 27) as the playing field of time space [Zeit-Spiel-Raum] within which “the sheltering of the truth of beings interpenetrates with the absconding and advent of the gods” (GA 65: 63; 50)—is another way for Heidegger to articulate the idea that beyng is nothing, the void that engenders and sustains—by withdrawing from—all beings. AUTOEROTIC QUIVERING, NOETIC JOUISSANCE, AND DIVINIZING THE INFINITE An interesting conceptual parallel to the Heideggerian motif of the trembling that comes into the open as self-refusal can be found in the teachings promulgated by Israel Saruq8 about the jouissance (sha‘ashu‘a)9 associated with the initial withdrawal or constriction (ṣimṣum) of the light of infinity.10 The utilization of the term sha‘ashu‘a to depict God’s relation to the Torah prior to the creation of the world is found in older rabbinic sources, based on the description of wisdom in Proverbs (8:30) and echoed in Psalms (119:77, 92, 143).11 The Saruqian materials reflect the connotation of this term in the writings of previous kabbalists,12 including the zoharic compilation, where it is connected most frequently to the theme of God taking delight with the souls of the righteous in the Garden of Eden,13 and Moses Cordovero (1522–1570), where it connotes, inter alia, the infinite’s contemplation of its own essence, which is beyond human comprehension,14 the first stirrings of the divine will to



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be garbed in the sefirotic gradations.15 The erotic element exposed in the latter sources is latent in some of the passages in Cordovero’s voluminous corpus.16 One of the bolder formulations of this myth in an anonymous Lurianic text begins with the startling assertion, “Before all the emanation Ein Sof was alone bemusing himself” (qodem kol ha-aṣilut hayah ha-ein sof levado mishta‘ashe‘a be-aṣmuto).17 From the continuation, which describes the emergence of the letter yod—a cipher for the seminal point of divine wisdom—from the infinite, we can deduce that this text is a commentary on the notoriously difficult zoharic passage linked to the first verse of Genesis, “In the beginning of the decree of the king, the hardened spark engraved an engraving in the supernal luster” (be-reish hurmenuta de-malka galif gelufei bi-ṭehiru illa’ah boṣina de-qardinuta).18 The theme of jouissance to mark the demiurgic playfulness of Ein Sof—I have rendered the term sha‘ashu‘a as bemusement to capture in a Lacanian fashion the dual connotation of erotic rhapsody and noetic bliss19—is highlighted by Saruq: You must know that prior to everything, the blessed holy One bemused himself [mishta‘ashe‘a be-aṣmo], that is, he was joyous and he took delight. . . . And from the quivering [ni‘anu‘a] of the spark the Torah was created . . . Know that the quivering that arose from the bemusement consisted of ten quiverings, corresponding to the yod, and they are the ten letters whence every tenfold derives.20 When the blessed holy One was being amused prior to the [existence of the worlds of] emanation, creation, formation, and doing, and before everything, the blessed One filled all the worlds, that is, [he was] the place wherein it was appropriate for all the worlds to be created, he made a garment [levush] from the light of his essence, which is the Torah.21

Paraphrasing this text, Scholem wrote: “In the beginning Ein-Sof took pleasure in its own autarkic self-sufficiency, and this ‘pleasure’ produced a kind of ‘shaking’ (ni‘anu‘a) which was the movement of Ein-Sof within itself. Next, this movement ‘from itself to itself’ aroused the root of Din, which was still indistinguishably combined with Raḥamim. As a result of this ‘shaking,’ ‘primordial points’ were engraved in the power of Din, thus becoming the first forms to leave their markings in the essence of Ein-Sof.”22 Scholem does not explicitly dwell on the fact that the self-pleasure is a form of erotic arousal.23 However, there is no room to doubt that this was the intent of Saruq’s elaborate myth of the infinite bemusing himself, and especially the trembling whence the garment of the Torah was concocted from the primordial points in the space within Ein Sof, an utterly paradoxical conception, since it is predicated on attributing a spatial component to the infinitivity that cannot be circumscribed spatially.24 The sexual innuendo of this mythic structure is more pronounced in a second passage wherein a metaphor from

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human sensuality is provided to illuminate the nature of the autoerotic throbbing on the part of the infinite: Just as when a person is happy, he pleasures himself [mishta‘ashe‘a be-aṣmo] and plays with himself [we-soḥeq beino u-vein aṣmo], and this toying comes from the spleen, which is entirely the remnants of the blood. Thus, the toying comes to a person from the side of the dregs, which is the force of judgment. Similarly, as it were, Ein Sof, blessed be he, saw that these worlds that he imagined emanating had the necessity for judgment in order to reward and to punish, and had he not amused himself there would not have been a place for judgment, and there would not have been place even for the engraving that he engraved in his essence, for it is judgment in relation to Ein Sof. . . . On account of this, he amused himself, for he is like water or fire that quivers when the wind blows upon it, and it shines like lightning to the eyes, and glistens hither and thither. Ein Sof, may he be blessed, quivered in himself [mitna‘ane‘a be-aṣmo], and he shone and sparkled from within himself to himself, and that quivering is called bemusement [sha‘ashu‘a], and from that bemusement . . . there comes to be the power of the measure of the engraving [shi‘ur ha-ḥaqiqah], which is the Torah in potentiality. . . . From the bemusement there is aroused the potency of the force of judgment [koaḥ de-khoaḥ ha-din] and from the potency of that force there comes to be the measure of the engraving, as was mentioned, which is the Torah in potentiality. Since Ein Sof, blessed be he, is absolutely incomposite [pashuṭ be-takhlit ha-peshiṭut], every dimension of movement or image of movement in him is judgment in relation to himself. . . . This engraving is alluded to in the section of Zohar on Genesis: “In the beginning of the decree of the king, the hardened spark engraved an engraving in the supernal luster.” That is, in the beginning when the bemusement arose in his incomposite will, as we said, which is the beginning of the measure that he conceived in relation to himself so that he would have dominion, and all dominion is from the aspect of judgment. . . . Know that from this bemusement there arose the engraving . . . and this engraving is the light, that is, the Torah that comes to be from the bemusement as has been mentioned. Thus, the measurement is in relation to Ein Sof and the engraving is the Torah.25

For the purposes of this analysis, I will focus on the motif of the shaking that produced the “primordial points” engraved by the power of judgment (din) suffused in the sea of mercy (raḥamim); from these points emerged the primal Torah, the weaving of the garment (arigat ha-malbush)26 out of the 231 gates of letter permutations,27 what Scholem ably called “the linguistic movement of Ein-Sof within itself.”28 One of the clearest presentations of Saruq’s attempt to explain the first actions of the infinite is found in Shever Yosef whence we can deduce that the logic of the myth transposes the normal sequencing of cause and effect.29 The self-pleasuring of the infinite arouses and therefore can be said to instigate the attribute of judgment, but that erotic



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gesture is only possible because of the force of judgment and thus the selfpleasuring is the upshot of the divine compression. In a heterosexual fantasy, phallomorphically conceived, the desire of the male to project is inspired by imagining the female vessel that will receive the seminal overflow. Speaking of the arousal of the force of judgment is not the same as speaking about the creation of the force of judgment; what is aroused existed already in potential.30 Summarizing Saruq’s teaching, the seventeenth-century kabbalist Naftali Bachrach writes: “They said concerning the secret of wisdom that it is from the light that emanates from the hidden source, and its source is called the ‘source of wisdom,’ and it is the secret of the world of the garment [olam ha-malbush],31 which is called the primordial Torah, and concerning it R. Eliezer said, ‘Before the world was created he and his name alone were,’32 and the Tetragrammaton in its permutations comprises all of the world of the garment.”33 Employing one of the oldest Jewish esoteric doctrines centered on the identity of the Torah and the Tetragrammaton,34 Bachrach’s paraphrase stresses that the name, which is the garment, functions in this context as the attribute of judgment—coeternal with Ein Sof—that propelled the linguistic delimitation of the limitless light. In another passage, Bachrach adds words of his own to the Saruqian text that he copied verbatim but without attribution to elucidate the nexus between writing, jouissance, and judgment: “From the abundance of happiness [that God] contemplated in relation to the righteous, he amused and delighted himself [mishta‘ashe‘a u-mit‘anneg] how he would have a holy nation, and from that movement there was born the potency of the force of judgment, that is, the constricting of the letters [qimmuṣ ha-otiyyot], which come to be from the vowel-points [nequddot] that were in the trace [reshimu] that remained within the circle [after the withdrawal],35 for each and every letter has a boundary on paper.”36 Carrying the metaphor forward, Bachrach interprets the division of the infinite consequent to the movement of self-contemplation into the aspect of the encompassing (maqqif) and the aspect of the encompassed (muqqaf), the former correlated with the engraving and the latter with the surface that is engraved, which is identified as the root of the “dough of all the worlds,”37 that is, the prime matter whence all beings are fashioned.38 The implication of the Saruqian doctrine is drawn out as well by the Lithuanian kabbalist Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv (1841–1926).39 In his typically methodical manner, he notes that the sha‘ashu‘a of the infinite is the “aspect of the arousal [hit‘orerut] and the movement [tenu‘ah] that quivers within himself, and every movement is in the aspect of constriction [qimmuṣ] and contraction [ṣimṣum] from place to place. That is to say, the movement that is in the bemusement [sha‘ashu‘a] is the aspect of the contraction from himself to himself, and thus there are two aspects, the forces that quiver and

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the contraction that is made between the forces, and this is the quivering [ni‘anu‘a] and the contraction. These quiverings . . . are in the aspect of the glowing [hitnoṣeṣut], for by means of the bemusement the glowing of many lights was revealed and produced, and this is the aspect of the quivering.” Eliashiv goes on to write that the glimmerings disclosed through the bemusement of the infinite are the aspect of points. These points and the contraction are identified respectively as mercy and judgment—expressions of the more concealed aspects of the will (raṣon) and thought (maḥashavah)—the former is the quality of illuminating and the later the bestowing of boundary. By the abundance of the illumination, the points were joined together until they formed the letters of the Torah.40 The Lurianic doctrine spotlights an important factor in the gender implications of the kabbalistic symbolism: the instrument of writing corresponds to the phallus and the letters written to the semen, but the act of arche-writing, portrayed as sexual self-excitation, is facilitated by the activation of feminine judgment in the predominantly masculine and merciful world of infinity (olam ein sof).41 When the mythopoiesis is charted psychoanalytically, it can be said that the will of the infinite to procreate is impelled by the narcissistic yearning of the male to expand the contours of self into the space of the feminine, to extend phallically and to inseminate the vessel that receives the overflow in order to give boundary to the boundless. The female thus signifies the potential for heterogeneity ensconced in the homogeneity of the infinite. The psychological drive may be viewed as an application of the theosophic myth or, alternatively, the theosophic myth may be viewed as an application of the psychological drive. Be that as it may, the decisive point is that the creative urge to project is rendered symbolically in the image of Ein Sof toying with himself, which eventuates in the linguistic gesticulation of shaking, the graphic act of engraving. Elaborating the Saruqian reading of the aforementioned zoharic image, Bachrach remarked that the engraving of the hardened spark involves the “letters that stand in the world of delights [olam ha-sha‘ashu‘im] that surrounds the light of Ein Sof.”42 While it is clear that Saruq and those who followed him embellished the zoharic myth, the notion of the primordial act of the infinite as a linguistic movement—primarily an act of writing (gelifu or ḥaqiqah) but one that is at the same time an act of speaking43—that involved sexual selfgratification is found already in older sources and is not the innovation of later kabbalists. It would not be incorrect to say that the complicated symbolic structures in this version of Lurianic kabbalah are midrashic enhancements of zoharic passages. That this has been the view of kabbalists themselves, even if academic scholars have not always been sensitive to this issue, is attested, for instance, in the comment of Ḥayyim Ickovits (1749–1821), the Lithuanian kabbalist better known as Ḥayyim of Volozhin, on the identification of God



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and the Torah found in several zoharic homilies, “The supernal source of the holy Torah is in the uppermost of the worlds that are called the worlds of the infinite [olamot ha-ein sof], the secret of the hidden garment [sod ha-malbush ha-ne‘lam] mentioned in the mysteries of the wondrous wisdom from the teaching of our master the Ari, blessed be his memory, for it is the beginning of the secret of the letters of the holy Torah.”44 In comparing the themes of the fissure and the trembling of Ein Sof in the Saruqian version of Lurianic kabbalah and the application of similar motifs to the originary leap of Seyn in Heidegger’s inceptual thinking,45 we must note the obvious discrepancy: although in both instances there is a mythical underpinning to the conceptual formulation, for Heidegger these issues seemingly have no overt or implicit sexual meaning as we find in the kabbalistic texts. However, setting aside this difference, some astonishing affinities can be noted. First, just as Heidegger speaks of the leap as a fissure and self-refusal of beyng that is experienced as a trembling, an enfolding that is an unfolding to create the doubling of the ontological difference, so the kabbalists envision the inception as the withdrawing of the infinite from itself to itself, the rending of the beginning characterized by the pulsating rapture (sha‘ashu‘a) and the ensuing rupture (beqi‘ah)—a caesura that is expressed, based on a zoharic idiom, as the infinite breaking and not breaking through its own aura (baqa we-lo baqa awira dileih)46—or the folding of the garment (qippul ha-malbush).47 The commencement is thus marked by the secret of the fold, the doubling of difference, encoded semiotically in the opening letter of the Torah, the beit in the word bere’shit, the lingual-mathematical encryption for the antecedent that is consequent.48 Second, for both Heidegger and the kabbalists, these images attempt to describe the theopoetic process by which the divine becomes manifest iconically as the image that makes absently present the supreme hiddenness and imagelessness of the Godhead beyond God, a theme known to Heidegger from both Eckhart49 and Schelling50 and affirmed independently by kabbalists since the thirteenth century. Third, the mystery of being, according to the kabbalah and Heidegger, is disclosed through the garment of language whose task is to manifest the self-concealing grounding of the stillness that is the origin of speech. NOTHINGNESS AND THE UNVEILING OF THE VEIL OF BEING The nothingness to which the kabbalists and Heidegger allude from their variant perspectives is not a substance subject to the antinomy of being and nonbeing but rather the dynamic event of the immanent transcendence that is the transcendent immanence, that is, the event wherein transcendence and

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immanence are juxtaposed in the sameness of their difference prior to the division into transcendence and immanence dictated by the dyadic logic of traditional onto-theology. We can impute to both the kabbalistic Ein Sof and the Heideggerian Seyn/Nichts the remark of Schelling that “the Godhead, in itself, neither is nor is not [weder ist noch auch nicht ist]; or in another expression . . . the Godhead is as well as is not [sowohl ist als auch nicht ist]. It is not in such a way that Being [Seyn] would befit it as something differentiated from its being [Wesen], since it is itself its Being and yet Being cannot be denied to it precisely because in it Being is the being itself.”51 In a previous study, I articulated this metaontological way of contemplating the kabbalistic infinity by comparing it to the Mahāyāna Buddhist identification of the indiscriminate emptiness (śūnyatā) and the discriminate suchness (tathātā) of all that exists. The advantage of this interpretive stratagem is to distance Ein Sof from any suspicion of an ousiology or substance-oriented metaphysics. Infinity is the nothingness before the rift between nothing or something, the nothingness that overcomes all differentiation, including the differentiation between differentiation and nondifferentiation, the self-emptying emptiness that must be emptied of the distinction between empty and nonempty.52 Ein Sof is the nonessence that is the essence of all things that have no essence, the essence that is the exemption of essence.53 Relatedly, Heidegger writes in the Beiträge that the abysmal ground is neither emptiness nor fullness, presumably because the fullness of beings is the emptiness of beyng and the fullness of beyng the emptiness of beings (GA 65: 384; 303).54 In another aphorism from that work, Heidegger explains that the less that humans adhere to the beings they find themselves to be, the nearer do they come to being (Sein), and then he adds parenthetically “Not a Buddhism! Just the opposite” (ibid., 171; 134).55 His protestation notwithstanding, we are justified to juxtapose his thinking about Seyn as Nichts and Buddhist reflections on the radiant emptiness of be-ing.56 Just as the emptiness in the madhyamaka tradition is the linguistic and conceptual marker to denote the lack of intrinsic nature, and not itself a reified lack of such a nature,57 so for Heidegger, the claim that beyng is nothing is meant to criticize the core assumption of fundamental ontology that being is the primum signatum, the signified that requires no signification, in Derridean terms, the transcendental that is logocentrically essential insofar as in its absence all signifiers lose their signification and are reduced to chaos. This is the import of the following comment in the postscript to Was ist Metaphysik? (1943): “The nothing, as other than beings, is the veil of being [Das Nichts als das Andere zum Seienden ist der Schleier des Seins]” (GA 9: 312; 238). In the fifth edition of this work (1949), Heidegger added the following note: “The nothing. That which annuls, i.e., as difference, is as the veil of being, i.e., of beyng in the sense of the appropriative event of usage [Das Nichts: das Nichtende,



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d.h. als Unterschied, ist als Schleier des Seins, d.h. des Seyns im Sinne des Ereignisses des Brauchs]” (ibid., 312 n. a., 238 n. a.).58 That the nothing is the veil of being means that beyng is revealed through the nothing by which it is reveiled. Beyng is thus not to be conceived metaphysically as the presencing unmasked as absence but rather as the absence that is both absent as presence and as the presence that is present as absence. My suggestion is reinforced by the statement concerning the aforementioned lecture placed by Heidegger in the mouth of the Japanese sage in Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache,59 “We marvel to this day how the Europeans could lapse into interpreting as nihilistic the nothingness of which you speak in that lecture. To us, emptiness is the loftiest name for what you mean to say with the word ‘Being’.” Through the Inquirer, Heidegger responds that the confusion is indeed related to his use of the term Sein, a term that belongs to the “patrimony of the language of metaphysics,” but which has the same meaning as nothingness or emptiness, the essential being that we try to think as the other (das Andere) to all that is present or absent (GA 12: 103; 19).60 This is confirmed anecdotally by the exchange between Heidegger and Bikkhu Maha Mani, a Buddhist monk from Thailand, reported by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet. After Heidegger opined on the topic of releasement and openness to mystery, he asked Mani what meditation means for “Eastern humanity.” The monk responded that meditation entails concentration and gathering oneself without exertion of the will to the point that the “I” dissolves and all that remains is the Nothing. “But this Nothing is not nothing; it is just the opposite—fullness. No one can name this. But it is nothing and e­ verything—fullness.” Petzet adds that Heidegger understood the words of Mani and remarked, “This is what I have been saying throughout my whole life.”61 Long before Heidegger, the kabbalists ascertained that if one speaks of nothingness as nothing, one negates the negation of the negation and thereby renders the negative as positive. The mutual insight of Heidegger and the kabbalists is captured pithily in the language of a verse cited in Asaṅga’s Mahāyānasaṃgraha, a base text of the Yogācāra school of the Mahāyāna tradition: “The nonbeing of beings appears as being. . . . Thus it is like a magic trick,/Like the empty sky.”62 Piercing through the epistemological sleight of hand, one with eyes truly awakened from the dichotomy of wakefulness and nonwakefulness sees that in its being nonbeing is without the pretense of being, even as one so enlightened knows that the nature of truth, the empty sky beyond words and images, can only be transmitted through forms that accord with the hardwiring of the human brain.63 From the standpoint of absolute truth (paramārtha-satya), form is empty, and hence there is neither inherent nature nor intrinsic cause and effect, but there is no access to this truth except by way of conventional truth (saṃvṛti-satya) predicated on affirming the very conventions that the enlightened consciousness rejects.64

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According to the tetralemic logic of the middle way (madhyamaka) in the Mahāyāna tradition—S is P; S is ~P; S is both P and ~P; S is neither P nor ~P65—to say that form and emptiness are the same and not different implies that they are not the same nor not different. The characteristic of emptiness— language inevitably fails me—is to be discerned from the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle, the chiasm where the reality of the unreality is both and therefore neither real nor unreal, where the existence of the nonexistence is both and therefore neither existent nor nonexistent, where the difference of the nondifference is both and therefore neither different nor nondifferent. The formulation of Brook Ziporyn, based on the Tiantai School of Chinese Buddhism, can be applied suitably to Heidegger and the kabbalists: “To be a being at all is already, for us, to be that X as non-X, or the Asness that is the showing of Xness and non-Xness. Neither the collapsing of Being into beings nor the separation of the two, which makes of Being another being, are possible from this perspective; as we saw already in the early Mahāyāna argument about a relationship between a thing and its marks, we have here a relationship for which both identity and difference are woefully inadequate predicates.”66 There are limits of thought that cannot be crossed except as the limits that cannot be crossed.67 The culmination of the mystical path is sometimes expressed—especially prominent in Sufism—as seeing the face of the unseen without a veil, but as I have argued in previous publications, what this means is that one comes to see that one cannot see the face but through a veil, which is to say, the final veil to unfurl is the veil that there is no veil to unfurl.68 Similarly, the self-effacing interface of Ein Sof—the plenitude that is the emptiness of the emptiness of emptiness, that is, the emptiness that is itself empty, and therefore identical and not identical to the nonemptiness of the emptiness that is the nonlocality of infinite space69—lights up as the showing of the being of nonbeing enshrouded in the nonbeing of being. This is attested explicitly by kabbalists, who assert of the infinite that it is “neither something nor nothing” (lo yesh we-lo ayin).70 Expressed metaontologically, nothingness (ayin) can be addressed only by the interrogative “what” (mah), which signifies the privation of whatness (he‘der ha-mahut), the threshold of our thinking, since we cannot speak of this nothing as being in existence (meṣi’ut).71 The kabbalistic insight underlies the insistence of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) that the decisive return of the human spirit to the sphere of “pure belief” will take place when the “last subtle shell of corporeality” collapses, the shell that consists of the “attribution of existence in general to divinity [yaḥas ha-meṣi’ut bi-khelalut el ha-elohut], for in truth all that we define by existence is incalculably removed from divinity.” The “shadows of this negation” may resemble the heresy of atheism—denying the existence of God—but in reality, the expunging of any proclivity to represent the divine unity anthropomorphically or anthropopathically is the “highest



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level of faith.”72 Even if Ein Sof is referred to verbally as a being, the apophatic presumption that renounces our ability to know anything about that being undermines viewing it ontologically. As the Italian kabbalist Raphael Immanuel ben Abraham Ḥai Ricchi (1688–1743) concisely summarized the point, the First Cause is “called in the mouth of all veritable kabbalists by the name Ein Sof, for in truth there is no end [ein sof] to his existence, unity, power, and providence. . . . And if we come to investigate what is the essence of his existence [mahut meṣi’uto], our thoughts grow weary and we do not comprehend it at all.”73 In a manner consonant to Heidegger’s ponderings on the nature of Seyn, the kabbalistic infinity disturbs the philosophical portrayal of God as the summum ens and, consequently, provokes the negation of the negation of the negative,74 a reclaiming of negativity that no longer dialectically contains its own other within the identity of the same, a nullity (Nichtigkeit) that is not the negation of some positivity, à la Hegel’s idea of true infinity as the negation of negation, opposed to the bad or negative infinity that fails to enable the absorption of the other into the infinite whole and thus does not free itself from the finite.75 The kabbalistic equation of whatness and nothingness is well encapsulated by Heidegger’s assessment that nothingness is “higher than everything ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in the totality of beings” (GA 65: 266; 210). If we presume, as I think we must, that for kabbalists all being is the manifestation of infinity—the light that, paradoxically, is described in one zoharic passage as not existing in light (nehora de-lo qayyema bi-nehora),76 that is, the light so resplendently hidden that it sheds the garment of light in which it is attired, and in so doing denudes the darkness—and any manifestation of that light is concomitantly an occlusion thereof, insofar as the concealment cannot be revealed unless it is concealed in the guise of being revealed,77 then it follows that the nothingness of Ein Sof can be beneficially described by what Heidegger refers to—akin to Böhme’s Nichts, the nonbeing that is the ground and unground of being, and hence the self-negation that is simultaneously present in and absent from the coming to presence of all beings—as the nihilating (Nichtige) of the “original ‘not’ ” (ursprünglichen »Nicht«), the ripeness (Reife) of being manifest and hidden through discrete beings in nature (ibid., 268; 211). Insofar as “the ‘not’ [das Nicht] belongs to the essence of beyng”—the ripeness expressed as the turning in the event (Kehre im Ereignis)—“beyng likewise belongs to the ‘not.’ In other words, what has genuinely the quality of the ‘not’ [das eigentlich Nichtige] is the negative [das Nichthafte] and is in no way whatever mere ‘nothingness’ [»Nichts«] as the latter is grasped through the representational denial of something [die vorstellende Verneinung des Etwas], on the basis of which denial one then says: nothingness ‘is’ not [das Nichts »ist« nicht]. But nonbeyng [Nichtseyn] essentially occurs, and beyng [Seyn] essentially occurs; nonbeing essentially occurs in the distorted essence [das Nichtsein west im Unwesen], beyng essentially

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occurs as permeated with negativity [das Seyn west als nichthaft]” (ibid., 267; 210; emphasis in original). We can assign to the kabbalistic infinity the same property: it is not the nothingness that is not, which is to say, a nothingness defined representationally as the negation of something, but rather the nonbeyng that occurs as the beyng permeated with negativity. To interpret Ein Sof in this way challenges the widespread but unexamined assumption that the kabbalistic infinite should be classified ontotheologically, which in Heideggerian terms is predicated on the assumption that ontology, the question of beings, is necessarily a matter of theology, insofar as the ultimate metaphysical substance, that which is beyond beings (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) or the origin of beings (ἀρχή τοῦ ὄντος) possesses the character of the divine (θεῖον) or the god (θεός) (ibid., 211; 165). Brushing against this grain, I would argue that instead of viewing Ein Sof as a substance, or even a hypersubstance, the substance beyond substance as the One of the Neoplatonic tradition is often described, it is preferable to grasp it as a marker that symbolizes the interrelatedness of all things in the same way that the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising contests the reification of substance as an enduring essence. The nondifferentiated oneness of the nothingness of infinity indicates, therefore, that the reality of all beings that issue therefrom, or that are comprised therein, is nonexistent. Medieval kabbalists did not have the language to communicate this idea adequately, and lamentably, in the course of time even Ein Sof was calcified linguistically, as we see, for example, in the expression ein sof barukh hu, the infinite, blessed be he, a turn of phrase that translates the nontheistic—or maybe atheistic—notion into a theistic register.78 As Cordovero rightly noted, however, it is not justified to attribute the traditional expression ha-qadosh barukh hu, the “blessed holy One,” to Ein Sof because the words barukh hu intimate the existence of a being that is influenced (mushpa) by another, that is, an effect and not a cause, and the infinite cannot be considered the effect of any cause.79 Even to think of Ein Sof as a cause requires a break with the conventional understanding of causality insofar as the latter requires some degree of reciprocity between cause and effect that is interrupted by the assumption that we have a cause that does not comport the capacity to be an effect. The apophasis with regard to Ein Sof is so austere that there is no letter and no name that can be ascribed to it; like Heidegger’s Seyn, the infinite is beyond divinity, the nihility that exceeds and dispels our theopoetic confabulations. EPILOGUE The dominant question of late has been Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism and his avowal of overtly crude anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism.80



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These topics have been amply explored in several essays in this volume (Thomä, Babich, Brumlik, Fried, and Trawny). Related to, but somewhat separate from, these matters is the question of the status of the Jew in Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte (Di Cesare), or the critical reading of Heidegger by Jewish thinkers (Thau-Goodman, Hershkowitz). In this chapter, I have pursued a different line of inquiry. My contribution seeks to take seriously the challenge of whether we can identify a modality of Jewish thought that can be placed in juxtaposition to or in conversation with Heidegger (Dolgopolski), even though my emphasis is on comparative metaontology as opposed to political epistemology (Lapidot) or the adaptation of Heidegger’s political ontology to elucidate the theologico-political imaginary in the contemporary state of Israel (Fagenblatt). Here it is pertinent to recall that Heidegger expressed the difference between selfsameness (Selbigkeit) and identicalness (Gleichheit) by noting that the quality of belonging togetherness (Zusammengehörigkeit) applies to the former and not to the latter. It is precisely the identicalness that precludes the justification of thinking of them as belonging together (zusammenzugehören) (GA 77: 39; 25).81 Things belong together, in other words, only because of the unbridgeable chasm that keeps them disparate; sameness is discernible through difference but not in a dialectical way that sublates the disjuncture of their conjunction. My effort to plumb the convergences and divergences of Heidegger’s notion of Seyn/Nichts and the kabbalistic Ein Sof adopts this methodological perspective. Although there are historical-textual channels to explain the possible influence of Jewish esoteric doctrine on Heidegger—most likely unbeknownst to him and therefore in the category of what is left unthought in his thinking—my focus is rather on contemplating the manner of the belonging-together of these two patterns of thinking on the nature of being. The comparison of kabbalah and Heidegger yields reflections on the same within which the differences shall become more conspicuous in the light of common ground.82 Given Heidegger’s personal involvement with National Socialism, his disparaging use of some standard anti-Semitic tropes, his steadfast refusal to honor the victims of Nazi brutality, and his concerted effort to avoid engaging any Jewish thinker or text, it is all the more remarkable that the path of his thinking can be illumined by and can illumine the symbolic language of the Jewish esoteric tradition. NOTES   1 Obviously, the tradition concerning the nameless God is found in older sources from Late Antiquity, in part reflecting the Platonic notion that the absolute being has no proper name, an idea that was eventually appropriated by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology and/or religious philosophy. See Gedaliahu G.

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Stroumsa, “A Nameless God: Judaeo-Christian and Gnostic ‘Theologies of the Name’,” in The Image of the Judaeo-Christians in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature, edited by Peter J. Tomson and Doris Lambers-Petry (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 230–43; Robert J. Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God from the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 9–18.   2 It is of interest to note the interpretive gloss that Heidegger added in the fifth edition of 1949, cited in Pathmarks, 90 n. b (GA 9: 114 n. a): “Repelling: beings by themselves; gesturing toward: the being of beings” (ab-weisen: das Seiende für sich; ver-weisen: in das Sein des Seienden). On the comparison of the kabbalistic Ein Sof and Heidegger’s understanding of Seyn/Nichts, see George Steiner, Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 32: “Though, strictly considered, unthinkable, the En Sof of the Kabbahlists [sic], becomes the root of roots, the font of fonts. The mundane nihilist would forget, would suppress from preconscious witness, the infinite agency in absentia of the abyss of God, of that which irradiated the fruitful turbulence of chaos. . . . Precisely as Heidegger posits, after Hegel, there cannot ‘be Being’ without the eclipse, the inward contraction of non-being. But non-being which, according to the mystics, ‘is so that Being can be,’ presses on existence as does a vacuum on a membrane.”  3 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 137; L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 201. Concerning this passage, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 172.  4 See Lin Ma, Heidegger on East-West Dialogue: Anticipating the Event (New York: Routledge, 2008), 19–23.   5 In “Das Wesen der Sprache,” written in 1957–1958, Heidegger elicits from the fact that the guest goes unnamed in Stefan George’s “Das Neue Reich” the wisdom that the nameless (Ungenannt) remains the highest favor of the poet. See GA 12: 173; Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 79.  6  Timothy Jussaume, “Heidegger and the Nothing: Transcendence after Metaphysics,” PhD dissertation, Villanova University, 2014, vi.  7 Gregory Tropea, Religion, Ideology, and Heidegger’s Concept of Falling (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 126–27.   8 In scholarly literature, there is debate whether Saruq was a genuine disciple of Luria, an independent and perhaps less authentic interpreter of Lurianic doctrine, part of an independent circle of kabbalists in Safed that evolved alongside Luria’s school, or perhaps someone who transformed Cordoverian themes in a Lurianic key. For some representative studies, see Gershom Scholem, “Rabbi Israel Sarug: A Student of Luria?” Zion 5 (1940): 214–43 (Hebrew); Ronit Meroz, “R. Yisrael Sarug—Luria’s Disciple: A Research Controversy Reconsidered,” Da‘at 28 (1992): 41–50 (Hebrew); idem, “Faithful Transmission versus Innovation: Luria and His Disciples,” in Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:



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50 Years After, edited by Peter Schäfer and Joseph Dan (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 257–75; idem, “The School of Sarug—A New History,” Shalem 7 (2002): 151–93 (Hebrew); Moshe Idel, “Between the Kabbalah of Jerusalem and the Kabbalah of Israel Sarug,” Shalem 6 (1992): 165–73 (Hebrew); idem, “Italy in Safed, Safed in Italy: Toward an Interactive History of Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah,” in Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy, edited by David B. Ruderman and Giuseppe Veltri (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 254–56; Sharron Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug: A Lurianic-Cordoverian Encounter,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 14 (2011): 158–87. Finally, it is worth noting that Abraham Cohen de Herrera, who studied with Saruq in Ragusa and transmitted oral teachings in his name, considered him to be a disciple of Luria. Moreover, he attributes the doctrines of sha‘ashu‘a and malbush to Luria directly and not to Saruq. See Abraham Cohen de Herrera, House of Divinity (Casa de la Divinidad), Gate of Heaven (Puerta del Cielo), annotated translation with introduction by Nissim Yosha (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2002), 7–8 (Hebrew). See the passage from the Puerta del Cielo, 488, where contraction (ṣimṣum), measurement (shi‘ur), attribute (middah), bemusement (sha‘ashu‘a), movement (tenu‘ah), and alteration from pleasure (ḥilluf me-oneg) are identified and all ascribed to the master (rav), that is, Luria. For the original Spanish, see Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Puerta del Cielo, edition, introduction, and notes by Miquel Beltrán (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2015), 291, and English translation in Abraham Cohen de Herrera, Gate of Heaven, translated with introduction and notes by Kenneth Krabbenhoft (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 295. See Gerold Necker, Humanistische Kabbala im Barock: Leben und Werk des Abraham Cohen de Herrera (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 156–57, 159 n. 103.   9 For my previous analysis of this motif and reference to other scholars who have discussed it, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 69–72, 189–92 nn. 174–80. See also idem, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 271–87; idem, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 131–36; idem, “Phallic Jewissance and the Pleasure of No Pleasure,” in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, edited by Charlotte Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, and Moulie Vidas (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 293–335. The motif of quivering in both Lurianic kabbalah and Heideggerian thought may be profitably compared to the state of trembling (durchzittern) in Hegel to mark the tension of the interiorization of alterity when the subject feels like an “other” in relation to itself. See Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, translated by Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 32. 10 For comparison of Heidegger’s conception of nothingness and the domain of being’s withdrawal to the kabbalistic speculation on ṣimṣum, see Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, translated

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by Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 130–38. See also Mark Goodman, “Give the Word: Levinas and Heidegger on Language,” PhD dissertation, Boston College, 2000, 155–60. On the possible affinity between the kabbalistic idea of ṣimṣum and Heidegger’s depiction of nothingness as the vortex of zeroness, see Steiner, Grammars of Creation, 27–28. 11 Bere’shit Rabba, edited by Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck (Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1965), 1:1, 1–2, 8:1, 57; Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 89a. 12 See, for instance, the analysis of the motif of sha‘ashu‘a in the Bahir in Wolfson, Language, 277–78. 13 See Zohar 1:178b, 245b; 2:173b, 217b, 255a; 3:193a. 14 Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1962), 12; Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1974), 20. Compare Moses Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah, (Jerusalem: Or Ḥadash, 1999), 53a, 58a; idem, Elimah Rabbati (Jerusalem: Nezer Shraga, 2013), 8. Given the fact that kabbalists universally accepted the Galenic idea that the semen originates in the brain, it stands to reason that self-contemplation and auto-sexual arousal should be deemed two sides of the same coin. 15 Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 16 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1989), 37, cited in Bracha Sack, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University, 1995), 71–72 (Hebrew). In some passages, Cordovero emphasizes that the sha‘ashu‘a of Ein Sof is related to benefitting the emanations and created beings outside of his essence. See, for example, Moses Cordovero, Zohar im Perush Or Yaqar, vol. 21 (Jerusalem: Or Yaqar, 1991), 95, where the rabbinic notion of God’s taking delight in the Torah is interpreted symbolically as the sha‘ashu‘a of Ein Sof related to the unity of Ḥokhmah, Binah, and Da‘at. Compare Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah, 13b. On the description of sha‘ashu‘a as the illumination of the light of Ein Sof through the unity of Keter, Ḥokhmah, and Binah, see ibid., 15a. See also ibid., 18b-c. The motif of sha‘ashu‘a in Cordovero has been discussed by Joseph Ben-Shlomo, The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), 60–61, 174, 187, 239 n. 202 (Hebrew); Gershom Scholem, “The Name of God and the Linguistic Theory of the Kabbala (Part 2),” Diogenes 80 (1972): 182 n. 62; Bracha Sack, “The Doctrine of Ṣimṣum of R. Moses Cordovero,” Tarbiz 58 (1989): 226–27 (Hebrew); idem, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, 73–76, 150–76; Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug,” 164–74. For the influence of Cordovero on the Saruqian notion of sha‘ashu‘a, see also Yehuda Liebes, “Towards a Study of the Author of Emek ha-Melekh: His Personality, Writings and Kabbalah,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 11 (1993): 105 n. 24 (Hebrew); Meroz, “The School of Sarug,” 154; Miquel Beltrán, The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Kabbalah on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 33–39. 16 Sack, “Doctrine of Ṣimṣum,” 226 n. 79, points out that in at least one passage (Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah, 42d-43b) sha‘ashu‘a does have overt sexual connotations. See Sack, The Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, 73 n. 79. This formulation likely influenced the Lurianic sources. Compare as well Cordovero, Shi‘ur Qomah, 13b-c. Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug,” 169, seems to



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minimize the autoerotic and narcissistic elements of the myth of divine bemusement, emphasizing the speculative element. In my judgment, Shatil is misled by an oversimplified distinction between the Neoplatonic orientation and the mythical approach. 17 MSS Oxford, Bodleian Library 1783, fol. 48a and 1784, fol. 58a. For a list of other manuscript witnesses of this text, see Ronit Meroz, “Redemption in the Lurianic Teaching,” PhD dissertation. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1988, 93 (Hebrew). See, in particular, the reading preserved in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library 1741, fol. 128a: “When it arose in the will of the emanator to produce the letters, at first he was alone, delighting in himself.” The text is published on the basis of MS New York, Columbia University X893 M6862 in Ronit Meroz, “Early Lurianic Compositions,” in Massu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish Philosophy in Memory of Prof. Ephraim Gottlieb, edited by Michal Oron and Amos Goldreich (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1994), 327–30 (Hebrew). The relevant passage appears on page 327. 18 Zohar 1:15a. See Meroz, “Redemption,” 111–12. It is noteworthy that Saruq’s Derush ha-Malbush is presented as an explication of this zoharic passage. See Israel Saruq, Derush ha-Malbush we-ha-Ṣimṣum, edited by Matthias Safrin (Jerusalem: Matthias Safrin, 2001), 7. 19 Wolfson, Language, 278–79. 20 It appears that the reference is to the ten sefirot that emerge from or correspond to the ten letters of the name YHWH when written out in full in one of the following three ways with the respective sums of 45, 63, and 72: yw”d h”a wa”w h”a; yw”d h”y wa”w h”y; yw”d h”y wy”w h”y. The fourth permutation of YHWH, which has a sum of 52, consists of nine letters: yw”d h”h w”w h”h. Another possible explanation is that the four letters of YHWH can be written as a sequence of ten letters: yod, yod heh, yod heh waw, yod heh waw heh. See Solomon ben Ḥayyim Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim (Jerusalem: Aaron Barzanai, 2006), 126. On the derivation of the four different permutations from the letters of the name YHWH, which are fixed in the garment, see Saruq, Derush ha-Malbush, 14. 21 Israel Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut (Munkács: Blayer & Kohn, 1897), 3a. Compare the version in Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah (Basle, 1629), 77b, and the introduction to the commentary on Sifra di-Ṣeni‘uta in Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 34c-d. 22 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), 132. For a brief historical sketch of Saruq and some other kabbalists influenced by him, see Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1956), 257–58. 23 The same can be said of the summary of Saruq’s teaching in Scholem, “The Name of God,” 181. 24 Yehuda Liebes, “Tsaddiq Yesod Olam—A Sabbatian Myth,” Da‘at 1 (1978): 105 n. 167 (Hebrew), argues that sha‘ashu‘a in the Saruqian kabbalah is not described in explicit sexual language even though the divine thought has an erotic quality that is actualized in the emanative process. On the sexual connotation of the word sha‘ashu‘a applied to God in Lurianic texts, see Ḥayyim Viṭal, Sha‘ar Ma’amerei

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Rashbi (Jerusalem: Sitrei Ḥayyim, 2014), 171. The word sha‘ashu‘a in this context denotes the sexual foreplay that arouses the male waters above and the female waters below. Compare ibid., 44, where Binah is described as taking delight in the letters in the manner that Malkhut takes delight in the souls of the righteous, which are identified as the female waters. Both of these sources have been noted by Meroz, “Early Lurianic Compositions,” 315 n. 22. 25 Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 21d-22a. 26 Ibid., 22a. The same expression is used in Shever Yosef in Delmedigo, Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah, 60a. 27  Itamar Gruenwald, “A Preliminary Critical Edition of Sefer Yezira,” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): § 18, 147; A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira: Edition, Translation, and Text-Critical Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), § 18, 98–100. On Saruq’s theory of malbush and its possible connection to older Jewish magical techniques, see Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 148–54. 28 Scholem, Kabbalah, 132. 29 Delmedigo, Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah, 60a. 30 This point is missed by Shatil, “The Kabbalah of R. Israel Sarug,” 174, who concludes that Saruq maintains “the causal relationship between God and the power of din, without making it a fully integral part of Divine essence, as it is in Cordovero’s system.” Surprisingly, Shatil draws this conclusion after citing the very text from Shever Yosef that I have cited, but she neglected to relate to the first part whence it is clear that the ten delimited attributes are contained in the limitless essence of the infinite. On the concealment of all things in the essence of Ein Sof, see the introduction to the commentary on Sifra di-Ṣeni‘uta in Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 34b. 31 Naftali Bachrach, Emeq ha-Melekh (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-Sefarim, 2003), 113. 32 Pirqei Rabbi Eliezer, edited by David Luria (Warsaw, 1852), ch. 3, 5b. 33 Bachrach, Emeq ha-Melekh, 1:4, 124. Compare Moshe ben Menaḥem Graf, Wayaqhel Moshe (Jerusalem: Yerid ha-Sefarim, 2005), 38–39. On the doctrine of malbush in Bachrach, see Sharron Shatil, “The Doctrine of Secrets of Emeq HaMelech,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 17 (2010): 374–77. 34 See Wolfson, Language, 26, and reference to other scholarly discussions on 422 n. 251. 35 Bachrach, Emeq ha-Melekh, 1:1, 111. 36 Ibid., 1:2, 119. See Liebes, “Towards a Study,” 117–20. The images of inscription (gelifu) and the paper (neyyar) upon which the point (nequddah) is inscripted, are developed by Graf, Wayaqhel Moshe, 39. 37 Bachrach, Emeq ha-Melekh, 1:2, 119–20. Compare Shever Yosef in Delmedigo, Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah, 60a, and idem, Novelot Ḥokhmah (Basle, 1631), 151b–152a. 38 What is implied philosophically in Saruq’s kabbalah, especially the connection between ṣimṣum, sha‘ashu‘a, and the force of din, was already made explicit in the depiction of infinity or the First Cause (Causa Primera) offered by De Herrera, Gate of Heaven, 297–98; Puerto del Cielo, 293–94. For the Hebrew translation, see de Herrera, House of Divinity, 490. See the analysis in Alexander



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Altmann, “Lurianic Kabbalah in a Platonic Key: Abraham Cohen Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo,” in Jewish Thought in the Seventh Century, edited by Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 30–32; Beltrán, The Influence, 344–46. 39 On Eliashiv’s use of the Saruqian version of Lurianic kabbalah, see Eliezer Baumgarten, “History and Historiosophy in the Teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Elyashov,” MA thesis, Ben-Gurion University, 2006, 18–20 (Hebrew). I prefer to label Eliashiv an exponent of Lithuanian kabbalah as opposed to a representative of the kabbalistic circle of the Vilna Gaon. Regarding these taxonomies, see the sources cited by Jonathan Garb, Modern Kabbalah as an Autonomous Domain of Research (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2016), 63 n. 55, 65 (Hebrew). Closer to the mark, in my opinion, is the description of Eliashiv’s Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah as “a work largely concerned with the elucidation of the GRA’s mystical commentaries” in Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 37. See also Jonathan Meir, “The Eclectic Kabbalah of R. Shimon Horowitz (A Critical Note on the Term ‘The Lithuanian Kabbalah’),” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 31 (2014): 311–20 (Hebrew); Raphael Shuchat, “Thoughts on Lithuanian Kabbalah: A Study in the Lurianic Concept of Igulim and Yosher,” Da‘at 79–80 (2015): 11–32 (Hebrew). 40 Eliashiv, Leshem Shevo we-Aḥlamah: Haqdamot u-She‘arim, 126. 41 This Lurianic motif is based on zoharic passages that explicitly depict the activity of the boṣina de-qardinuta in the highest recesses of the infinite as judgment or even the catharsis of evil. See Zohar 2:254b; 3:292b (Idra Zuṭa); Ḥayyim Viṭal, Eṣ Ḥayyim (Jerusalem: Sitrei Ḥayyim, 2013), 29:7, 24b. On the expression olam ein sof, see Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 22c. 42  Gan ha-Melekh, MS Oxford, Bodleian Library 1586, fol. 2a. 43 Scholem, “The Name of God,” 181; Wolfson, Circle, 49–78. For emphasis on the elements of voice and breath in kabbalistic linguistic speculation, see Jonathan Garb, “Powers of Language in Kabbalah: Comparative Reflections,” in The Poetics of Grammar and the Metaphysics of Sound and Sign, edited by Sergio La Porta and David Shulman (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 233–69. 44 Ḥayyim Ickovits, Nefesh ha-Ḥayyim, edited and annotated by Joshua Lipschitz (Jerusalem, 2016), 4:10, 275–76. 45 The Saruqian kabbalah was made accessible to the Christian world through the inclusion of several texts (including sections from Bachrach’s Emeq ha-Melekh and Herrera’s Puerta del Cielo and Casa de la Divinidad) in Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata. See Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, Band 3: 1660–1850 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2013), 76–85, 127–30, 132–34. 46 Zohar 1:15a. See the account of Saruq’s kabbalah in Delmedigo, Ta‘alumot Ḥokhmah, 78b. Regarding the zoharic style of oxymoron and paradox, see Scholem, Major Trends, 166–67. 47 Saruq, Limmudei Aṣilut, 36a; Bachrach, Emeq ha-Melekh, 4:1, 171; Delmedigo, Novelot Ḥokhmah, 164a-b. On the folding up of the Torah, see Scholem, “The Name of God,” 182.

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48 For an extended discussion of this symbolism, see Wolfson, Alef, 123–32. 49  Bernard McGinn, “The God beyond God: Theology and Mysticism in the Thought of Meister Eckhart,” Journal of Religion 61 (1981): 1–19; and reference to other scholars cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Patriarchy and Motherhood of God in Zoharic Kabbalah and Meister Eckhart,” in Envisioning Judaism: Studies in Honor of Peter Schäfer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Ra‘anan S. Boustan, Klaus Hermann, Reimund Leicht, Annette Yoshiko Reed, and Giuseppe Veltri, with the collaboration of Alex Ramos (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 1060 n. 33. 50 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, The Ages of the World, translated, with an introduction, by Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 25; Die Weltalter in den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813 (Nachlaβband), edited by Manfred Schröter (Munich: Beck, 1946), 236. 51 Schelling, The Ages, 26; Die Weltalter, 237. 52 Wolfson, Giving, 198. 53 My formulation is indebted to the language of the second-century Yogācāra text Saṃdhi-nirmocana-sūtra. See The Scripture on the Explication of the Underlying Meaning, translated by John Keenan (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2000), 36–37. To say all things have no essence is a technical expression to convey the sense of codependent arising, the absence of selfhood. The Buddhist insight about the emptiness of being, or the no-self of things, can be applied to the kabbalistic Ein Sof, the nonessence that is the essence of all things that have no essence. 54 The text is cited in Wolfson, Giving, 245. 55 See, however, the conversation between Heidegger and Bikkhu Maha Mani, a Buddhist monk from Thailand, which took place in Autumn 1963, in GA 16: 589–93, and discussion of this meeting in Heinrich W. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929–1976, translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 170–81. 56 The expression is appropriated from the comparison of Heideggerian and Buddhist reflections on emptiness in Gail Stenstad, Transformations: Thinking after Heidegger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 161–71. Regarding the comparison of Heidegger’s nothing and the Buddhist emptiness, see also Joan Stambaugh, The Finitude of Being (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 171–83; Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, translated, with a complementary essay, by Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996), 21–34; Wei Zhang, Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern Thinkers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 54–61; Ma, Heidegger, 178–85. 57 Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 66. 58 See Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 191. 59 Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 199. See Ma, Heidegger, 19–23. 60 Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 19; See Ma, Heidegger, 188–89.



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61 Petzet, Encounters, 180. 62 Asaṅga, The Summary of the Great Vehicle, translated by John Keenan, revised second edition (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2003), 49. 63 Gishin, The Collected Teachings of the Tendai Lotus School, translated by Paul L. Swanson (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1995), 5. 64 Paramārtha-satya is the truth of the universal emptiness, codependence, and impermanence of all things that lies beneath empirical phenomena and beyond verbal expression and conceptual discrimination, whereas saṃvṛti-satya relates to the ways that we routinely experience, classify, and describe sentient reality as a patchwork of reified and permanent substances. See Guy Newland, The Two Truths in the Mādhyamika Philosophy of the Ge-luk-ba Order of Tibetan Buddhism (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1992); idem, Appearance and Reality: The Two Truths in the Four Buddhist Tenet Systems (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 1999); Dan Lusthaus, “The Two Truths (Saṃvṛti-satya and Paramārthasatya) in Early Yogācāra,” Journal of Buddhist Studies 7 (2010): 101–52. 65 For a more extensive discussion with proper annotation, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menaḥem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 109–14. 66 Brook Ziporyn, Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 316. 67 My embrace of a logic of dialetheism to articulate thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable reverberates with the thesis of Graham Priest, Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 68 Wolfson, Open Secret, 25–27, 52, 64, 96, 99–100, 113, 114–29, 212, 245, 341 n. 166. 69 Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 27. 70 See Wolfson, Giving, 173 and references cited on 414–15 nn. 127–29. See also Daniel C. Matt, “Ayin: The Concept of Nothingness in Jewish Mysticism,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy, edited by Robert K. C. Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 134 and 153 n. 69. Matt cites several passages from Pseudo-Dionysius that make a similar point as well as the notable description of the Absolute in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (4:5, 15), neti, neti, “not this, not this.” An even closer parallel is found in the words of Nicholas Cusa cited in Wolfson, Giving, 414 n. 137. 71 Shmuel Arenfeld, Yira’ukha im Shamesh (Jerusalem: Makhon Yam ha-Ḥokhmah, 2012), 748–49. 72 Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1993), 126–27. The text is previously cited in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Secrecy, Apophasis, and Atheistic Faith in the Teachings of Rav Kook,” in Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity, edited by Michael Fagenblat (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 149. 73 Raphael Immanuel ben Abraham Ḥai Ricchi, Yosher Levav (Jerusalem: Alei Ayin, 2010), 21.

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74 A similar point was made by Julio Meinvielle, De la Cábala al Progresismo (Piazza San Pietro: Editrice del Verbo Incarnato, 2013), 321. I thank Jeremy Brown for drawing my attention to this book. 75  See George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 133. 76 Zohar Ḥadash, edited by Reuven Margaliot (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), 57a (Qaw ha-Middah). 77 Wolfson, Language, 25–31. 78 The point was duly noted by Matt, “Ayin,” 138: “Typically, the Jewish mystic cannot resist appending a personal formula to the divine, even when his object of contemplation is undifferentiated oneness concealed in the depths of ayin.” 79 Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim (Jerusalem: Makhon ha-Ramaq, 2013), 5:4, 117. 80 I have explored these topics in Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 81 For discussion of this theme, see “Translator’s Foreword,” in Country Path Conversations, translated by Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), xiv–xv. 82 For a more extensive analysis, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

Chapter 11

Fruits of Forgetfulness: Politics and Nationalism in the Philosophies of Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger Yemima Hadad*

PROLOGUE Like Daniel Herskowitz’s chapter, my own chapter deals with Heidegger and Martin Buber. Whereas Herskowitz reads Buber’s theological reading of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, my chapter is concerned with Heidegger’s later writings and the question of nationalism. Elements of this question are also dealt with in other essays. Michael Fagenblat examines Heidegger’s notion of land and Homeland in his writings on Hölderlin in view of Zionism; Elad Lapidot confronts Heidegger’s idea of knowledge, people, and state (“city of knowers”) with a similar idea in Judaism. With respect to Heidegger’s concern with the German and other nations in his Black Notebooks, I show that the Jewish nation plays for him a crucial role as part of his central narrative of Seinsvergessenheit, as suggested also by Peter Trawny and Donatella di Cesare. Several authors in this volume indicate an affinity between Heidegger’s philosophy and Judaism, or even between Zionist nationalism and Heidegger’s nationalism. My own research grows out of and hopes to contribute to this comparative investigation. In this chapter, I wish to present my thesis that Martin Buber offers a narrative of historical forgetfulness similar to that of his contemporary Martin Heidegger: a history of the oblivion of dialogue between man and the divine. I name this phenomenon Dialogsvergessenheit. Buber himself never used this term, nor did he develop this idea explicitly. Rather, it is my claim in this chapter that the idea is implicit in his writings. To elucidate my thesis, I will look at Heidegger’s thought on the oblivion of Being, known as Seinsvergessenheit. The proximity of the two positions presented here is particularly 201

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interesting in the light of their political implications: the narrative of forgetfulness expresses the philosophers’ critical point of view toward the condition of their respective nations in the present. For both, the acknowledgment of the oblivion operates as the starting point of the nation’s restoration toward a new beginning. This common narrative, however, leads these two thinkers in my view to opposite nationalist conceptions. The comparison suggested in this chapter does not include a discussion on possible lines of direct influence between Buber and Heidegger. Evidence of exchanges between them does exist, as indicated by Haim Gordon in his book The Heidegger-Buber Controversy1 and by Paul Mendes-Flohr in his essay Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger in Dialogue.2 I, however, focus on the conceptual affinities and differences, rather than on historical connections. In what follows I will examine these two philosophers one after the other: first Heidegger, then Buber. In the case of each philosopher I will examine three elements: (1) the myth of forgetfulness; (2) the relation between the myth of forgetfulness and the conception of the nation; (3) the relation between the myth, the national concept, and the concrete political choice of the thinker. The basic analogy I suggest is between Heidegger’s history of Being and his vision of the “greatness of the nation,” on the one hand, and Buber’s history of dialogue and his interpretation of the Biblical notion of the chosen people, on the other. HEIDEGGER: SEINSVERGESSENHEIT Seinsvergessenheit is one of the central concepts Heidegger uses to articulate his critique of the entire history of Western philosophy. For Heidegger, the pre-Socratics alone came close to the notion of Being and the difference between Being and beings, an onto-ontological difference that the entire history of Western philosophy, since Plato and Aristoteles, had failed to notice.3 Heidegger aims at a new beginning of fundamental ontology, where Dasein renews its relationship with Being as such. Accordingly, the conception of a history of Being (Seinsgeschichte) and of the oblivion of Being (Seinsvergessenheit) is of central importance in Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger considers our era, in which beings are confined to their use, as a metaphysical era in need of overcoming. I will now examine the negative implications that emerge from this situation, in Heidegger’s view. In his essays “The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead” and “Overcoming Metaphysics” (1936–1938), Heidegger depicts modernity as captive to a power that he names “the will to will.” It is an impersonal, blind power, which took control over Being, and wills the preservation and continuation of willing: “What the will wills it does not merely strive after as something it



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does not yet have. What the will wills it has already. For the will wills itself. It mounts beyond itself” (The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 77). Dasein might think that it is the subject of its willing; however, it does not own its will, nor does it master the will to will. Rather, Dasein is a captive of the will to will, which consumes and utilizes it for its own realization: “The opinion arises that the human will is the origin of the will to will, whereas man is willed by the will to will without experiencing the essence of this willing” (The End of Philosophy, 101). In order to impose itself, “[t]he will to will forces the calculation and arrangement of everything for itself as the basic forms of appearance, only, however, for the unconditionally protractible guarantee of itself” (ibid., 93). Modern technology is, for Heidegger, “the basic form of appearance in which the will to will arranges and calculates itself” (ibid.). This encounter between the will to will and technology generates what Heidegger calls “machination” [Machenschaft], which is a specific feature of modern metaphysics (unlike technê) and is portrayed as basically negative. Machination, claims Peter Gordon, is Heidegger’s preferred title for the technological force that he saw as dominating the modern world. According to Gordon, “[t]he notebooks of the later 1930’s are thick with dark ruminations on the rise of technology and its manifold consequences across the globe.”4 The problem arising from this situation is presented by Heidegger in the following words: “The will has forced the impossible as a goal upon the possible. Machination, which orders this compulsion and holds it in dominance, arises from the being of technology, the word here made equivalent to the concept of metaphysics completing itself” (ibid., 110). It seems that for Heidegger, machination is the final stage in the history of the “will to will”—an apocalyptic metaphysical era which prompts its own destruction: It is first the will which arranges itself everywhere in technology that devours the earth in the exhaustion and consumption and change of what is artificial. Technology drives the earth beyond the developed sphere of its possibility into such things which are no longer a possibility and are thus the impossible. (ibid., 109)

As already mentioned, the will to will is blind, and has no intention, vision, destination, or vocation other than to continue willing and to remain in power. Machination is thus considered by Heidegger a far greater power than the power of humans; it is a seductive power, which is capable of forcing itself on the human and of holding him captive in order to maintain itself. Accordingly, Peter Gordon goes as far as to describe machination in Heidegger’s text as some sort of deity: “Machenschaft [machination] appears with such

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frequency that it assumes a quasi-mythological status not unlike an ancient God.”5 The metaphysics of the will to will brings about its own destruction: in Heidegger’s view, by using technology for preserving itself, the will to will rather sets the stage for its own extinction. The fate of machination is self-destruction, for it drives production beyond the possible—thus destroying its own resources, bringing forth its own annihilation. Heidegger’s eschatology envisions the end of the current age and the beginning of a new age—the end of the metaphysics of will, which perceives beings as objects, and the beginning of an era of the ontology of Being, which unveils the truth (aletheia) of Being as such. Up to this point, Heidegger’s critique may appear as a general and universal analysis of modernity and its challenges in face of modern technology. However, the writings discussed so far reveal only one dimension of Heidegger’s critique. The newly published Black Notebooks reveal another dimension, one that features, among things, a nationalist and moreover antiSemitic myth. I consider this dimension to be as important and central to Heidegger’s thought as the dimensions offered by his previously published writings. The writings in the Black Notebooks complete Heidegger’s critique of technology and reveal its connection with his political, nationalist, and anti-Semitic worldview. FORGETFULNESS AND NATIONALISM: THE GREATNESS OF THE NATION Heidegger’s insights, John Caputo claims, are “obscured by his penchant for heroic tales and privileged epochs, for first dawn and new beginnings.”6 Heidegger’s general critique of technology and the forgetfulness of Being consolidates into a nationalist outlook founded on folkish historical myths. Here, Heidegger exceeds the realm of philosophy and enters the realm of myth, where the German nation plays a role in redeeming Being from its forgetfulness, and overcoming the threat of technology. In order to deliver Being from oblivion, and to save beings from being consumed by the manipulative power of machination, there is, for Heidegger, a need for a people, a Volk. In Heidegger’s view, the renewal of the pre-Socratic relation to Being, is a task possible only for the German Volk: “The German alone can poetize and say the Being originally and anew—he alone will re-conquer the essence of the theoria, and finally create logic” (GA 94: 27). Heidegger is convinced that the common denominator shared by the ancient Greeks and their German heirs is their spirituality (Geist), which is also the source of their greatness. In other words, the Germans are the spiritual successors of the ancient Greeks; as such, the vocation to begin



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anew is the essence of German destiny. However, as Heidegger maintains, the genuine greatness of the German Volk has been lost, and will remain so as long as Being is forgotten; only with the renewal of a German politeia will the Volk, with the guidance of their philosopher, regain their genuine greatness. Nonetheless, the Volk is not expected to return to the ancient Greek era, or imitate it, but to revive its essence: “Not a revival of antiquity—there is no need for this—but the revival of our people and its task. For this, however, we must deliver ourselves to the clear hardship of the distress of beginning” (GA 94: 100, emphasis mine). In Heidegger’s infamous rectorate speech, known also by its title, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” which he delivered on May 27, 1933, the occasion of his nomination as rector of Freiburg University under the early Nazi regime, Heidegger articulates his wish for establishing a Platonic polis in twentieth-century Nazi Germany. This polis should be led by the philosopher king, who will lead the spiritual revival of the German Volk and guide it to the restoration of its relation to Being. Thus, the philosopher, in the name of Sein, calls his listeners to return from oblivion to their genuine spiritual greatness: [T]he spiritual world of the Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge [Kenntnisse] and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence. A spiritual world alone will guarantee our Volk greatness. For it will make the constant decision between the will to greatness and the toleration of decline the law that establishes the pace for the march upon which our Volk has embarked on the way to its future history. (The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 33–34)

For Heidegger, the greatness of the German people depends on their choice to release themselves from the will to will, the power that holds humanity captive, and to enter into an original relation to Being; hence, they will set themselves free from the shackles of machination, and being a new era: the ontological era of Being. By practicing a relation to Being under the guidance of the philosopher and under state rule, the Volk will establish a house for the dwelling of Being. In this respect, the polis, as Dror Pimental explains, is but a different name for aletheia.7 Thus, the meaning of the polis is in point of fact ontological: “The polis is founded upon the truth and essence of being, in terms of which all beings are determined” (Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” 85). Modern politics, for Heidegger, has corrupted the ontological meaning of the polis, which primarily should have become the arena where beings appear in their truth and in their authentic state of being.

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In “People of God, People of Being,” John Caputo points to Heidegger’s intentional dissimulation of the Hebraic.8 He claims that “Heidegger has constructed a rival narrative of Being—structurally analogous in all of its main points to the biblical model, that is the narrative of the Jews and their God in the Tanach.”9 Caputo argues that Heidegger’s “call [of being] was addressed to a rival chosen people, not the Jews but the Greeks and their spiritual heirs, the Germans, in a rival new Jerusalem, not Israel but the Third Reich, with a rival prophet, not Hosea but—if truth be told and with all due modesty! − Heidegger.”10 Christoph Schmidt elucidates this analogy by stressing the messianic vocation of the chosen people: Where Christianity understands itself as the fulfillment and realization of Judaism, Heidegger appoints the German Volk as the true community for the realization of Greek theopoetics. The German people becomes the subject of the suppressed ontological redemption, in fact it becomes the new chosen people and finally the messianic ‘rest’, which should bring the Greek light of redemption to the peoples.11

It thus seems, to follow Caputo, that Heidegger reproduces the Biblical myth of God’s chosen people and of God’s promised land.12 Forgetfulness of Being have brought about the oblivion of the greatness of the German nation, which Heidegger expects to revive. In the second part of this chapter I will reflect on Martin Buber—Heidegger’s contemporary—and the notion of “chosenness” with regard to the Hebrew Bible, which I will then compare it to Heidegger’s conception. But first, I wish to introduce the concealed component in Heidegger’s national myth that reconciles his philosophy and myth with the political choices he had made. FORGETFULNESS AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM In the first section of this chapter I presented Heidegger’s myth of forgetfulness as a universal critique of the modern era, whereas in the previous section I introduced his myth of forgetfulness in its nationalist folkish context, which portrays Heidegger as a neo-Romantic folkish thinker. Nonetheless, the folkish myth alone cannot explain, in my view, Heidegger’s political choice in favor of National Socialism. In Heidegger’s nationalist narrative, forgetfulness does not only imply the oblivion of the nation’s greatness, as well as its renewal by reestablishing the connection to Being, but contains also elements of an additional, more sinister, namely, anti-Semitic myth. In this section, I suggest a reading of Heidegger’s narrative of forgetfulness as an expression of a certain anti-Semitic mythology, which could account for his political choice.



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Most scholars today consider Seinsgeschichte and Seinsvegessenheit substantial for understanding Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and his support of National Socialism. In his article Thesen zu Heidegger seinsgeschichtlichem Antisemitismus, Peter Trawny sheds light on Heidegger’s anti-Semitic “reasoning”: What I characterize as seinsgeschichtliche anti-Semitism consists in the recurring interpretational figure, in which the historical reality of the relations between National-Socialism and Judaism is inversed in order to have world Jewry act as a factually existing institution in history. [Accordingly,] the murder-machine of the Shoah is not National-Socialism; what National-Socialism executes is only a reaction to what Judaism has long been intending (see The Problem of Self-Destruction).13

In order to understand how the Nazis, the perpetrators, became victims in Heidegger’s view, we must pay heed to his myth. I argue that Heidegger interweaves elements of anti-Semitic myth into his critique of technology and his national thought. These elements, I contend, added to the narrative of forgetfulness and Heidegger’s nationalist view, may account for his political choice. As I argued in the first section of this chapter, Heidegger considers machination as a fundamental problem of modernity. What I wish to contend now is that Heidegger associates machination with Judaism. Already prior to the publication of the Black Notebooks, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy suggested a link between the Jewish-Christian god of creation and the emergence of machination as principle of modernity: The medieval concept of actus already covers over what is ownmost to the inceptual Greek interpretation of beingness. It is in this connection that what belongs to machination now presses forward more clearly and that ens becomes ens creatum in the Judaeo-Christian notion of creation, when the corresponding idea of god enters into the picture. Even if one refuses crudely to interpret the idea of creator, what is still essential is beings’ being-caused. The cause-effect connection becomes the all-dominating (god as causa sui). That is an essential distancing from Φὐσις and at the same time the crossing toward the emergence of machination as what is ownmost to beingness in modem thinking. The mechanistic and biological ways of thinking are always merely consequences of the hidden interpretation of beings in terms of machination. (Contributions to Philosophy, 88)

In this passage Heidegger interprets the medieval introduction of the JewishChristian God into philosophy as a decisive moment in the emergence of machination. Indeed, Heidegger speaks of the “Jewish-Christian” and not only of the Jewish notion of creation. However, the Black Notebooks now

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reveal that the problematic, destructive principle of Christianity is in its root Jewish: “In the timeframe of the Christian West, that is, of metaphysics, Judaism is the principle of destruction” (GA 97: 20). Not only Judaism, but Jews too are perceived by Heidegger as carrying machination’s destructive features of reasoning and calculation: Jewry’s temporary increase in power is, however, grounded in the fact that Western metaphysics, especially in its modern development, furnishes the starting point for the diffusion of a generally empty rationality and calculative ability, which in this way provides a refuge in ‘spirit’, without being able to grasp the hidden decision regions on their own. The more originary and primordial the prospective decisions and questions, the more they remain inaccessible to this ‘race.’ (GA 96: 46–47)

Thus, Heidegger perceives the Jews as promoting machination, rationalism, calculation, and racism. Anthony Steinbock explains: Jews were not for Heidegger a political or a racial problem, but a “metaphysical” problem because the Jews (among others of their ilk) are symptomatic conveyors of the withdrawal, forgetfulness, or the abandonment of Being. . . . Machination is not the Jew’s fault, but because of Judaism’s structure, the Jews are presumably particularly adept at the machination’s domination and can especially “prosper” in it.14

Against Steinbock, I argue that Heidegger’s metaphysics cannot be separated from his political view. Although Heidegger articulates the “Jewish problem” in metaphysical rather than in political terms, it is his metaphysics that paves the way for his political outlook. The alluded Jewish tendencies, phrased in the Black Notebooks in metaphysical terms, are ultimately inclined to fulfill their metaphysical task: “The question of the role of world Jewry is not racial, but the metaphysical question of the type of humanity that can accept from Being the world-historical ‘task’ of uprooting all beings” (GA 96: 243). A cosmo-mythological reading of these sentences reveals that in Heidegger’s myth the Jews exist as a certain “type of humanity” that had accepted from God-like Being the metaphysical task of “uprooting all beings”; in other words, Being endowed this certain “type” of people with a destructive metaphysical power to fulfill their destructive task. Following the same logic, Being bestowed upon the Germans—the spiritual heirs of the Greek—the constructive spirit of maintaining Being. While the metaphysical task of the Jews is uprooting and machination, the metaphysical task of the Germans is antithetical: rootedness in Being against machination. The rivalry between the two metaphysical powers, Being and machination, is



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hypothesized as a rivalry between two nations. Michael Fagenblat explains this rivalry, as perceived by Heidegger, thus: Heidegger folded anti-Semitism into his philosophy, satisfying the need of das Man—including der Mann Heidegger selbst—for ontic figures that historicize uprootedness, and thereby name the enemy of Being. . . . [H]is thought demands the determination of some specific enemies of Being which must, in turn, be destroyed, whoever they are.15

Heidegger thus posits two nations in a metaphysical struggle. He portrays Jews and Germans as two powerful nations (world-Jewry vs. nation of Being), which stand at the center of the history of forgetfulness and determine the destiny of Being. In Heidegger’s view, the world, dominated by God-like machination, can be saved only by the German people, whom in my understanding of Heidegger, must be the true persecuted minority in the international constellation of forces. In this metaphysical war, the German nation plays the role of the savior of Being, standing along in its fight against machination. This “minority” among nations is Being’s only hope for a crack of dawn in the darkness of forgetfulness. The role of the “tragic” warrior of Being against Machination is bestowed by Heidegger upon the Nazis. This narrative is still evident in the much later interview in Der Spiegel (1966): National Socialism did indeed go in this direction [to achieve a satisfactory relation to the essence of technicity]. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years. (Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, 61)

As stated previously, Heidegger maintains the belief, in 1966, that the Nazis indeed strove to restore the right relation to technology. Heidegger suggests two reasons for their failure to do so: greater powers, which were too immense to fight against (machination), and the Nazis’ limited ability to establish a real relation to technicity. These explanations imply that the Nazis’ role in the destruction was a role of victims,16 who wanted the right thing but were led astray by powers far greater than themselves, and were eventually defeated by machination;17 ultimately, it seems that machination used the warriors for Being to empower itself. According to this distorted myth, it was not the Nazis who annihilated the Jews—it was machination who had done so by taking control over the Nazis. The extermination of the Jews is therefore the fault of the blind machination and its unrestrained will to will. Machination has, as shown in the first section of this chapter, an inner logic of self-destruction. Following its own self-destructive nature, machination destroyed the Jews, its own carriers.

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Thus, by the extermination of the Jews, machination ultimately committed self-annihilation. This logic explains Heidegger’s notion of Selbstvernichtung (self-annihilation), which appears in his Notebooks (GA 97:20). In this notion Heidegger finds a distorted sense of “poetic justice,” a closure to his ontopolitical myth. Moreover, Heidegger’s sense of justice and victimization may explain why his much-anticipated repentance never took place. BUBER: DIALOGSVERGESSENHEIT Having focused on Heidegger’s narrative of the forgetfulness of Being, I wish to turn now to the phenomenon I name Dialogsvergessenheit: the forgetfulness of dialogue between the nation of Israel and God, which is the basic narrative underlying Martin Buber’s understanding of history. My interpretation of Martin Buber’s history of forgetfulness largely draws on Leora Batnitzky’s essays “Renewing the Jewish Past: Buber on History and Truth” (2003)18 and “Revelation and Neues Denken—Rethinking Buber and Rosenzweig on the Law” (2006).19 In these essays, Batnizky explores Buber’s perception of history and his attitude toward Jewish law. Batnizky points out that “Buber’s ontological claim can perhaps also be illuminated with reference to Heidegger,”20 and that Buber’s perception of history, as well as his complicated relation to Jewish law, can be illuminated by its proximity to Heidegger’s notion of history. Buber, as Heidegger before him, portrays the sickness of modern era as resulting from the loss of connection to an original ontological reality.21 Much like Heidegger, who calls upon the German nation to return to its ancient Greek, pre-Socratic, origins, with the purpose of reconnecting to Being, Buber articulates a need to renew Israel’s ancient forgotten dialogue with the divine, which originates in the Hebrew Bible.22 For Buber, the dialogue with God is the ontological reality that prevailed in the past and that has since—I wish to stress—been forgotten. Although Batnizky mentions the motif of forgetfulness in her essays, she is more concerned—like Buber himself and the majority of scholarship—with the possibility of Jewish renewal.23 In this section, I wish to discuss the notion of forgetfulness, which is the necessary, though overlooked, corollary to the idea of renewal, and had been addressed rather implicitly by Buber and by most of Buber scholars. Before discussing forgetfulness and renewal, it is necessary to approach the earliest, primordial moment preceding renewal and forgetfulness, when a dialogical relationship with the divine was originally established in Israel. Buber’s theopolitics, first introduced in Kingship of God (1932) and later elaborated upon in The Anointed (1938–1951), The Prophetic Faith (1940), and Moses (1945), pivots on the notion of a mamlechet kohanim, or “kingdom



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of priests.” “Priest,” in this context, refers to any servant of God who maintains a constant dialogue with Ribono shel Olam, the sovereign of the world, God himself. The mission of Israel, according to Buber, is to establish God’s Kingdom as a national paradigm in which other nations can nonetheless partake; eventually, the world will become God’s, and all humanity will become God’s servant and will fulfill the principles of justice and peace. This political regime, which is not governed by human beings, and in which God is the only sovereign, is the synthesis of religious anarchism and direct theocracy. The Jewish law, the so-called halakha, the most celebrated product of rabbinical Judaism, reflects the extent to which Judaism has deviated in exile from what originally distinguished it from other religions: instead of direct dialogical relationship with God, nurtured by His living word, halakha is, rather, an organized compilation of intense, multilayered and passionate scholarly debates, a grand discursive and exegetic effort among rabbis. For Buber, what was lost in halakha is “the great deed of Israel,” namely, “not that it taught the one real God [i.e. monotheism] . . . but that it pointed out that this God can be addressed by man in reality, that man can say Thou to Him, that he can stand face to face with Him.”24 This living dialogue must be extricated, claims Buber, “from the rubble with which rabbinism and rationalism have covered it.”25 I claim that the dialogue of Israel with the divine is, for Buber, the ontological reality which has been forgotten—and should be renewed. Halakha, therefore, adheres to the word of dialogues past and forgets living dialogue. But the dialogue with God cannot be renewed in the religious sphere alone; it must first and foremost concern the renewal of Judaism in the political sphere (i.e., the theo-political). Following his teacher, Georg Simmel’s distinction between religious and religiosity, Buber distinguishes in his early writings On Judaism (1909–1919) two kinds of Judaism: Judaism as religion and Judaism as religiosity.26 In “Judaism and the Jew” (1909) Buber identifies certain periods of religiosity in Judaism, for instance, ancient biblical times, ancient Christianity (which according to him has nothing to do with modern Christianity and therefore should be called ancient Judaism), Essenes, and early Hasidism. In “Jewish Religiosity” (1913) Buber calls for a renewal of religiosity in Judaism. He thinks that apart from a few moments of revival in Judaism, rationalism and so-called rabbinism have concealed Judaism’s true religiosity under the rigid patterns of religion. In his preface to On Judaism, first published in 1923, Buber retroactively applied the principle of I and Thou (1923) to his earlier call for the renewal of Judaism. The Preface ends with these words: All men, somewhere, in some loneliness of their pain or of their thought, come close to God; there is no invulnerable heathen. But the Jew, bound up with the world, immured in the world, dares to relate himself to God in the immediacy of

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the I and Thou—as a Jew. That is Judaism’s primal reality. This people had once been the first to respond to the One who spoke, where previously only the single individual had responded. It will not, after all its failures and even in the midst of its failures, cease to prepare itself anew for His word that is yet to come.27

Religiosity, to which Buber refers in his early essays as being in need of spiritual renewal, appears in his later writings in terms of dialogue. In the 1930s Buber bases his biblical exegesis on the dialogical relation between YHWH and the Israelites. In his biblical treatise mentioned earlier, one can trace the original constitution and gradual decline of the dialogue between God and the Israelites, reaching its lowest point in the ancient secularization of Israel, that is, in the reduction of God’s kingship in the world by confining and restricting Him to the realm of religious ritual. Henceforward, a rebellious biblical Israel reclaims for itself the political and the ethical by declaring them profane and secular. The rebellion against dialogue was not heresy or idolatry; it was simply the unwillingness to enter a living dialogue with God. Buber’s resentment toward the Rabbinical-Halakhic is best expressed by the term Dialogsvergessenheit, as I suggest in this chapter. In periods of oblivion, Israel remains faithful in worshiping God, without however entering into a living dialogue with Him. During the long period of exile, it is only in early Hasidism that Buber identifies a moment of renewal of the dialogue with the divine. However, in spite of reestablishing the dialogue, no genuine renewal of theopolitics comes to fruition in Hasidism. Hasidism remains in exile, without reestablishing God’s kingdom in the world. After the period of early Hasidism, deterioration and forgetfulness return. It is, finally, in Zionism that Buber saw the opportunity to renew the ontological reality of dialogue with the divine and the renewal of God’s kingship. Batnizky claims that Buber does not suggest that modern Jews can or should relive the Jewish past in the sense of a subjective experience. What he suggests is rather the possibility of a new connection to the original ontological condition of the dialogue with God. This ontological condition is therefore not a matter of subjective experience but rather establishes the ground of existence itself.28 The people of Israel plays for Buber—as the Germans do for Heidegger—a major role in repairing the ontological crisis. For Buber, Israel was elected to execute God’s kingship in the world: first from within, through the Israelites’ establishment of this kingship among themselves, and later by providing guidance to other nations. In God’s Kingdom humanity will liberate itself from human coercion, subordinating itself, of its own free will, to God directly, as its invisible leader, with whom it shall have a direct dialogue.



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FORGETFULNESS AND NATIONALISM: THE ELECTION OF ISRAEL In 1938 Buber composed an essay entitled “The Election of Israel.”29 The essay’s timing was, of course, no accident. It was directed against Nazi propaganda and against the false understanding of the idea of election in Judaism. Following Jewish tradition, Buber understands election in the essay not as granting superiority to Israel over other nations, but as imposing a task that demands special responsibilities. Buber emphasizes that the God of Israel is a universal God, and not only the God of one nation. As such, His care is not limited to Israel alone, but concerns all nations. Buber quotes Amos’ prophecy to the Israelites: “Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Aram from Kir.”30 Amos, then, admonishes Israel not to view itself as having an exclusive title to God’s salvation. The election of Israel, for Buber, is not an election for privileges, but an election for extraordinary obligations. God granted to the people of Israel high office, Buber writes, not high rank.31 Israel’s role in preparing the world for the kingdom of God is, however, not unconditional. If the Israelites follow God in preparing the world for His kingdom of justice and peace, then the office is theirs; but, Buber adds, if they do not follow Him, the office will be taken away. Israel and the other nations are equal in the eyes of God with regard to their privileges but not with regard to their obligations. Buber quotes the Bible: “You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth—That is why I will call you to account for all your iniquities.” (Amos, 3:2).32 The idea of election in the Bible rarely means additional privilege, Buber stresses, but rather additional obligation, a burden beyond the burdens of the nations. For this reason, most of the elected messengers of God, including the prophets, do not wish to accept their election. Those who are chosen in the Bible, Buber argues, are not the privileged, but the underprivileged: It is the weak and the humble who are chosen. By nature, it is the strong, those who can force their cause through, who are able and therefore chosen to perform the historical deeds. But in the Bible, it is often precisely the younger sons who are chosen, such as Abel, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, or David, and this choosing is accompanied by a rejection, often a very emphatic rejection, of the older sons; or, in other cases, those who are chosen were born out of wedlock, or of humble origin.33

Humility is a virtue that Buber consistently stresses as a religious rather than a moral distinction. He emphasizes it with regard to the worship of God and

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with regard to election. Elected are those who are humble, not great, and humility is the way to truly worship God. Truly religious is only the humble man. Pride, on the other hand, is the rotten apple of religious life. Buber quotes the sages saying that there are three kinds of wickedness in the world: the first, bloodshed; the second, idolatry; and the third, pride.34 FORGETFULNESS AND ZIONISM Nationalism, therefore, is the nation’s self-pride; it is rebelliousness against God. Election means that the elected people should carry out their commission in “humble work for God.”35 Moreover says Buber, “whoever makes the Election a motive for haughtiness, whoever imagines himself protected and exalted by it, instead of being laid under an obligation and set to work by it, . . . sets the Shekhina [the dwelling of the divine presence of God] against it.”36 Buber identified two trends of Zionism in the early twentieth century: the political and the spiritual. He spoke against the school of Zionism that followed nineteenth-century European nationalism. He saw it as taking a wrong direction, because no nation may admire its own substance.37 Buber considered nationalism as egotism, as idol worship.38 He clearly distinguished the perception of the Jewish folk from twentieth-century völkisch Nationalism. To him, the nation of Israel has no essence of its own, no greatness of its own, only a difficult mission and responsibility, namely, to announce God’s greatness and the greatness of his creation upon earth. Yet while Buber strongly criticized Zionism, he still remained convinced that Hassidic teachings could protect Zionism from following the nationalistic trend of the nineteenth century: Here in Hasidism we have something close to us in time, and its off-shoots reach into our very age. Hasidism is a great revelation of spirit and life in which the nation appears to be connected by an inner tie with the world, with the soul, and with God. Only through such a contact will it be possible to guard Zionism against following the way of the nationalism of our age, which by demolishing the bridges which connect it with the world, is destroying its own value and its right to exist.39

Buber criticizes political Zionism for taking the path of modern nationalism. By contrast, he saw the dialogical principle as a power that could prevent Zionism from following the general secular nationalist wave of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secular nationalism means for Buber that the nation and the land become the object of worship. Renewing Israel’s dialogue with



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God in Zionism is, for Buber, the hope for the nation’s reconnecting to God and to the world (i.e., other nations). Buber’s implicit history of forgetfulness, what I name the narrative of Dialogsvergessenheit, is a severe critique of the historical condition of Israel and of Judaism. Forgetfulness of the dialogue, if my reading of Buber is correct, made Judaism monological and distanced it from the living dialogue with the divine. Only forgetfulness of the dialogue with God could lead the Jewish nation to seek its own greatness, instead of recognizing the greatness of God’s whole creation. CONCLUSION: FRUITS OF FORGETFULNESS One can find many similarities in the writings of these two neo-Romantic philosophers. On the level of their conception of history, as argued earlier, both thinkers employ a similar structure of historical thinking, positing an ontological reality that has been forgotten and should be recalled. Both account for the sickness of modernity with reference to this ontological oblivion, and both envision a messianic age of revival. On the level of their conception of the nation, both see the solution to the ontological problem as political; both consider their respective nations as playing a prominent role in establishing a new era of relation with God/Being. Both hold their country to be the place for the fulfillment of the respective metaphysical mission. Both portray the era of fulfillment in messianic terms. For both thinkers, this revival involves a political change as means for the ontological change. In contemporary scholarship, Buber is increasingly criticized for his affinity with Heidegger, with his nationalist theories and neo-Romantic ideas. In his article “Martin Buber between Nationalism and Mysticism,” Paul Mendes-Flohr portrays the young Buber as an advocate of the First World War, a German nationalist, who nonetheless experienced a turn in his later years.40 Uri Ram, in contrast, thinks that Buber’s early nationalism persists in his mature works too, for instance in “Between Nation and Its Land” (Hebrew, 1942).41 Ram harshly criticizes Buber’s idea of election and his orientalist attitude toward the Arabs. Ram does take into consideration Buber’s humanitarian worldview, yet he downplays its significance. He even refers to Buber as “one of the Faithfuls of the Temple Mount,”42 and relates Buber’s worldview to that of the settlers of “Gush Emunim.”43 In other words, he considers Buber to be a Jewish nationalist thinker.44 In the light of my thesis of Dialogevergessenheit, I find it hard to accept a simple application of the category of “nationalism” to Buber, as I believe Ram does. Buber was indeed a nationalist, and yet he criticized nationalist

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egotism, called for improvement of the nation’s ethical and moral level, and deemed the nation to be a mere first step on the way toward universal salvation. Dialogsvergessenheit explains Buber’s critique of nationalism. This critique is addressed both to Israel and to the nations; it refers to the rise of twentieth-century nationalism in both cases. National egotism, pride, and the sense of one’s own greatness are the rotten fruits born of the oblivion of the dialogue with God. Buber stresses that individuals and nations who are courageous enough to maintain the dialogue with the divine know that this dialogue does not reflect their greatness, but rather signifies a moral admonition for the sake of justice and goodness. I think here of the prophet Amos: For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins. There are those who oppress the innocent and take bribes and deprive the poor of justice in the courts. Therefore, the prudent keep quiet in such times, for the times are evil. Seek good, not evil, that you may live. Then the LORD God Almighty will be with you, just as you say he is. (Amos, 5:14)

Like the Biblical prophet, Buber too harshly criticized Zionism for its nationalism and self-pride, and rejected any interpretation of the Jewish people’s chosenness as high rank or privilege. The dialogue with God, his creation and beings, requires—on the contrary—responsibility, introspection, and the rejection of narcissism and the will to power. With respect to nationalism and forgetfulness, the two thinkers, Heidegger and Buber, take parallel, but opposite, directions. For Buber, recovery from forgetfulness will unmask the illusions of national pride and greatness, whereas for Heidegger it will reveal the original greatness of the nation. It seems to me that while Buber conceives of nationalism as representing moral improvement, Heidegger conceives of nationalism as purely ontological improvement. MYTHS OF FORGETFULNESS John Caputo concludes his “People of God, People of Being,” as Elad Lapidot reminds us,45 by critically invoking the Old Testament, the Jewish myth, as the essence and origin of Heidegger’s onto-political thought: Heidegger reproduces the myth of God’s chosen people, of God’s promised land, which is no less a problem for religion and the root of its violence. We need to break the logic that allows the myth to flourish that certain human beings speak the language that being or God would speak, had they vocal chords and lungs and writing instruments, the murderous twin myths of the people of



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God and of the people of being, myths which license murder in the name of God or in the name of the question of being.46

Against Caputo’s conclusion, I contend that Heidegger’s myth concerns not only the chosen people or “the people of Being” in a way that is equivalent to “the people of God.” Heidegger’s myth also contains the motif of an evil people, the followers of an evil God, carrying out the evil metaphysical mission of machination, which Heidegger identifies with the Jews. In contrast to Caputo’s claim that Heidegger rewrites the biblical myth, Susan Anima Taubes has argued that Heidegger’s polemic is directed against the biblical and metaphysical compromise of Christian theology and thus carrying on a secret, esoteric, heretical, “Christian” tradition. . . . When Heidegger announces the task of destruction of the entire history of ontology as the leading thread to the development of his philosophy, he “revolts”—in the realm of theory—against the same classical world frame, in opposition to which the gnosis came to voice.47

My reply to Caputo is that the source for Heidegger’s “murderous” nationalism is not the Biblical myth but the Gnostic dualistic myth of friends and enemies of Being, of ontological good and evil.48 Martin Buber strongly opposed the dualist perception of Gnosis, of two authorities, and argued for the existence of only one authority, standing for both good and bad.49 The task of human beings consists, in his view, in that to which the Hasidism are dedicated: in unveiling the egoistic self, struggling against the internal foe (Yetzer ha-ra, “the evil inclination”), learning to distinguish good from evil, and giving existence, as much as possible—to the good. According to Buber there are no pure entities in the world, not even the Zaddik, the righteous one. To quote Kohelet, “there is not one good man on earth who does what is best and doesn’t err” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). Where evil is an ontological attribute, no repentance is possible, and war, animosity, and murder are unavoidable. NOTES  * “I thank Nadav Avruch and Elad Lapidot for their attentive readings, useful remarks and editorial suggestions.”  1 Haim Gordon, The Heidegger-Buber Controversy: The Status of I-Thou (London: Greenwood Press, 2001).   2 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger in Dialogue,” The Journal of Religion 94, no. 1 (2014): 2–25.   3 John Caputo, “Demythologizing Heidegger: Alētheia” and the “History of Being,” The Review of Metaphysics 41, no. 3 (1988): 522–23.

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  4 Peter E. Gordon, “Heidegger In Black,” New Yorker, October 9, 2014, accessed March 30, 2017, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/09/heidegger-in-black/.  5 Ibid.   6 Caputo, “Demythologizing Heidegger,” 519.  7 Dror Pimentel, “The Gift of Place: From Hölderlin to Avidan, The Unit for History and Theory,” Bezalel 10 (2008), accessed May 2, 2017, http://bezalel. secured.co.il/zope/home/he/1220527665/1222064907.  8 John Caputo, “People of God, People of Being: The Theological Presuppositions of Heidegger’s Path of Thought,” in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. James Falconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).  9 Ibid., 90. 10 Ibid. 11 Christoph Schmidt, “Monotheism as a Metapolitical Problem: Heidegger’s War against Jewish Christian Monotheism,” Manuscript, last accessed March 31, 2017 in: https://www.academia.edu/19920690/Monotheism_as_a_Metapolitical_Problem_-_ Heideggers_war_against_Monotheism_the_Catholic_Church_and_Judaism, 44. 12 John Caputo, “People of God, People of Being,” 90. 13 Peter Trawny, “Thesen zu Heideggers seinsgeschichtlichen Antisemitismus,” in Antisemitismus: Positionen im Widerstreit, ed. Walter Homolka (Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 2016), 386. 14 Anthony J. Steinbock, “Heidegger, Machination, and the Jewish Question: Problem of the gift,” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle 5 (2015): 55. 15 Michael Fagenblat, “The Thing That Scares Me Most: Heidegger’s Anti-Semitism and the Return to Zion,” Journal for Culture and Religious Theory 14.1 (2014): 11. 16 See Heidegger’s correspondence with Marcuse after the war in “The Exchange of Letters: Herbert Marcuse and Martin Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 152–64. 17 See also Gordon, “Heidegger In Black”: “Heidegger had the habit of blaming his personal misfortunes and the misfortunes of the modern age on conspiracies and anonymous metaphysical processes that no human being could hope to control.” 18 Leora Batnitzky, “Renewing the Jewish Past: Buber on History and Truth,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 10, no. 4 (2003): 336–50. 19 Leora Batnizky, “Revelation and Neues Denken—Rethinking Buber and Rosenzweig on the Law,” in New Perspectives on Martin Buber, 149–64. For more about the Buber and the law, see Admiel Kosman, Gender and Dialogue in the Rabbinic Prism, trans. Edward Levin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 18–19. 20 Batnizky, “Renewing the Jewish Past,” 340. 21 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970). 22 In this short chapter, I cannot elaborate on what dialogue means for Buber; however, I want to argue that Buber follows Hasidism in his conception of dialogue, according to which God conducts the dialogue not through voice and speech but through the actual happenings in the world. In every event God is “speaking” to the human—through encounter with reality.



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For more about dialogue and Hasidism, see Israel Koren, The Mystery of the Earth: Mysticism and Hasidism in the Thought of Martin Buber (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 275–336. The problem of understanding the exact nature of this dialogue must be discussed separately. However, it is important to say that for Buber the dialogue with God is not a flattering one, it brings forward one’s misdeeds and not one’s greatness. The dialogue with God requires to take responsibility for one’s actions, and to be attentive and insightful about one’s ethical relations to the Thou that one encounter in reality. 23 For more about Jewish renewal see Asher Biemann, Inventing New Beginnings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Reception of Hasidism as Kulturkritik (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 24 Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. and ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: HB, 1988). 25 Martin Buber, “Jewish Religiosity,” in On Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 2013), 81. 26 “Religiosity is the creative, religion the organizing, principle. Religiosity starts anew with every young person, shaken to his very core by the mystery; religion wants to force him into a system stabilized for all time. Religiosity means activity—the elemental entering-into-relation with the absolute; religion means passivity—an acceptance of the handed-down command” (Buber, “Jewish Religiosity,” 139). In addition to Simmel, Buber himself testified that A. D. Gordon was to him a “true teacher” in matters of religiosity. See Paths in Utopia [Hebrew], ed. Avraham Shapira (Tel Aviv: ʿAm ʿoved Press, 1984), 253–64. See also Y. Jobani, Y, “The Lure of Heresy: A Philosophical Typology of Hebrew Secularism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 24, no. 1, 95–121. 27 Buber, “The Early Address (1909–1918) Preface to the 1923 Edition,” in On Judaism, 3–10. 28 Batnitzky, “Renewing the Jewish Past,” 345. 29 Martin Buber, “The Election of Israel,” in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 80–92. 30 Buber, “The Election of Israel,” 80. 31 Ibid., 89. 32 Ibid., 81. 33 Martin Buber, “Biblical Leadership,” in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, 141. 34 Martin Buber, On Zion: The History of an Idea, trans. Stanley Godman (London: Horovitz, 1973), 51. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Martin Buber, “The Spirit of Israel and the Present Reality,” in Ruach ve-Meziut: Tisha shearim le-Berur ha-Yachas she-Benehen (Tel-Aviv: Machbarot Lesifrut, 1942), 23. 38 Buber, “The Spirit of Israel and the Present Reality,” 23. 39 Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, trans. and ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: HB, 1988), 218.

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40 Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, “Martin Buber between Nationalism and Mysticism,” The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly no. 29 (1980): 71–92. 41 Cf. On Zion. 42 Uri Ram, The Return of Martin Buber: National and Social Thought in Israel from Buber to the neo-Buberians [Hebrew: Shuvo shel Martin Buber: ha-Macchshava ha-Leumit ve-ha-Hevratit be-Israel mi-Buber ad ha-Bubrianim ha-Hadashim] (Tel-Aviv: Resling, 2015). 43 Ram, The Return of Martin Buber, 91. 44 Ibid., 51–105. 45 Elad Lapidot, “Heidegger’s Tshuva?” Heidegger Studies 32 (2016): 33–52. 46 Caputo, “People of God, People of Being,” 91. 47 Susan Anima Taubes, “The Gnostic Foundations of Heidegger’s Nihilism,” The Journal of Religion 34, no. 3 (1954): 157. 48 The first and most prominent to see the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and Gnosticism was Hans Jonas. See Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism, Existentialism, Nihilism” in The Gnostic Religion (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1991), 320–41. I suggest here a different aspect of Heidegger’s Gnosticism, which is not existential, but metaphysical. I thank Jonathan Chahana for illuminating the relevancy of Gnosis for Heidegger’s thought and the insightful discussions we had on the topic, see: Jonathan Cahana, “A Gnostic Critic of Modernity: Hans Jonas from Existentialism to Science”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2017): 1–23. 49 On Buber and Gnosticism, see Yaniv Feller, “From Aher To Marcion: Buber’s Understanding of Gnosis,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2013): 383.

Chapter 12

How Else Can One Think Earth? The Talmuds and Pre-Socratics Sergey Dolgopolski

1. τὰδὲπάνταοἰακίζειΚεραυνός Das Weltall aber steuert der Blitz (tr. Diels) [But lightning steers the universe] or: Lightning steers all (Heraclitus: 64) 2. ‫תוהוובוהו‬ tohuva-vohu (Gen: 1:2) 3. ‫מהאנןמקיימין‬ What [then] we establish? (pT.Gittin 9:101)

Where2 do the two Talmuds stand on the line of thinking unveiling itself from the pre-Socratics to the most recent redefinition of philosophy as geophilosophy—that is, as a way to think earth?3 “Pre-Socratics” names those who came “before” Plato and Socrates, before the “Beginning,” as it were. They come before philosophy as metaphysics, and manifest the promise, at least for Heidegger, that metaphysics will also come to its end. They are the lost other of metaphysics which Heidegger rediscovers and/or reclaims as a source for his “question of being.” By way of a preliminary comparison, Talmud as a discipline of thinking is too a lost other; this other, however, is lost to both metaphysics and to “the question of being,” for the Talmud, as I argue, offers a radically different way of thinking earth, which is to be found neither in the pre-Socratics, nor in Heidegger, nor in traditional metaphysics. By cross-examining the thinking of earth in pre-Socratic traditions and in the two Talmuds, the Palestinian and the Babylonian, this chapter detects and analyses how the way of thinking earth found both in the Talmuds and in the 221

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pre-Socratics is undermined/precluded in the currently dominant post- and anti-Platonic traditions of thinking earth. This preclusion of thinking earth in the Talmuds proceeds from late-ancient theology to modern versions of globalism in phenomenology, political theory, geopoetics or geocritics, and culminates in Heidegger’s thinking of the pre-Socratics in opposition to metaphysics. I first outline contemporary attempts to reclaim earth from the (post)platonic reduction of earth to an object, a concept, an image, or a sentiment. I follow these attempts as they reveal their own limitations on the way from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of earth to Carl Schmitt’s political theology, and further to the way in which both, Husserl and Schmitt, are reclaimed4 and renegotiated by Gilles Deleuze. These thinkers provide a broader comparative scope, in which to revisit Heidegger’s thinking of earth. In the second part of the chapter, I consequently apply and retest the perspective resulting from that analysis in order to set a new stage for observing the workings of the earth in rabbinic thought. I approach that task through a close intertextual reading of a pericope in pTGittin 9:10 and related texts. I perform this reading by way of applying and reconsidering the optics of earth in Husserl, Schmitt, and Deleuze as presented in the first part. The final part of the chapter highlights implications and stakes of the resulting analysis for rethinking earth in the current debate on globalization and pluralism, suggesting that the current modes of political thought prevalent in this debate are increasingly insufficient. The new concern expressed by this volume is, as Elad Lapidot has it, the relationship between Heideggerian and Jewish thought. This concern is, of course, closely connected to, but also goes beyond the scope of, another issue, which has hitherto been discussed and debated with much greater prevalence: the issue of Heidegger and the Jews. My argument here speaks primarily to the new concern, although it is clear that asking about Jewish thought and Heideggerian thought strongly contributes to the already existing discussion. By way of another preliminary clarification, a move from “Heidegger” to “Heideggerian” becomes necessary if the new focus is not only on Heidegger but both on the thought and the thinkers who are responding to him in the Jewish tradition, or as I will argue more specifically for this chapter, in rabbinic tradition in the entirety of its chronologic existence from late antiquity to its current stage. With that in mind, let me, first of all, second Elad Lapidot’s proposition about Jews versus Israel. Allow me to gesture here toward political philology, a path of thinking developed in the works of Geoffrey Waite5 and earlier in Gramsci. For the purpose of my argument at this point, I apply that approach to rabbinic literature. In rabbinic literature of late antiquity yehudayoi, “Jews,” is the term with which those outside of both rabbinic and Christian



How Else Can One Think Earth? 223

imagined communities named the Children of Israel, which is the name by which these communities refer to themselves, if they give themselves any name at all. This, however, requires reconsidering the initial question that Elad Lapidot asks in his Introduction to this volume, namely, whether Jews as Jews think, or whether thinking has anything to do with any specific collective in distinction from others. To the second part of the question, in its more general sense, my answer is affirmative when it comes to the Talmud. As I have already argued elsewhere, thinking in the Talmud is intrinsically interpersonal, rather than solitary, whether the solus means an individual or a nation. In a more precise sense, however, for Elad Lapidot, political thinking, with the emphasis on the political, is thinking on behalf of a particular group, a particular collective. Yet the thinking on display in the folios of the two Talmuds is not particular, it is not the thinking of solitary thinkers, either as particular individuals or as a particular collective. Nor is it thinking per se. It is rather—to state it formulaically and with reference to a work that I have already started developing—a process of remembering the open past. It is thus not thinking in time, which both for Hermann Cohen and for Martin Heidegger comes from the future.6 This takes me to my second seconding. It concerns Eveline GoodmanThau’s brief remark that “as we all know, Levinas’ Talmudic lectures are too philosophical” (I quote from memory). Nonetheless, despite the excessively philosophical way Levinas had in reading the Talmud, which is not dissimilar to the way the Talmud was read in the nineteenth century,7 his reading has the merit of introducing the task of asking the question of the relationship between Talmud and philosophy, a question that becomes even more important in the context of discussing the question of Heideggerian thought and—let me change the term in the light of my first remark—rabbinic (rather than “Jewish”) thought. To begin addressing this question of Heideggerian thought and Rabbinic thought, however, one must perform another act of philology, an act of metaphilology, the removal of the “the” from “the Talmud,” an act that, again, I have already begun elsewhere. This removal allows approaching Talmud as a discipline—if not of thought, then of memory and remembering, a discipline that is both commensurable with and irreducible to the discipline of philosophy. This in turn allows articulating a further shift that is already, slowly but surely, transpiring in this volume, a shift from Heidegger and the Jews to the question of Heideggerian and Rabbinic thought. Just as for Heidegger the question of thought has to do with the Who (“Wer ist Zeit?”) rather than with the What (“Was ist Zeit?”),8 in the Talmud, too, the question of thought has to do with the Who: Who thinks in the Talmud, or more specifically, Who Remembers? The argument in the essay below advances these questions further.

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As I will argue, articulating—let alone answering—these questions will require asking the question of the relationship between the Talmuds and the pre-Socratics. Yet before embarking on that task, or more precisely as the first step of this task, let me address the specific moment of the political, to which Heidegger’s question “Who Is Time?”9 refers, by which reference his ontology becomes political ontology. Based on Donatella di Cesare’s presentation in the conference that led to this volume and in her work elsewhere,10 it is clear that Schmitt’s political theology is indispensable for this discussion. In Schmitt’s political theology, too, the question of the Who is central. In contrast both to Heidegger and to Schmitt, the Who in the Talmuds is to be asked in radical disconnection from both ontology and theology. The Talmudic “Who” is political, but not in the sense of political ontology or of political theology. Rather it is the purely political, a category that both ontology and theology tacitly introduce into and no less tacitly preclude from the view. Unlike an understanding of the political relationship as driven by discourse on either justice or being in time, or, alternatively, by theology in which the Old Testament is suspended, the Talmudic understanding of political engagement is driven by the concept and practice of refutation. Refutation comes front and center in the Babylonian version of Talmud (without the “the”; note I did not say in the Babylonian Talmud). Telegraphically, as a summary of an argument I have begun developing elsewhere,11 the political in Babylonian Talmud serves as a vehicle of remembrance: to remember something correctly is to remember what it refutes; the truth of an utterance is available if one has access to what is being refuted by that utterance; and therefore truth can be multiple without being relativistic. Refutation, and in particular self-refutation or showing someone that her argument is self-refuting, becomes the mode of political action in Babylonian Talmud. The political12 founded in refutation is neither of theology nor of ontology. It is another type of political. In order to lay it bare the question of the Who in the Talmud, or rather of Who remembers in the Talmud, becomes indispensable. If in (the) Babylonian Talmud this question of the political, the question of the Who, has to do with refuting and self-refuting, then what informs that question (of the pure political before it gets locked in either ontology or theology) in (the) Talmud developed in and between the rabbinic schools in Tiberias, Caesaria, and Tzipory, also known as the Palestinian Talmud, the Talmud of the Land of Israel, or the Talmud Yerushalmi? The argument below will proceed to articulate the question of the Who as the question of the pure political in the Talmud Yerushalmi by asking about the position of this Talmud in the range of thought developed from the pre-Socratics to modern Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian thought.



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One last disclaimer before I proceed with the argument. The Black Notebooks figure prominently in this volume. They are also a part of my argument; however, I approach them via what I construe as an intellectualbiographical—although not necessarily empirical-biographical—response to Heidegger’s thought on earth in the early 1930s. It is as such a response that I refer to Husserl’s text of 1934 on the origin of the spatiality of nature, which is a series of notes that were published posthumously.13 I think of this text as a response to what the Black Notebooks express with respect to Heidegger’s insistence on the original (of course, non-“ontic”) rootedness in a dwelling. Husserl’s text will play an important role in my argument here as a response to Heidegger’s articulation of the original dwelling. ON EARTH The intrigue of reading pre-Socratics and Palestinian rabbis together sets out from Gilles Delezue’s claim that philosophy must think earth, and that only the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche, Bergson, and—no surprise here—Deleuze himself rose to the task. If the majority of philosophy, from Socrates on, falls short of this task, where does it place the Palestinian rabbis, and more generally, how does this resituate the question of the relationships between Talmud and philosophy, which so far has only been asked in relation to philosophy after Plato, in the broader scope in which these traditions of thought unveil themselves from the pre-Socratics to Deleuze? By way of an outline, this project is a reading of the three epigraphs to this chapter. The three engage different ways to think and represent earth. Yet, and this is where my argument will begin, the three epigraphs differ in the ways in which earth and representation interrelate. Let me first introduce these three ways, which I call three imageries, in thinking earth. 1) ‫( אדם‬adam; commonly translated “man”) comes from ‫( אדמה‬adama; earthground); by contrast, the ‫( ארץ‬eretz; earth-abyss) of ‫( תוהו ובוהו‬tohu vavohu; commonly translated “chaos.” I refer here to Gen. 1:2: “And the eretz was tohu-va-vohu”) is beyond any representations of earth in either perception or thought. 2) Heraclitus’ “Lightning in the night” shows the contours of earth as “all” (rather than “world” or “universe”) in the flash of lightning. Under the bolt of lightning, humans give this earth being, and retroactively nonbeing. Earth is a contour of a multiple “all” where distinctions do not shine forth. 3) Earth in the blindness of the bright light of day, in the bright day of knowledge both Socrates and Plato are striving for. Distinctions between things, in particular between things that are and things that only seem to be come

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to the fore. What only seems to be, is not. Most importantly, nonbeing derives here from seeming. Humans most gloriously reside in the world of being; and they must engage in the fight against seeming and against the chimeras of the day produced by seeming. In this scheme of things, the nonbeing of night becomes a chimera of day, a function of seeming; and no more. Gone is the power of the nonbeing that, as in (2), has always already lurked before lightning stroke. To understand the complexity of the relationships between earth and representation, I map these three imageries on a sequence of readings in (1) Husserl, (2) Schmitt, whom I am grouping with Heidegger,14 (3) Deleuze, and (4) a passage of Tractate Gittin of the Palestinian Talmud (pTGittin 9:10). In the argument here, these four bodies of text and thought will afford a series of readings of the three epigraphs in a sequence of changing perspectives or articulations. Each reading will provide a perspective or an articulation to pick up and help where the previous reading comes short. But before I begin, let me note that already the first three corpora on the list advance the question of representing earth well beyond the geopoetics of Kenneth White,15 who demanded to represent earth differently than how science does it, and also beyond the geocriticism of Bertrand Westphal,16 who demonstrated some of the difficulties in doing so. In contrast, earth in Husserl, Heidegger and Schmitt, and Deleuze radically escapes representation. Unlike Westphal, for these bodies of thought representing earth is not difficult, but programmatically impossible. How then to map Husserl, Schmitt and Heidegger, Deleuze, and Gittin on the three imageries of the earth? Husserl articulates one possible paradigm through which to read the first imagery.17 Earth neither moves nor rests. Rather, it is of the rank of the “basisbodies” (“Boden-‘Körper’ ”18) or, to render it literally, and in singular, the “body-ground” from which a living body cannot detach itself in space. Husserl’s phenomenological analysis shows how Earth, as an object—either a planet one can see from afar, or a ground-clay one can hold in one’s hands— belongs to the space, of which, per Husserl’s argument, the living body is the phenomenological (but neither logical nor historical) origin and/or ground. What that means however is that Husserlian reading forsakes earth ‫)ארץ‬, eretz) behind the ground (‫אדמה‬, adama, ground-body). That reading does render the ground-body as non-representable, however the ground-body is clearly presented within the human experience of space and objects therein. Earth-ground and/or body-ground is unimaginable and non-representable but still is given, as necessarily indirectly as it is, in the experience of space; that body is given there as a commensurable origin of the space. Schmitt articulates a paradigm suitable to find the hidden power of night (from the first imagery) in the bright light of the day (in the second). He



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both discovers19 and dismisses (as anti-Catholic) a primary, dark power of representation—that is, the power to represent representation itself (“primary representation”) before it represents any content. Schmitt discovered primary representation, which always accompanies, but also always precedes and conditions the possibility (Kant) of any representation of any specific content. Schmitt’s discovery20 of the primary power of representation to represent before any specific represented content explains where Husserl’s body-ground derives its power, and why it does not need any turtle to rest upon. The power of primary representation explains the power of earth (still as ‫אדמה‬, not ‫ )ארץ‬as underlying the experience and origin of space in Husserl’s thought. Deleuze articulates a paradigm through which to read the first and the second imageries together. He reclaims the earth of the lightning as the only earth philosophy should think. This also becomes the earth of tohu-va-vohu. The (ex)static21 body-ground constitutes, in his terms, the initial “territorialization,” which is the starting point both for the human and for the bird. Humans however end up “reterritorializing” in the bright light of day, as in the third imagery.22 The result is a stably visible, imaginable, and representable territory of a police (fractal) or an empire (map). These two forms of reterritorialization are always “relative,” precisely because they are bound to clearly represented objects (which can always disappear). For Deleuze, the dark earth of lightning, without day-clear representations, either perceptual or mental, is however the condition sine qua non, historically, logically, and analytically, for the transition from the “territorialization” of the bodyground to the “relative reterritorialization” into political territory. Philosophy therefore must think the nonrepresentational earth. Deleuze call this act of thinking the nonrepresentational earth “absolute deterritorialization,” which is a never-ending departure from the body-ground, a departure without which no political territory can exist. For this reason, absolute deterritorialization always precedes and exceeds political territory. For Deleuze, the philosophies of the pre-Socratics, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Deleuze himself were the only philosophies that lived up to the task of philosophy. They were the only philosophies to think earth in the meaning of the first or second imagery, as that ecstatic tohu-va-vohu and/or earth of lightning, which comes before and grounds any static representation of earth and/or any static reterritorialization of it. The way to think earth is to create new concepts and formulate new problems with their help, not to worry about solutions (as science does) or about the sense/effect of non-resolvability (as art practices.) Deleuze’s creation of new concepts and problems corresponds to Schmitt’s primary representation; and the solutions correspond to secondary or ordinary representations with a specific content. It is only to the former, that is, to conceptual creation, that Deleuze grants the status of earth of the second imagery, namely, the “all” of

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lightning; in contrast, he restricts the earth of the third imagery, the earth as a territory visible in the bright light of the day, to a much narrower realm of solutions and relative reterritorializations. This means ‫( ארץ‬eretz) or earth of the first imagery is lost between the bright light of the day as well as in the darkness in which lightning strikes. Both the earth of the day and the earth of the lightning remain commensurable to a human being, to adam, related, as adam must, to earth as the adama. What that means however is that in Deleuze, too, the incommensurable aretz becomes reduced to commensurable adama; the aretz thereby becomes lost. Deleuze does, however, have a resource that he tacitly creates and just as tacitly excludes from consideration: the absolute reterritorialization, that is, reterritorialization that always only approximates the territory for human stand and/or dwelling. Absolute reterritorialization neither takes root, nor claims original rootedness: this absolute “re”-territorialization is without or independent of any chthonic territorialization. This means that any chthonic origin becomes either tacitly absent or explicitly irrelevant. Not totally in contrast with Deleuze’s recurring motive of the “line of flight,” absolute reterritorialization is the “line of landing” which is never “full.” In other words, absolute reterritorialization means never achieving complete reterritorialization, and thus never leaving reterritorialization behind; an ‫ ארץ‬that is always either not yet or always already not subjected to ontic reduction. This model of ongoing and, if one prefers, (ex)static approximation is another possible resource for thinking earth as the ‫ ארץ‬of the first imagery. I will now test this possibility through a reading of pTGittin 9:10 and see in what way this would require a reconsideration of Deleuze. On the way, I take inspiration from the existing scholarship on satire in the Babylonian Talmud.23 I take that scholarship as drawing a clear distinction between Socratic irony performed, as it always is, in the steady light referred to in the second imagery of the earth, and the satire that has been reliably attested as the form of thinking in the Babylonian Talmud.24 I further take satire away from Socratic grounds. Satire can be done by the speedy lightning in the midst of the night; in that it differs from a slow and laidback irony one performs in the safety of a midday. What is this night, then? And where does the human stand in the midst of it, and where is the earth, and in which of the senses outlined above, if any? THEN, WHAT DO WE ESTABLISH? GIVING NEW LAW TO EX-HUSBAND A Case Study in Standing on Earth Before directing the lights toward the action on stage in the passage from pTGittin, let me summarily state the new questions that the aforementioned



How Else Can One Think Earth? 229

analysis invites us to ask about this action: What is the subject position25 of the one and only character on stage below? Is the action of this character a decision in Schmitt’s sense of being an exception from the norm? Is the act a judgment in the sense of either creating or applying a rule through one’s action? What is the ground on which this character stands?26 How does earth, as body-ground (Husserl), or as concept-problem (Deleuze), or otherwise, perhaps as the biblical abyss of Genesis 1:2, function on stage? My broader questions will pertain to other problems already raised in rabbinics: how the subject position and in particular the grounding of the character as featured in this passage of the Palestinian Talmud (pTGittin 9:10) changes in the respective “parallel” pericope in the Babylonian Talmud (bTGittin 90ab)? In the last pericope in the Palestinian Gittin, which I am reading next in this chapter, the entry point through which to think these questions is the term ‫( מקיימין‬mekaymin), the main term that the main and only on-stage character is using. Let me translate the term preliminarily as “accomplish” or “establish,” in the sense of establishing the law in a particular case by deriving this law from Scripture. Because the main on-stage character has no further characteristics beyond its grammatical number, namely, the first-person plural, “we,” and the language it speaks, I will call this character “the Aramaic Speaking Character” or, for brevity, “the Aramaic Character” or “the Character,” to differentiate it from all other, off-stage characters, who are all named and identified. My focus is on the subject position of the Character and more specifically on what the term ‫ מקיימין‬says about this subject position. I will read the pericope from pTGittin with some help from the Tannaitic Midrash Sifre 269 as a background against which to understand some of the actions involved in the Character’s subject position—from discovering/ inventing what the authorities “established” to invoking other authorities to contravene the previous ones, to attempting to “establish” a “new commandment” whereby “the ex-husband is not even to get close to his ex-wife” to showing why such “a new commandment” is (im)plausible27 to establish. As is already clear, my main concern with the subject position is formal. But let me first clarify a general set of questions, which constitute the discursive dwelling of the subject with respect to content. The questions are as follows: Shall (i.e., both May and Must) the husband divorce his wife if he thinks she commits adultery? Shall he divorce her if he simply thinks she is emotionally disengaged from him as a woman? The competing answers to these complex questions arise from the interpretation of an idiomatic expression in Deut 24:1,‫( ערות דבר‬ervat davar). This term generally means a “sexually illicit act.” One party, the scholars of the House of Shammai, takes it to refer to any Scripturally prohibited act of sexual nature listed in Leviticus 18 (for the sake of brevity, and at the price of imprecision, I shall call it

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“adultery”). These Shammai-house scholars therefore conclude that the husband shall (may and must) divorce his wife only if he finds her committing a sexually illicit act from the list. A competing party, the House of Hillel, takes “sexually illicit act” to refer to any “act” of the wife whatsoever that is deemed sexually illicit by the husband, for example, dressing immodestly, bathing in public, or going out of the house with her hair undone. The House of Hillel therefore concludes that the husband shall divorce his wife even if her acts connote illicit sexuality without being sexually illicit per se. The linguistic play consists in the different ways in which the competing parties read the scriptural expression ‫( ערות דבר‬ervat davar). If we translate ‫ ערות דבר‬as “illicit act” then the House of Shammai emphasizes the “illicit” and de-emphasizes the “act”: “the illicit act” comes to mean “what is sexually illicit per se.” In contrast, the House of Hillel emphasizes the “act” and deemphasizes “illicit”; “the illicit act” means something much broader, namely, “any sexually illicit display or behavior.” In what follows, “illicit act” will refer to a violation from the list in Leviticus 18, whereas “illicit act”—without any definite emphasis—will refer to a broader scope of acts, which perhaps connote but certainly not constitute any of the acts prohibited in the list in Leviticus 18. Examples of “illicit acts” would be much subtler, because they involve a mutual relationship between husband and wife, such that anything intimating a break of this mutuality could become an “illicit act”—from wearing an immodest dress in public, to having one’s hair undone when going out, to things much less obvious to other’s eyes, since interpreting the relationship’s mutuality is as mutual as the relationship itself. Such an “illicit act” would be an indication for the husband that his wife has a will to break the relationship. It is assumed that if, on the other hand, the husband is willing to break the relationship, he can do it by writing the divorce bill. This is precisely why the question arises as to whether the husband is to write such a bill in a case that an “illicit act” has been committed. It is about a liminal case when the very determination of whether or not the “illicit act” has been committed is not a question of witnessing, but rather the question of husband’s own interpretation of his relationships with his wife. This is why such a liminal question comes front and center and becomes so pertinent and debated between the two Houses. In the subsequent example, a more specific form of that question will have to do with the following: If a husband cannot remarry a wife he divorced based on the legitimate testimony of someone who witnessed her cheating, can he remarry her if the only reason for the divorce was his sense of her having cheated? This is, if one prefers, the question of the legal power of the husband’s jealousy in cases where that jealousy has no support through the legally accepted testimony of a witnesses. The discussion in pTGittin begins perhaps—and as later editions surely have the reader assume—with the last Mishnah Gittin in view. However, it



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does not directly mention or address the Mishnah until the end, where the reference is neither explicit nor certain. The starting point for my reading is the linguistic play discussed above between the different ways in which the competing parties read the scriptural expression ‫( ערות דבר‬ervat davar): as “illicit act” (as the house of Shammai reads it) or as “illicit act” (as the House of Hillel reads it). Again, in what follows, “illicit act” will refer to a violation from the list in Leviticus 18, whereas “illicit act”—without any definitive emphasis—certainty provided by this pericope—the one and only character on stage: the Aramaic Speaking Character. The action begins with the Character invoking a recitation: Is it not recited as follows? The House of Shammai say, [she is] only [forbidden] to him [to remarry] if he divorced [her] because of the illicit act. Yet from where does it follow [whether or not she is forbidden to him for remarriage] if he divorced her [only] because her hair was undone, her sides exposed and hands sleeveless? It follows from “because he hath found the illicit act in her.” (Deut 24:1)

As it will become clear, the Character informs the reader of how the invoked recitation is to be interpreted. I signaled this interpretation with square brackets. The verse, Deut 24:1, helps to dismiss the possibility that the wife may remarry the husband if he divorced her because of “the illicit act” rather than because of “the illicit act.” The Aramaic Speaking Character is now asking what the point was—what the scholars of the House of Shammai do or‫מקיימין‬ (“accomplish,” “establish”)—by inquiring as they did above. The question and the answer of the Character are as follows: What do the House of Shammai accomplish [‫מקיימין‬, mekaymin; lit: “establish,” here also “derive”] thereby? They preempt anyone from arguing that if he divorces her because of the illicit act, he is forbidden [to remarry her] but if because of the illicit act, she is permitted [for remarriage].

The point of the House of Shammai, or what they ‫מקיימין‬, is that the husband is forbidden to remarry his ex-wife even if he divorced her because of an illicit act—and not only the illicit act per se. Once divorced, she is thus forbidden to him, whatever the reason for the divorce might have been. With that understanding of what was “established” and/or “accomplished” by the House of Shammai, the Character recalls an authority that refutes the House of Shammai thus understood. The refutation proceeds as follows: Said R. Shila of Kefar Thamratha, The verses (Deut. 24:1 and 24:4) refute the teaching of the House of Shammai: “her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again.” (Deut 24:4)

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Whether or not the “original” argument of R. Shila28 addresses the same teaching of the House of Shammai as it does in the given context, the logic of the refutation here is that if there is already a verse (Deut 24:4) that explicitly forbids him to remarry her, then the other verse that was invoked by the House of Shammai (Deut 24:1) cannot be used as a ground for arriving to the exactly same result. Put differently, what is explicitly established by one verse cannot be established by another verse.29 Having established the conflict of authorities—the House of Shammai versus R. Shila of Kefar Thamratha—the Aramaic character, as collective as it turns out to be, asks what “we” are then supposed to “establish,” “accomplish,” or “derive”? The question suggests both an aporia of the two conflicting authorities, with no exit, and an inclination to act, that is, to “establish,” “derive,” or “accomplish,” just as one of those authorities did. The Character thus asks: What [then] do we accomplish [‫ ;מקיימין‬lit: “establish,” here also “derive”]? If [we were] to forbid him to remarry her, she is already forbidden [to him for remarriage, i.e. explicitly by the verse Deut 24:4]. Rather we do establish [‫ ;מקיימין‬lit: “establish,” here also “derive”] to subject him to a [new] negative commandment [lit: to give upon him a ‘you shall not do’ (‫])ליתן עליו בלא תעשה‬.

The Aramaic-Speaking Character is thus to accomplish, to establish, to derive (later, I will work with the difficulties in grasping the multilayered structure of this one act of ‫מקיימין‬, expressed, as I have rendered it, in the three English words “accomplish,” “establish,” and “derive”), so that “we” can “give” (‫ )ליתן‬the husband a negative commandment (which, let me reveal this in advance, will be “Do not even get close to your ex-wife!”). The Character “gives” the negative commandment to the ex-husband by deriving, establishing, and accomplishing it through reading Lev. 15:32–33. I have italicized the parts of the verses that the Character emphasizes: It is written, [This is the law of him that hath an issue, and of him from whom the flow of seed goeth out, so that he is unclean thereby;] and of her that is sick with her impurity, and of them that have an issue, [whether it be a man, or a woman; and of him that lieth with her that is unclean]. (Lev. 15:32–33, translation: JPS 1917)

The Character recalls how “the first elders” interpreted these two verses in Leviticus: The first elders used to say, [The part of the verse saying ‫התדנב הודהו‬, translated by JPS as “and of her that is sick with her impurity”, means, according to the very literal meaning] “she shall stay at a distance” (‫)תהא בנידתה‬. [They further interpreted it to prescribe that] she shall neither put a blue [make-up] on her eyes



How Else Can One Think Earth? 233

[‫]לא תכחול‬, nor wear bright colored dress [‫ ]לא תפקוס‬before such time as she gets into the [purification through] water.

These verses provide the rule for a woman who is in a temporary condition of ritual impurity. The first elders took these verses to mean, literally, that she is to remain at a distance from her husband. Less literally, they took it to prescribe that she is not to make herself attractive to him. Then comes a moment of telling silence. Even if the Character does not say a word at this point, his/her/their point is clear. The negative commandment that this Character is achieving, or accomplishing, or deriving (‫)מקיימין‬ from Leviticus 15:33 via the first elders’ reading of the verse is as follows: Not only is the ex-husband forbidden to remarry her, as the Scripture explicitly says; furthermore, and here is the new point (or new accomplishment, or new achievement, all captured in the term ‫)מקיימין‬, the Aramaic character is preparing to “give” (‫ )ליתן‬to the ex-husband: Do not even get close to your ex-wife! This new negative commandment is what the Character achieved, thereby both surpassing and defending the House of Shammai against the refutation of R. Shila of KefarThamratha. Yes, the latter was right, but there is also a new negative commandment, which is not explicitly spelled out by any verse, and therefore it is both a merit or “achievement” of the Character and the new defense for the House of Shammai. At the very least, at this victorious point in the action, the Character and the audience hope it is so. Yet it is not quite so. Even at this dramatic moment of silence and with the taste of victory on her lips, the Aramaic Character is both sober and selfcritical enough to question the achieved “gift.” In fact, that sober moment in the midst of the telling and victorious silence was already signaled in advance in the question “What do we establish?”(‫מה‬ ‫)אנן מקיימין‬, which was not only a technical question leading to the victory, but also an introduction of a problem that the victory helps to expose. “What are we to establish?”: “We” could try to follow the first elders and, on their shoulders, produce a new negative commandment to give to the ex-husband. But their shoulders are shaking—Rabbi Akiva gives them a knock, so that “we” are losing ground. This is why and where the Character recalls how Rabbi Akiva objected to the first elders, who served as the basis for the Character: Rabbi Akiva said to them, This is how you derive your proof?

Rabbi Akiva aims to undermine the interpretation of the first elders. He says to them, as it were: You, first elders, took the part in Lev. 15:33 (‫)והדוה בנידתה‬ literally to mean “to stay away from him” and you further took it, less

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literally, to mean “she is not supposed to work on looking attractive to him”! To that reading, Rabbi Akiva objects as follows: Yet if you say [i.e. interpret] that way, then [if she did not work on looking attractive to him,] she herself makes [herself look] repulsive, [so that] he would look at his wife and would want to divorce her!

Rabbi Akiva thus undermines or refutes the first elders’ reading by reducing it to absurdity: a wife deliberately making herself repulsive in the eyes of the husband. In turn, because that—now refuted—reading of the elders was supporting the Aramaic Character’s proposal of the new negative commandment “not to even talk to one’s ex-wife,” the new commandment becomes implausible, too. This leaves the Character and his/their “accomplishment” suspended—but not deactivated (contrary to Schmittean logic of exception, let alone Hegelian Aufhebung or, as I will show later, Christian supersession)—between the conflicting authorities and arguments of the first elders versus Rabbi Akiva. The Character’s next (and again silent) thought is that perhaps she/he/they can invalidate the record of Rabbi Akiva, who was the source of the problem. The readers learn of this silent moment when it is already suppressed, namely, when the Character recognizes that it is not doable, that the record cannot be invalidated: And the first elders’ [interpretation] comes fitting the House of Shammai; while Rabbi Akiva’s [counterargument] befits the House of Hillel.

Whether or not the implied reference in this last passage is to the last Mishnah in Gittin (where Rabbi Akiva disagrees with both Houses, but is closer to the House of Hillel), the Character is unable to invalidate the record of Rabbi Akiva’s objection to the first elders. However, because the “achievement” of the new negative commandment derives its authority from the elders’ reading of Lev. 15:33, the Aramaic-Speaking Character is left with a valid “achievement,” which however conflicts with Rabbi Akiva’s position. What, then, shall (i.e., may/must) the Character establish? The action ends with the Character and the readers facing that question, now in the full complexity it entails. The curtain falls, the scene fades, the on-stage Aramaic-Speaking Character and the off-stage characters disappear and the readers are left with a model of “achievement,” which is trapped in the conflict, but at the same time is fully effective, precisely because its fate is not resolved. The subject position of such an “achiever” or “accomplisher” as the on-stage Character is best portrayed and characterized through a series of comparisons. This subject position is not that of a Schmittean sovereign, because even if



How Else Can One Think Earth? 235

the purported “new negative commandment” or more broadly “new law” is introduced, the “old” norm, that is, “Do not remarry your ex-wife,” is far from suspended, let alone abolished. What is more, the “new law” is not fully “established” either, nor does it vanish or become fully negated. Thus no negative dialectics of Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung) can be said to be at work. Nor is here a broader theology of supersession at work, of which both sublation and exception are different modes. The Character does not exactly supersede the House of Shammai, for the new negative commandment, “Not to get even close to your ex-wife,” does not enjoy uncontested success. Rabbi Akiva challenges its validity. Yet Rabbi Akiva’s (virtual or reconstructed?) polemic against the first elders does not eliminate the “accomplishment” of the new law, “to give,” either. In the midst of the debates about the old laws that are incited by the subject (the Character), the new law emerges: it does not take over, does not disappear, does not make an exception, does not supersede, but rather arises as permanently new and permanently vulnerable “gift” offered by the subject to the ex-husband. In short, we don’t have here any kind of supersession. Another differentiation is due in regard to the parallel pericope in the Babylonian Talmud, bTGittin, which in that case too is the last pericope. There, the subject’s concern is not with giving a new law, but rather with making sure that the Mishnah is recited correctly and thus remembered correctly. Creative preservation of memory takes over, and the task of accomplishing a gift of new law is no longer to be found. There is more to ask and to learn about the Character’s thinking in the dark, and about the ground of such thinking. First, the grounding of this Character is nothing stable or territorial; it is not Husserlian ground-body.30 Rather, it consists in the movement of inducing conflicting currents between the authorities of The House of Shammai and R. Shila of KefarThamratha. The Character has the former conflict on grounds that become visible in the latter. Unlike Husserl’s concept of ground, the Talmudic Character’s ground is thus dynamic, but similarly to Husserl’s it is nonrepresentational. It consists in inducing the electric charge of accomplishment that emerges between the conflicting authorities and in taking up this charge for inducing a new accomplishment—a new law to give to ex-husband, which—again unlike31 the Husserl of 193432—is not stable, but rather gets locked in a new circuit of conflict, this time between the first elders and Rabbi Akiva. Of course, the charge of the lurking new law does not vanish as a result. Instead, it remains in the circuit, never disappearing but also never taking the force of law derived from Scripture. What is at work here is, in post- or rather anti-Deleuzian terms, is a neverfinished absolute reterritorialization. The new law never gets to a firm ground

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and never stops getting there. It suspends itself in (im)plausibility, but it does not suspend any “old law,” for there is none. That means neither thinking in the brightness and therefore blindness of clear distinctions and descriptions, as in the day of post-Platonic philosophy, nor a thinking earth as in the lightning that governs all in the pre-Socratics (where, at least per Deleuze’s reading of pre-Socratics in What Is Philosophy?, the earth is not ground but absolute deterritorialization). In his analysis of the pre-Socratics, the earth as absolute deterritorialization does not have the stability of territorial earth but instead enjoys the stability of earth as a problem or concept for thinking. Unlike either Platonic or Pre-Socratic versions of earth in Deleuze, Talmudic thinking is thinking in circuits of dissention that generate the energy charge for a new law, which in turn continues to circulate in the circuits and configurations that each new and inexhaustible charge creates. ANTI-DELEUZE: A CONCLUSION This takes me back to the main question of how else we can think earth in view of Heideggerian and Rabbinic thinking. Here I pick up where the first part of this chapter left off: with the possibility that Deleuze’s geo-philosophy both tacitly created and, just as tacitly, dismissed. By this I mean a way of thinking earth-abyss as absolute reterritorialization, which never ends, not even when territory is “achieved” or “established”—in the language of the nameless Aramaic-Speaking Character in the aforementioned Talmud. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze privileges the question of earth over the question of being, arguing that whereas for Heidegger the latter can and indeed must be reduced to the former, but that for Deleuze and his pre-Socratics the question of earth cannot be reduced to the questions of being. We thus proceed, with Deleuze, from the question of being to the questions of earth, interrogated now no longer as solid ground, commensurable as it might be to a human, but rather as “absolute deterritorialization” of which even being is only a version. Yet is “absolute deterritorialization” sufficient for attuning thought to the earth-abyss? There is, of course, a leap between (1) earth as ground, in the sense developed by the characters in the Talmud and by Husserl, each in their own way, and (2) earth as abyss. But this leap is dialectic. One might of course say that the ground becomes solid only after seeing the lightning, and that otherwise the abyss can be encountered only as emerging in the steady light of day. Yet there can be no true night before lighting, either. Without or before lightning one can only see a bleak version of the chimeras of day. The rabbis, however, have a third way: the way of the shaky and (im)plausible ground, the ground



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which is and must be abyss. The question thus becomes precisely the question of the (im)plausible ground, a question that Talmudic absolute reterritorialization, rather than Deleuze’s absolute deterritorialization, both allows us and requires us to ask. The direction that this question implies goes beyond the blinding clarity of daylight, but also beyond the still blinding lightning bolt in the dark—toward listening to earth as incommensurable abyss. The former creates reterritorialized world; the later absolutely deterritorialized earth. What remains to explore is a reterritorialization that does not and cannot end. As the pericope exemplifies in the case of the new implausible negative commandment to give, human beings—grounded as they are in the land of ‫( המדא‬adama, earthground) and therefore in the world—must reterritorialize, incessantly, in the form of a programmatically implausible law, which, in the language of the Character, they are “to establish” and constitute. Let me thus conclude with some provisional characterizations of a potential movement in that direction: 1) One step toward such absolute reterritorialization is to switch from the world of description and representation, in which the law proscribes and prescribes, to “standing” or “establishing” oneself in a position oriented both on and toward the earth-abyss, where the law is always a refutation of another law: the just laws are to be (im)plausible (the Talmudic way) rather than possible, impossible, or necessary (the philosophical or rhetorical way). 2) This also means moving away from description and from the world created by description toward refutation and thus to the earth of eretz. The Talmudic refutations renders humans as attuned to eretz despite the restraining forces of human ground in adama. To go from description, which always creates territorialized worlds, to the earth-abyss of refutation, is to render (im)plausible any territorialized world and the law governing it. This means giving the (im)plausible law, and not suspending the old in the new by the logic of exception (Schmitt), sublation (Hegel), or supersession (theology of fulfillment). 3) Exploring these two directions requires, moreover, not only departing from the blindness of the daylight, in which all things are described and exist discretely from one another; it also means bypassing the being of all things that is ruled by lightning; bypassing being or earth, as Heidegger and Deleuze would respectively have it,33 both being subject to the lightning. This means paying even more attention to satire in its connection to refutation in the Talmuds than has been done so far. 4) Unlike logical negation, rhetorical and Talmudic refutation never eliminates and therefore always moves toward reterritorialization, without ever

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ending the process, even when the process—temporarily—reaches the end. In the case discussed earlier in the Palestinian Talmud, the absolute reterritorialization created circuits of conflict, from which the Character directs the force for the new law to be given. By the powers of the same charge in the chain of exchanges of the arguments in the Talmud, the Character locked the new law in a new circuit of conflict, in which the new law neither charted a new territory nor disappeared. Instead, it continues to lurk without any supersession. The result was the authentic implausibility of the divine unspoken law, a law that can never reach any final form in any form of fixed writing, so that even the letters in the Scripture remains just that—absolute reterritorializations of the law with which one arrives to the land. 5) My final point concerns a topic extensively discussed in rabbinics, namely, the difference between the two Talmuds, now in these new respects. The nameless on-stage characters in the Babylonian Talmud worry more about memory and the stabilization of the refutation structures in the received traditions, and they worry less about the productive powers of refutation to continue reterritorializing, namely, to create, give, or establish the (im)plausible law. This is of course not to say that the difference between the two Talmuds is absolutely radical, but it is to say that there is a shift of emphasis from establishing the new law to cultivating the power to do so, from absolute reterritorialization to cultivating the ability to continue reterritorializing even where the charted territory must be carefully preserved. It also means coming back from (1) the always programmatically closed and therefore always expanding universe or Weltall (the term entailing the always relatively territorialized world or universe that Diels finds in Heraclitus), to (2) standing in the open space of the always absolutely reterritorializing, that is to say neither fully deterritorialized earth-abyss.

NOTES   1 Cited and translated from Talmud Yerushalmi According to Ms. Or. 4720 (Scal. 3) of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and Corrections (Jerusalem: The Academy for the Hebrew Language: 2005), 1095–96.   2 This essay stems from and broaches new ground in a line of argument I began in my forthcoming book Other Others: The Political after the Talmud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). I am picking up where the last chapter, “The Earth for Other Others” leaves off. Drawing on the argument there, I am addressing now a much broader question concerning the relationship between Talmud, pre-Socratics, and philosophy as traditions of thinking. On a different but no less



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significant note, I would like to thank Dr. Edourad Nadtochi of the University of Lausanne, with whom I discussed and where I first presented an earlier version of this argument. I also feel deeply thankful to Dr. Elad Lapidot of the Free University of Berlin for his heuristically powerful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Preparation of this chapter for publication was made possible with the generous support of Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professorship in Jewish Thought at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.   3 This new self-understanding of philosophy as geo-philosophy or as thinking earth traverses Heidegger’s distinction between traditional philosophy as metaphysics or thinking beings without thinking being on the one hand, and Heidegger’s own “truth of being” or attunement to being otherwise occluded behind beings. Obviously, earth can be and has been thought metaphysically, or as a being, in Heidegger’s terms. Yet the point or the question here is precisely whether asking the question of being is enough to ask the question of earth. And conversely: does the question of earth extend beyond the question of being? More precisely, it means asking whether thinking being in the “question of being” is also thinking earth, even if in a new, non-metaphysical way, or does, alternatively, the question of thinking earth extend beyond the horizon of thinking being, even in Heidegger’s way of asking that question. More precisely still, it is not only that Heidegger claims metaphysics failed to think earth, but his ontology renews a thinking of earth as the new question of being; neither is it only that Heidegger, conversely, claims that metaphysics did think earth as “a being,” and his ontology in contrast wishes to be a non-metaphysical but rather geo-philosophical thinking of earth under the rubric of being. Rather the question is whether Heidegger’s question of being can either escape from or suffice for asking the question of earth on its own terms.   4 “Reclaiming” is the key term here. Just as Heidegger reclaims the pre-Socratics as a source for his way of thinking being, Deleuze too, as we will see, reclaims the pre-Socratics as a way of thinking earth. Deleuze then raises the question of thinking being as thinking earth, showing the impossibility of separating the one from the other. In contrast, and by comparison, Talmud is also a way to think earth, but a third way, an approach to thinking that is neither metaphysical nor ontological, and more precisely a way for remembering earth and moving toward earth.   5 Jeffrey Waite, “A Short Political Philology of Visceral Reason (A Red Mouse’s Long Tail)” in Parallax, 2005, vol. 11, no. 3: 8–27. Waite understands political philology as an exposition of both hidden and uncorrectable metalepsis (inversion of cause and effect) in human thinking and action; he is tracing his notion of political philology back to Antonio Gramsi’s Prison Notebooks.   6 Later Heidegger does talk about the task of thinking as remembrance, and in particular as laying bare the occlusion of the occlusion of being. Achieving this task of thinking has more to do with the future than with any turn to the past. This is so because the past can only be ontic, and thus occlusive. It is in this sense that Heidegger dis-privileges any turning to the past in Erinnerung (remembrance) and privileges Andenken (commemoration, observance). Andenken is the mode in which the occlusion of the occlusion lays itself bare, the mode that, once again,

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has to do with thinking in time, that is, thinking toward the future as time’s main element. In his sense of time, Heidegger shares such privileging of the future as the element of time with Jacob Taubes, since both thinkers follow the steps of Hermann Cohen, for whom in his Logik der reinen Erkenntnis (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922) the future is the main element of time; the past is a necessary fictional starting point; and the present is a resulting tension between the two. Of course, unlike Heidegger, who connects future with the possibility of nonbeing, and thus time with being, Taubes, in his 1923 Occidental Eschatology does not necessarily see the future to be enclosed in the possibility of nonbeing. Cf. Jacob Taunes and David Ratmoko, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). However, he is still privileging the future as the main modality of time. Yet, unlike either of the three thinkers, the characters in the Talmud privilege the past without, however, recurring to a traditional understanding of time as proceeding from the past to the future, either. Instead, they critically analyze any testimonies of the past to renegotiate both the power and the content of that past by differentiating it carefully from either the power or the content of a mere phantasy of the past in the mode of what “was” or “took place,” that is, from a mere imagination. The characters in the Talmud do privilege the past, but that past belongs neither to traditional linear, nor to a futurist nonlinear time. Instead, they leave behind both the linear and the futurist time, without, however, having to privilege eternity over time either.   7 In conjoining Talmud and philosophy in his Talmudic Readings, Levinas relied on and/or took for granted the ways of reading the Talmud established in the traditional rabbinic academies, yeshivot, in the nineteenth century, as neo-Kantian in their conceptual setup as these ways of reading had been. This relation between Talmud and philosophy, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter.   8 Cf. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time (London: Continuum, 2011).  9 Ibid. 10 Cf. Donatella Di Cesare, Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2016). 11 Sergey Dolgopolski, The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 12 I transform the term “the political” from an adjective to a noun, and from a descriptor to a concept, thus moving along and against the lines of Schmitt’s usage, as in, for example, his “the concept of the political.” See: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 13  Edmund Husserl, “Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum Phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlichkeit der Natur” [1934] in Marvin Faber, ed., Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 307–25. In these notes from 1934, Husserl develops a new understanding of earth as an absolute and indivisible basic-body or basic-ground (Boden“Körper”) of any possible experience of space and of objects, including earths/ planets therein. Earth as such a ground is neither an object nor a subject. It therefore neither moves nor stays put. Instead, remaining never directly representable,



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this ground is constitutive for and thus absolute with respect to any experience (Erfahrung) of any space and any objects and subjects therein. 14 Grouping Heidegger and Schmitt together in this equation, I rely more generally on Donatella di Cesare’s argument on the connection between these two thinkers in relation to Jews, both in this volume and in her Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah. Additionally, and more specifically relevant to the purposes my argument here, the connection between Schmitt and Heidegger has to do with Schmitt’s and Heidegger’s respective questions of political representation and of being. Schmitt introduced the question of the political power of the form of representation, which acts independently of any variance in the content it represents. He did so in his 1923 book on political form. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). In parallel, Heidegger introduced the question of being as having a power and significance independently of the various answers to the questions about particular beings or essences. That parallel extends further, as both Schmitt and Heidegger privilege a place, a locality as separated from other pieces of land. Thus, Schmitt relies on the divisibility of earth-land as precondition of law, and Heidegger privileges one’s locality as distinct from others as a way of being attuned to the question of being. To give a few examples, these motifs appear respectively in Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth (New York: Telos Press, 2006) and in Heidegger’s Holzwege (GA 5). Emerging from these connections is the sense of a divisible earth as the foundation of both political power and of the question of being. 15 See, for example: Kenneth White, Collected Works, Vol. 1: Underground to Otherground (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2015). 16 See Robert T. Tally and Bertrand Westphal, Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 17 See, again, Husserl, “Grundlegende Untersuchungen.” 18 “Wie stehtes nun mit der Möglichkeit von neuen Boden-‘Körper’ order vielmehrmit neuen‘Erden’als Beziehungsgrundlagen für Körpererfahrung und mit der erwarteten Möglichkeit, dass dadurch die Erde ebenso gut wie der andere Bodenkörper zu normalen Körpern würden?” (“Grundlegende Untersuchungen,” 313). “Now, what about the possibility of new basis-‘bodies’? What about new ‘earths’ as relational foundations of the experience of bodies with the expected possibility that, as a consequence, the earth could become a normal body just like any other basisbody?” (Kersten’s translation, 225). Of course, in the context, Husserl only entertained the possibility of multiple “basis-‘bodies,’ ” concluding, however, in favor of there being only one earth and only one indivisible basis-“body” and therefore only one humanity, inclusive as it must be—for him—of any possible extra terrestrial living bodies. Arguably, although outside of the immediate scope of this essay, these extra terrestrial living bodies entail for Husserl a figure of thought most fitting to the political figure of the Jews, who thereby do belong to the earth, even if they do not have any immediate territory and/or piece of land assigned to them alone. 19 Cf. Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism. Schmitt describes a negative, externalist, “Jewish,” but still, in his mind, correct definition of “political form” as a mere

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“representation of representation,” rather than a representation of any specific content. 20 In Roman Catholicism Schmitt discovers a power of political form coming before any content conveyed. He recognizes the positive image of political form in the example of Catholic Church, where dignitaries represent the Church, which itself is an ultimate representation of—mystically identical with—the body of Christ. On the flip side of the coin, he finds the negative or dark side of representation of representation in how a Jew would perceive the Church—that is, as a representation of a representation without any content whatsoever. This is a perception Schmitt does not accept, but he does not find it incorrect either. 21 If the bird “territorializes” through the ecstatic intensities of twitting, croaking, or chirping, then a human does the same through crying, humming, sobbing, and so on. Humans, however, do more. They “reterritorialize,” that is, produce a representation of “their” territory by means of anything from landmarks, such as a biblical stone, Gal’ed, demarcating the land between Esau and his brother Jacob, to maps and fences. Such acts create a territory, a static position, which is ultimately comprehensible only in the bright light of the day. But it does not lose the sense of ecstasy of the primary territorialization behind the seemingly peaceful stasis of the reterritorialized land on which one then dwells. I refer to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 2011) and to Rodolphe Gasché’s critique in his Geophilosophy: on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “What Is Philosophy?” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), as well to my forthcoming analysis of territorialization in The Political in the Talmud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 22 Ibid. 23 Daniel Boyarin,  Socrates & the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). 24 Ibid. 25 I borrow the term “subject position” from discourse theory. According to that theory, a subject who purportedly produces a discourse is at the same time and by the same token only occupying a particular position within that discourse, a position that is, even if described as “outside,” nevertheless “inside” the discourse, thus rendering the very difference between inside and outside no longer sustainable. I understand the term even more broadly, to include the question of how any given subject of, and/or any character in, the discourse relates to that discourse. 26 In this analysis, I follow Husserl in using “standing,” and in the same sense “dwelling,” to designate a paradigmatic relationship to earth, namely as the relationship that for Husserl precedes representation. Even if this designation is necessarily limited in scope, I must defer an elaboration of that limitation to another occasion, where the political philological limitations of Husserl’s sense of standing before representation can be taken up and critically compared with other versions of political philology. In this chapter, I can only note that the “standing” of the Talmudic characters in the following will prove much more dynamic and much less heterogeneous than Husserl’s notion of pre-­ representational standing.



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27 The (im)plausibility of the new law differs from Derrida’s (im)possibility of justice. Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2016), 3–67. The (im)possibility of justice that Derrida articulates in his essay is logical: it has to do with what is either definitively necessary or impossible as distinct from what is rather merely possible. The (im)plausibility of justice is, however, not logical but rhetorical; it is in the sense that plausibility here means refutability and defensibility, where implausibility means defensibility and refutability, in that order. The irrefutable is necessary and is thus logical rather than rhetorical; the indefensible is impossible, and is thus, once again, logical rather than rhetorical. After eliminating the necessary and the impossible, what remains is the possible, which is the domain of Aristotelian rhetoric. A parallel to this in Talmudic rhetoric would be the plausible. Unlike the possible, the plausible is “established” not by demonstrating how something could be, but rather by refuting that it is refutable and then defending it by means of counter-refutation. This implies at the same time reciprocity and multiplicity. Multiplicity arises from the discussion conducted between a refuter and a counter-refuter concerning a certain position or claim. Reciprocity emerges because without the cooperation of refutation and counter-refutation, the plausibility of the claim cannot be “established,” but only its possibility or probability. Implausible is therefore not the same as impossible or improbable. The latter two categories are logical or rhetorical, whereas the former is Talmudic and implies anticipation of refutation. In the Talmud, when a character says or performs a refutation (‫ )אישק‬another or even the same character is expected to counter-refute. This is the way in which the Talmud says, or rather performs the “implausible.” The implausible arises when refutation has already occurred but counter-refutation has not. The implausible is always in anticipation of the counter-refutation to make it plausible again. 28 Although R. Shila is quoted in the pericope, he is not an on-stage character. Quoting him therefore does not necessarily mean that in his position off-stage, from where he is quoted, his words related to exactly the same “teaching” of House of Shammai. They might have related to another “teaching” of the House, and were transposed to the stage to perform a similar service in a new context. 29 A similar approach is at work in Sifre 269, although there it is bracketed/marginalized, whereas here it is central (not to mention the difference in the specific verses or the specific nature of the derivation). 30 Importantly, in his 1934 essay about the origin of the spatiality of nature, Husserl, in what I read as a response to Heidegger, turns precisely to a nonrepresentational standing as the ground, a move which is notably different from his other and earlier line of thinking, in which he “grounds” the constitution of objects in and by transcendental subjectivity, a “grounding” done not on the foundation of “standing” but rather on the foundation of a “stream” of Erlebnisse, a stream of time. In 1934, by contrast, the stream is no longer enough, and Husserl turns to a ground that is neither standing nor streaming, the ground of Leib. 31 Of course, content-wise, the “objects” Husserl speaks about (pieces of clay, planets, projectiles in space, people) all are very different from the “objects” in

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the pericope (the verses from Scripture, and the quotes from the Rabbis discussing them). Yet structurally both sets of “objects” are represented and representable, which, again structurally, is the case with neither the basis-body of a living body in Husserl’s space, nor with the standing-ground of the collective body of the Character in Talmud’s pericope. Yet both the living body and the Character operate on the non-representable ground vis-à-vis representable content in their respective spaces: the three-dimensional space of Husserl, the multidimensional space of the pericope. 32 Again, in Husserl’s earlier work there is something more comparable to the impossible standing vis-à-vis a new law. For the earlier Husserl, objects are constituted in such a way that they constantly need to be confirmed or refuted (ausgewiesen or widersprochen), and if confirmation fails and contradiction succeeds, a reconstitution of the object takes place. However fluid this procedure may be, it nonetheless remains stable, since for Husserl, unlike the standing of the Rabbis vis-à-vis the new law, what is refuted or non-confirmed is no longer there. 33 See the elaboration of the relationship between being and earth in Deleuze in Joseph Cohen and Zagury-Orly’s contribution to this volume. Going beyond apocalypse means, for them, going beyond the logic of appearing and making seen (in the terms of the present essay: beyond lightning). Emerging from that comparison is a logic of moving toward the (im)possibility of a new law as both abyss and ground, the absolute reterritorialization of the law already at hand.

Chapter 13

Of Dwelling Prophetically: On Heidegger and Jewish Political Theology Michael Fagenblat

“Friedrich Hölderlin lived a Zionist life from within the German people.” Gershom Scholem, Diary entry, 1919.

FROM POLITICAL ONTOLOGY TO JEWISH POLITICAL THEOLOGY The condemnation of Heidegger’s political ontology, at once necessary and facile, risks suppressing a more demanding and urgent task for which his thought provides some of our best philosophical resources. This task is to think the political in the absence of a universal conception of political right and good, once the philosophical fragility of liberalism has been demonstrated and its moral limits unmasked. The task is made urgent by the resurgence of antiliberal movements with perceived affinities to Heidegger’s thought; a resurgence, moreover, that in significant ways derives from the historical situation diagnosed by Heidegger: the erosion of the sense of home, place, and way of one’s own; overweening individualism; homogenization brought about by global capital and technicity; the merely abstract and unsustainable hypocrisy of progressive humanism; the conversion of beings into the standing reserve (Bestand) of means without ends, and so forth. The point, then, is not to adopt Heidegger’s thought for the sake of a conception of the political but to attain access to the political through his thought.1 My claim is that the access to the political provided by Heidegger is especially acute with respect to the Jewish theologico-political imaginary that prevails in and around the state of Israel today. I want to show how Heidegger’s political ontology provides an immense resource for a philosophical elucidation of the Jewish political imaginary in Israel. His ontological conception of the political allow for an interpretation of core aspects of the 245

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Jewish political imaginary in Israel that otherwise seem merely rooted in ethnic and religious dogmatism. In this respect Heidegger can serve as a guide for a philosophical clarification of Jewish political theology that renders phenomenologically plausible its articles of faith. At the same time, the passage from Heidegger’s conception of political ontology to a politics of identitarian brutality—whether intentional and inevitable or, on the contrary, risky but avoidable—reflects the philosophical clarity it achieves in a black mirror, where Jewish political theology can behold a terrifying image of itself. For this reason among others it must be emphasized that the attempt to compare Heidegger’s political ontology with the Jewish political imaginary in Israel is not a normative program. At most it allows us to display the normative horizon of a prominent Jewish political imaginary within which a range of concrete political options take shape. The aim is to offer a descriptive elucidation of the sacred disposition of Jewish political life in Israel as it is, not as it should be. It may be useful to address some objections before attempting to elucidate Jewish political theology in the light of Heidegger’s political ontology. After all, Heidegger explicitly distinguishes his thought from theology, has very little to say about political theology, and seems to have been almost entirely unfamiliar with Jewish theology. That Heidegger was a Nazi and an anti-Semite might seem to situate the unobviousness of the link between Heidegger’s political ontology and Jewish political theology within the realm of mere provocation. I hope to demonstrate that it is not merely a provocation. Let us then take these objections in reverse order. It goes without saying that the analogies and affinities between Heidegger’s political ontology and Jewish political theology in Israel never amount to identity, all the more so when radically disanalogous historical circumstances are at stake. The complicity between Heidegger’s thought after the Kehre (around 1929) and his “private” interpretation of National Socialism in the early 1930s, including his active participation in the movement, does not in any way imply an analogy between the ideology of the Third Reich and that of the Jewish political imaginary in Israel. For one, Heidegger provides a systematic set of distinctions between his thought and the ideology of National Socialism. These distinctions motivated his “spiritual resistance” to the Party after April 1934 and the apocalyptic critique of the movement he developed thereafter. Moreover, philosophical elucidation of Jewish political theology in view of Heidegger’s political ontology also demands that one attend to actual and potential divergences. The point is neither to imitate or identify but to use Heidegger’s political ontology for thinking through the major site of the Jewish theologico-political predicament today. On my reading, then, Heidegger is a type of prophet of the Jewish political imaginary, but ultimately a false prophet, like Balaam on his ass confronted by the malakh (angel or messenger) of YHWH which he mistakes for “the sending



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of being”—remembering that a malakh is a sending of YHWH himself in a determined temporal form. Could it be that Heidegger mistook the concealed sending of YHWH for the sending of being? That he mistook the Jewish Heilsgeschichte for the Greco-German Seynsgeschichte? The hypothesis would be impossibly simplistic were it not for “some astonishing affinities” between Heidegger’s thought and post-Lurianic Kabbalah, as Elliot Wolfson demonstrates in his chapter in this volume. Such affinities, acknowledged by other major Jewish philosophers (Rosenzweig, Altmann, Strauss, Levinas, Wyschogrod, among others), were methodically explicated by Marlène Zarader, whose account of Heidegger’s “close analogies” to Jewish thought has been accepted by many.2 Zarader’s framing of these analogies in terms of an “unthought debt” is potentially misleading. The claim is not that Heidegger unwittingly depends or exploits Jewish thought for his purposes but that he disavows his arrival there.3 The route, then, from Heidegger’s political ontology to Jewish political theology begins with an active re-theologization of Heidegger’s understanding of being. The first interpretative assumption here is that the process of “detheologization” (Enttheologisieriung) that Heidegger discerned in modern philosophy and marshaled for his own purposes in Being and Time continues to determine his understanding of being in the mid-1930s.4 Theology accompanies Heidegger’s descriptions of our multiple ways of accessing the difference between being and beings at every turn, like an anamorphic figure that can be brought into focus at any moment—so long as one occupies the right point of view or adopts the appropriate reflective tool. Adopting this point of view or reflective tool requires that one reject Heidegger’s rigid depiction of theology as a set of dogmas requiring cognitive assent about the existence of a supernatural, eternal entity, but this is not difficult. Such a re-theologization is particularly feasible by way of Jewish thought, since Heidegger’s thought is in so many ways already invested in an “unthought debt” to Jewish thought. Fackenheim’s likeminded view that “Heidegger engaged in no less startling an enterprise than the Judaization of the entire history of Western philosophy” implies that it must be possible to relocate this Judaized philosophy within the discourse of Jewish thought.5 On the basis of a re-theologization of Heidegger’s descriptions of our access to being and their relocation within the domain of Jewish thought a third step, in some ways the riskiest, becomes unavoidable. It involves transporting this Jewishly re-theologized reading of Heidegger from the realm of political ontology, where it was articulated in the 1930s, to that of Jewish political theology today—without denying that conceptual affinities do not amount to historical analogies or precluding genuine divergences on important phenomenological points. But even if Heidegger’s political ontology can be verjudet, why do it?6 I have suggested that his thought affords a unique way of guiding us to a philosophically plausible account of Jewish political theology in Israel and that

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Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism are crucial warnings, risks and reflections on the nature of this enterprise. A final introductory assumption should now be made explicit: The enterprise of Jewish political theology is not one that can be avoided merely because it is dangerous, for it grounds and sustains the plausibility-structure of the Jewish political imaginary in Israel. Even in its secular form, this Jewish Israeli political imaginary is essentially theological and only half-heartedly liberal. It consists of bonds of identification whose sacred code is covenant rather than contract among individuals. There is a sacred dimension to the principal elements of this covenantal bond such as language, people, memory, heritage, land, and destiny, all of which shape the Jewish political imaginary in Israel, and not just among religious Zionists. Of course there are a few norms, numerous individuals, sizable minorities, and sophisticated normative theories that reject the theological dimension of Israel’s political imaginary. But a political imaginary cannot simply be rejected; it forms the background within which dissent and critique take shape and cannot be made to disappear behind a veil of ignorance or proscribed by normative theories of rights. This does not mean that one should endorse the theological dimension of Israel’s political imaginary but that it is important to describe it as compellingly as possible in order, first, to understand why liberal principles, including those of liberal Zionism, are consistently belied and, second, to show why even the liberal Zionist concern for demography over geography is caught in a theological-political predicament.7 An appropriate normative theory will have to work with the phenomenology of the political, not against it, lest it repeatedly overestimate the power of liberal intuitions and institutions. No normative theory or institution will be of much concrete use—not the rule of law, not international law, not the independence of the judiciary, not a concept of human rights, not humanitarian principles—if it cannot gain traction within the experience of a particular political imaginary. If political theology, which accounts for the covenantal structure of the Jewish political imaginary in Israel, is a discourse wherein the danger grows, a Heideggerian reading of it may offer one of its few capacities for a saving power. The failure of liberal Zionism to actualize its principles is symptomatic of this disavowal of the theological dimension within which all Zionisms, including liberal versions, operate. The connection between the Jewish people, the Hebrew language, the land of Israel, and a sense of shared heritage and destiny will not abide the silence of God, as Scholem keenly saw. The response by Jewish theologians has been to develop alternative, antistatist forms of Jewish political theology. This is what Leibowitz tried to do, and what adherents of ethical monotheism, diasporic ecclessialism, and Marxist messianism still hope for. But these political theologies look like dead organisms in jars of formaldehyde from the point of view of the Jewish political imaginary in Israel as it is, where the Hebrew language, the specificity of the



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land of Israel, and the particular heritage and destiny of the Jewish people predominate. They are exactly the wrong sorts of political theologies for understanding the Jewish political imaginary in Israel as it is. WINTER 1934/1935: CRITIQUE OF STATE SOVEREIGNTY A few months after his resignation from the rectorship, Heidegger lectured on Hölderlin for the first time. The 1934/1935 lectures, Hölderlin’s Hymns ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ (GA 39), are Heidegger’s attempt to formulate an alternative political ontology to the official National Socialist one which he rejected. Needless to say, Heidegger’s rejection of major tenets of National Socialism, in particular its claim to have realized a Romantic conception of the people and its investment in the “new science” that rationalized its racial doctrines, in no way sprung from a commitment to liberal values or a superior regard for natural science. On the contrary, thinkers like Spengler and Rosenberg are still “too liberal” for Heidegger (GA 39: 26–27), whereas the new science was not historial enough. Instead of retreating from the antiliberalism of National Socialism, Heidegger’s political ontology seeks to pass through it. This is what is meant by the intent stated in mid-1934, shortly after his resignation from the rectorship, to “remain in the invisible front of the secret spiritual Germany” (GA 94: 165; 114). His resignation and rejection of the ideology of the regime afforded an opportunity to articulate the clear differences between his antiliberalism and that of Party advocates and apologists. The essential resource Heidegger’s thought provides Jewish political theology consists of this potential to think through its own antiliberalism, a task made necessary given the evident limits of Israeli liberalism. The cornerstone of Heidegger’s secret spiritual account of political ontology is Hölderlin, from whose work he elicits an ontological conception of the relation between people, place, language, heritage, and task that he distinguishes from both National Socialist ideology and Romantic nationalism. It was in the same vein that Heidegger criticized Schmitt in the seminar he was giving during the same winter of 1934/1935 on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.8 “Carl Schmitt thinks liberally,” he provocatively tells his students, because he regards politics as a “sphere” within being and fails to ground the political in being as such, that is, in being-historical, which transpires as “the being of the people” whose “inner transcendence” stands in “conflict” with the state because, we can suppose, it does not and cannot coincide with the state but can only abide in a temporal relation “toward the state.”9 Schmitt’s way of thinking the political is “far too extrinsic”10 with respect to the grounds of political existence; his argument for the “pre-cedence” (Vor-rang)

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of “leadership” is merely “self-founding”11; it has no way of “ranking” (Ranghaftigkeit) the role of political leadership within the order of being, and this because Schmitt has no genuine concept of the political as “being with others (historically).”12 From the point of view of the question of being, Schmitt’s account of the political as founded on the friend–enemy distinction is dogmatic and derivative. It is ungrounded in the conditions of its own manifestation in the being of the people, which for Schmitt is determined externally in relation to the enemy and internally, as a way of bolstering the arbitrariness of the politics of enmity, by a pseudo-scientific conception of the people as a biological race. Concepts like political heritage, purpose, desire and destiny, political space, place or landscape, political affinity, love, and transcendence have nowhere to ground themselves in Schmitt’s view, and this because for Schmitt the only ground of political existence is the self-founding act of the sovereign in relation to an arbitrary enmity. We might add that Schmitt’s secularization thesis is the very reason for his superficiality; the sovereign state is all that remains efficacious of theology in a secular age. For Heidegger, however, “the political” is not all that remains of the sacred in a secular age; what remains of the sacred is being, which is independent and prior to the political constitution of states. And because Schmitt has no way to account for how the political is founded on (its) being, his theory remains just that, a theory, which sinks no roots into the historicality of truth and has nothing but self-assertion on which to found itself. It is therefore to Hölderlin that Heidegger turns in order to think how political existence is grounded, a thought that leads Heidegger to ponder the singular being-historical of a people from which derive possibilities for beingpolitical. This ontological grounding of the political in the being-historical of a people does not take place through the sheer power of a sovereign authority within being but transpires in virtue of how a type of Dasein (people) holds forth the capacity for beings as a whole to be disclosed. Heidegger calls this disclosive capacity of being-historical “the truth of a people.” This is ontological truth, not ontic truth; it names those ways in virtue of which beinghistorical opens up beings as a whole and thereby gives a proper account of the three-fold ranking of the dimensions of political existence. “The truth of the people is the manifestness (Offenbarkeit) of being as a whole that prevails at a given time, in accordance with which the sustaining, configuring, and guiding powers receive their respective rank (Ränge) and bring about their attuned accord” (GA 39: 144; 126). The truth of a people whereby beings as a whole are opened in virtue of how its being-historical is sustained (tragend) by poeticizing, configured (fügend) by thinkers, and guided (führend) by statesmen. There are then “three creative powers” in Heidegger’s mythopoesis of the political, which together constitute its being. Crucially, each of the



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three powers—the founding act of poeticizing, the comprehending work of thinking and the creative acts of statesmanship—has its “own temporal unfolding . . . in both forward and backward directions” that are “not at all calculable” (überhaupt nicht berechenbar) and indeed “act in unrecognized ways over a long period of time, alongside one another without bridges and yet to the benefit of one another” (GA 39: 144; 126–27). The truth of the people abides independently of its realization in a determined form like the state, waiting or whiling for it yet maintaining a distance from it. The truth of the people is not founded by the state or by the statesman but is “originally founded (ursprünglich gestiftet) by the poet” (GA 39: 144; 126). It is nevertheless politically oriented “in its essence” and thus essentially calls forth “the creator of the state (Staatsschöpfer)” (ibid.). The temporal relation between being-historical and the state is asynchronous or syncopated. The state has a stake in being-historical but neither founds nor has sovereignty over it. The sacred ground of being-historical therefore enjoys a surplus of indifference to the interests of the state, which does not exhaust the grounds of beinghistorical but on the contrary are preceded, founded, and always potentially exceeded by it. The temporality of the political existence of the people does not depend on the urgent temporality of the state. If the latter lives or dies by its decision to assert itself in relation to an enemy, the former has time to while away its poetic existence by translating itself into new historical contexts. Hence the indispensable role of “the thinker,” perhaps a rector and if that fails then at least a professor, who is charged with mediating the poetic founding and destiny of the people into political form. The foolishness of wanting to lead the leader (den Führer zu führen), as Heidegger puts it to Jaspers, is now clarified in terms of a different hubris, that of configuring (fügen) the temporal relation between the founding poeticizing in the form of being-historical as a people. The task of the thinker is to interpret the poet, to comprehend and configure the poetic truth of the people so that the statesman can enact it. A proper ranking of the relation between the ontological work of poetry, thought, and politics is required in order to understand how political existence is grounded in being-historical. This way of accounting for the threefold ontological truth of the people as the capacity to disclose beings as a whole is how “the people knows what it wills historically (geschichtlich) in willing itself, in willing to be itself” (ibid.). Heidegger’s mythopoetic political ontology is thus at once profoundly antiliberal and squarely opposed to Schmitt’s view, to the “new science” of National Socialism, and indeed to the Führerprinzip. On the one hand, the political is not grounded in individuals, neither in their will nor their right, but in being-historical as a people that can never be grounded in an ahistorical conception of humanity. On the other hand, neither the state nor the statesman is sovereign or even primary, nor does natural science circumscribe

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the grounds of political existence; rather, juridical sovereignty and natural science depend on the historial configuring of being-historical that elicits its intrinsic political possibilities. Hölderlin’s poetry provides Heidegger with the resources for thinking the political as internal to the being-historical of the people. The political is founded on being-historical; not as an act of self-founding, not through the authority granted to a leader, not through the arbitrary exteriority of an enemy, and not through ontic determinations of the life science of biology. In the coming years, Heidegger will make this argument by contrasting Hölderlin and the Greeks not only with Schmitt and Rosenberg but also with Nietzsche. Neither the juridical state nor natural life is the ground of political existence; their place remains to be configured in virtue of their “ranking” within “the truth of the people,” a ranking that can only be determined, as the conclusion of the lectures make clear, by the role they play in facilitating the task (Aufgabe) of being-historical, which is to dwell poetically. RE-THEOLOGIZING POLITICAL ONTOLOGY Hölderlin’s founding and sustaining of the truth of the German way of being-historical renders the poet as a German of Mosaic persuasion. It is a distinctly Jewish view of Moses that Hölderlin most closely and uncannily resembles. He is the prophet whose uniqueness consists in constituting the space of being-historical within which the people sustain its possibilities for experiencing beings as a whole. This space of meaning harks back to proximity to the God but abides in the time of divine absence. Like the Jewish Moses, Heidegger’s Hölderlin cannot be superseded because his constitutive accomplishment sustains the very possibility of dwelling prophetically in the absence of the God, as the Torah does for Jews. As this poet of the poet, Hölderlin has a unique historical position and mission. We can comprehend it in saying: He is the poet of the Germans. Yet Klopstock and Herder, Goethe and Schiller, Novalis and Kleist, Eichendorff and Mörike, Stefan George and Rilke are surely German poets also; they too belong to the Germans. But this is not what we mean. ‘Poet of the Germans’ is meant not as genitivus subiectivus, but as genitivus obiectivus: the poet who first poetizes the Germans. Yet did not the other poets too sing and tell of the German essence in their own way? Certainly—and yet, Hölderlin is in an exceptional sense the poet—that is, founder—of German beyng, because he has projected such beyng the farthest. That is, he has projected it out ahead into the most distant future. He was able to open up this supremely futural expanse because he brought forth the key from his experience of the most profound need of the withdrawal and approach of the gods. (GA 39: 219; 201)



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Hölderlin is unique for founding the epoch of being-German. This founding involves a transformation of that which is most the peoples’, namely, their language, into the possibility of dwelling poetically as a people through intimacy and proximity with their origin as a people in the German language. Moreover, Hölderlin sustains this space of being-historical throughout the epoch of divine absence, when the Christian god of metaphysics has died and the Greek gods have taken flight. This is why the fundamental attunement of Hölderlin’s poetry is that of “holy mourning” (heilige Trauer). Hölderlin thereby not only opens the German way of being-historical but also projects it farthest, to the vanishing point where its giving the possibility of poetic dwelling coincides with the withdrawal of divine presence. This coinciding is marked as the shift from being’s play of presence and absence to beyng’s giving in the mode of self-concealing or withdrawal. But this conception of Hölderlin’s poeticizing is also scriptural, in a distinctly Jewish sense. It is a matter of revealing how the divine word calls forth a people (neither one person nor everyone) to its being-historical by sustaining the possibility of prophetic dwelling in the absence of the God. “Holy mourning” is a fundamental attunement of being-Jewish.13 Further, the opening and horizon of this space of possible ways of experiencing the world is mediated by the prophetic poet precisely not in the form of an “expression” of his “subjectivity.” The divine word inheres in the people, for it takes a people to bear a language. Hence Heidegger’s scandalously sincere denunciation of the “wretchedly banal” accounts of poetry as “the outwardly manifest expression of soul” proposed by Spengler and Rosenberg as “the accomplishment (Vollzug) of a quite specific way of being belonging to the ‘liberal’ human being” (GA 39: 28; 28). The poet expresses neither his nor his peoples’ inner truth but harnesses the power of a language and thereby carves out a space for truth, like a river coursing through the earth. This is how Heidegger interprets the rivers in Hölderlin’s poetry, as opening new channels within the silent, dense concealedness of beyng. Poetry or prophecy are political in the sense that they penetrate undiscovered intimacies of beyng and tap into the “original law-giving (ursprüngliche Gesetzgebung)” of beyng. In that sense poetry, like prophecy, constitutes the space of meaning which shapes the people’s historical experience (GA 39: 258; 233). With Hölderlin substituting for scripture, Heidegger could hardly avoid describing the political function of poetry as prophetic. In his 1942 lectures on Hölderlin’s poem “Remembrance” (Andenken), Heidegger describes the poet as going out to greet the wind, which is “the spirit of thinking” and has nothing to do with “meteorological” phenomena. The holy spirit (ru’ah hakodesh) of poetry is a thinking appropriate to the way beyng gives itself historically in withdrawing its presence from being, the restlessness,

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movement, elusiveness, and unpredictability of beyng, at times breezy, at times stormy, but never able to be arranged in a determinate order or precisely calculated. The poet reveals aspects of the truth of beyng that come upon him “suddenly . . . like the wind.” THE SIN OF FAITH: OF JEWISH POLITICAL THEOLOGY The possibility of prophetic dwelling was no more acutely understood than by Gershom Scholem. At the very same time that Heidegger was composing Sein und Zeit—we might imagine it was the day he composed Section 74, where he notes that “co-historizing” (Mitgeschehen) is determinative of “the historical happening of the community, of a Volk” (das Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes) through which the “destiny” (Geschick) of Dasein is guided—Scholem wrote his now famous “Confession on our language” (Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache) to Franz Rosenzweig. A familiar text to scholars of modern Jewish thought, Scholem’s “Confession” can serve as a convenient point of entry into the Jewish theologico-political imaginary in Israel, especially because of its affinity with Heidegger’s account of the relation between sacred language, political existence, and the possibility, including the danger, of prophetic dwelling. It is easy to read Scholem’s confession as a Bekenntnis der Sünde, a “Confession of Sin,” as if it concedes to Rosenzweig’s view of political Judaism as apocalyptically dangerous. But Scholem’s “Confession” is far more than an admission of sin; it is underwritten and exceeded by a Bekenntnis des Glaubens, a Confession of Faith. Invoking “our children” four times in two pages, Scholem’s confession is that the sacred language that risks unloosing its apocalyptic ghosts on the coming generation at the same time nurtures, shelters, and perhaps provisionally saves them. Prophetic dwelling has the structure of a pharmakon: the poison of a sacred language is also the only remedy that can heal the people from the nihilism of modernity: “out of the spectral degradation of our language, the force of the holy (die Kraft des Heiligen) often speaks to us. For the names have a life of their own; if they did not, woe to our children, who would be abandoned, hopeless, to an empty future.”14 The confession of sin is a confession of faith. Scholem speaks in two tongues: Woe to the children who will speak a holy language that gives voice to abysmal destructive forces of which they know not; and blessed be the children who will speak a holy language whose power alone can withstand the emptiness of modernity. The point then is not to plug up the volcano of the holy language or level it down, as Heidegger likewise often argues, but of knowing how to come near—and of course of being fortunate to find



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oneself on the safe side when the volcano of the holy language erupts, as Scholem thinks it “necessarily” must. Years later Scholem will show at length how the Kabbalists developed ontological accounts of language, arguing that the world itself is created and recreated through language. Kabbalists who differ in almost everything else are at one in regarding language as something more precious than an inadequate instrument for contact between human beings. To them Hebrew, the holy tongue, is not simply a means of expressing certain thoughts, born out of a certain convention and having a purely conventional character, in accordance with the theory of language dominant in the Middle Ages. Language in its purest form, that is, Hebrew, according to the Kabbalists, reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world.15

On this view, language is neither expression nor convention; it has an ontological character; it does not just communicate within the space of meaning but opens up that space, thus measuring out the dimensions of experience. One should of course distinguish between Scholem’s view and those of the Kabbalists whom he investigates. But the idea that God creates the world from the nothing that he himself is, articulating or speaking out the world by concealing his ownmost silence within it, is an idea supported by many kabbalistic texts.16 Heidegger puts it this way: “It is first in silence that something such as ‘beyng’ must have gathered itself, so as then to be spoken out as ‘world’ ” (GA 39: 217; 199). THE DIASPORA OF LANGUAGE AND THE PROMISED FATHERLAND The ontological view of language holds that language is not just a vehicle for expressing meaning but has capacities, long known to certain Kabbalists, to create and reveal worlds. In this sense language opens the space of meaning within the silence of beyng, what we saw Heidegger call “the Offenbarkeit [the openness or manifestness or revealedness] of being as a whole that prevails at a given time” (GA 39: 144; 126). But the revelatory opening of the space of meaning through language, the space within which a people experiences its world, is as much local as temporal; it prevails not just “at a given time” but also at a given place, the place in which the people dwell in time in proximity to the concealment from which they are spoken forth. This place is called “the fatherland” by Hölderlin, which Heidegger tells his 1934/1935 German students “does not mean some dubious greatness of an even more dubious patriotism full of noise” but “means the ‘land of the fathers’ . . . us, this people

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of this Earth as a historical people, in its historical being” (GA 39: 120; 108). The fatherland is not a geographical region that can be mapped or measured but the place from which the horizons of historical experience unfold. What is most concealed with respect to our everyday dealings with beings, and most forbidden with respect to our ever contingent and roaming curiosity, is the “fatherland.” . . . The “fatherland” is beyng itself, which from the ground up bears and configures the history of a people as an existing [daseienden] people. (GA 39: 121; 109)

The fatherland remains concealed, the way water is famously concealed from fish, the way being was concealed from Dasein as worldhood in Being and Time, except that the fatherland, unlike water and more singularly than worldhood, is thought in its radical historicality as the openness within which the historical happening of the people takes place. This is why the fatherland is not a mere concept. The fatherland is not some abstract, supratemporal idea in itself; rather, the poet sees the fatherland as historical in an original sense. . . . experienced as the authentic and singular beyng from which the fundamental orientation toward beings as a whole arises. (GA 39: 121; 109)

Heidegger emphasizes that Hölderlin’s imagery of mountains and rivers are ontological; they are not to be taken ontically, as designating ordinary locations on a map. When the poet writes of the “Alpine range” which he sees, it is not the mountains standing there that are seen but “the nearness of the origin, of that essential dimension of beyng to which the poet wants to remain bound” (GA 39: 175). For Heidegger, the fatherland is never present, only near; which is why the Heimat is what is most unheimlich, and also unrepresentable, ungraspable, forbidden.17 The fatherland is neither literal nor allegorical. It is not the ontic thing that can be mapped and bordered, walled and occupied; but nor is it an idea to which the text points, a realm of concepts that could be inhabited by the mind contemplating the abstract meaning of words or sentences. Hence Heidegger’s strong reading of Hölderlin’s line, Full of merit, yet poetically Humans dwell upon this Earth. (“In beautiful blue. . . ,” VI, 25, lines 32f)

Heidegger comments on these lines twice in 1934/1935 lectures and will return to them on numerous later occasions. It is always a matter of contrasting the “merit” of everyday life, which is prosaic, from the poetic way



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“humans dwell upon this Earth” (GA 39: 37; 34). Everyday living is not yet a poetic dwelling on earth. For this reason it is a form of “exile” (ibid.). One can be in exile from the homeland even on native soil, just as one does not yet dwell poetically even when speaking one’s native tongue. This is the essential ambiguity of historical existence, a problem diagnosed in Being and Time which now returns in the ambiguity of the historical language of a people. The ambiguity divides a people against itself, not in the sense that some live prosaically while others dwell poetically, nor some inauthentically while others authentically, but in the sense that the language, which the people share, which “sustains” them “from the ground up,” both exposes them to the fundamental historical happening of their truth as a people and exiles them from this truth (GA 39: 37; 34). A people is this dialogue that happens within its language, for within this dialogue, between its poetic dwelling and its prosaic living, a people experiences “something like a world” (GA 39: 218; 199). This opening of the world through language is inevitably an experience of exile, for the poetic dimension of language “disseminates (verbreitet) itself as prose and becomes leveled out in such dissemination. (Verbreitung), so that poetry appears to be a deviation and exception.” (GA 39: 217–8; 199). If one were to translate the Verbreitung or dissemination of the word in a Greek rather than Latin idiom, as Heidegger would doubtless prefer, one might speak of the “diaspora” of the word from its poetic homeland.18 The world is spoken forth as the diaspora and exile of the word from its proximity to the homeland from which it originates, its “origin withheld in silence” (GA 39: 4; 4). Hence the paradoxical power of poetry, or prophecy, which draws a people back from the dialogue that it is, since humans are “always already” held open into the discourse of their being-historical, toward a divine silence that no human has known (GA 39: 218; 199). Poetic or prophetic dwelling draw a people near the abyss from which its world has always already been spoken forth.19 Here too the Moses-like figure of Hölderlin in Heidegger’s political imaginary, a poet who steps into the breach, whose speech does not boom, as Heidegger tendentiously suggests, but on the contrary stutters, as if shot through with those very silences from which the truth of the people will be spoken forth throughout its wandering, exile, and yearning.20 Lacoue-Labarthe recalls a fable about Hölderlin that could easily be a Hasidic story about Moses. “We are told that when the poet went ‘mad,’ he constantly repeated, ‘Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me.”21 Vaday! Like Heidegger’s Fatherland, the land of Israel or Zion—not Zionism, but Zion—is the mythopoetic political ground of beyng Jewish historically, that which, as Heidegger says of the Fatherland, “from the ground up bears and configures the history of the people as an existing people.” Like the fatherland, Zion is not straightforwardly ontic, an objective entity that can be mapped, bordered, or occupied; but nor is it simply a metaphor that can be

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comprehended on the basis of figurative interpretations. It is rather the nearness that makes it possible to dwell on earth in proximity and orientation to the origin of being-Jewish-historically, where the openness of Jewish experience is opened up. It is not only that Jewish prayer is always turned to Zion, but that the very possibility of Jewish spiritual dwelling goes forth from Zion. The promise of dwelling spiritually, the promise of Zion, is the source of the Jewish theological imaginary that makes it possible for Jews to live at home anywhere.22 It is the ontologically originary jointure of Sinai/Zion that makes Jewish experience always on the way to Zion, even when it is at home in the Diaspora. This is also why Jewish mystical experience, in drawing nearer to the origin of revelation, so often finds itself there in Zion, no matter where it is geographically, even if “experience” is not the right term to describe such an adventure, neither as Erlebnis nor as Erfahrung, for there is nothing there to find. This is not because the truth of Zion is elsewhere, in a realm of abstract ideas, but because its theological geography is metonymically structured, a place of nearness, neither literally present nor allegorically absent. Because it marks the orientation and span of Jewish desire, Jewish mystics throughout the ages have not only yearned but even risked their lives to get there, or else imaged themselves as being there at moments of mystical disclosure or unification. The author of the Zohar, for example, understands his access to the divine secrets of the Torah as placing him there in the land of Israel, but this secret place is not the physical location nor a metaphorical abstraction but a structure of proximity to the only place on earth from where the holy language flows forth.23 For the Castillian mystic, only in the land of Israel can sound (kol) and speech (dibur) be united, which is the essence of poetry; and only there can the secrets of the Torah become manifest. The rabbinic tradition according to which there is no prophecy outside the land of Israel, affirmed despite conspicuous exceptions like Ezekiel, stems from a similar conviction.24 SINAI/ZION How is it that the geo-mytho-poesis of Zion becomes metonymically structured as proximity to the origin of Jewish historical existence rather than a concretely present thing or an abstract conceptual metaphor? It happens through the constitutive Event of Jewish political theology, the fusion of Sinai and Zion. Sinai of course is the home or abode or YHWH, the place of his dwelling. Some of the oldest poems in the Hebrew Bible call YHWH “the One of Sinai” (Ps. 68:9; Judges 5:5). Sinai is the place where YHWH roams, where he dwells. It is, however, no ordinary place, nor even a proper place. It is an antiestablishment, a place of radical possibility, the place where YHWH will be whatever he will be (Exod. 3:11–14). It is a place that lacks



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a determinate location. The term might refer to a mountain, but if so we do not know which; or rather, we could not know which, and not (only) because it was “invented,” as historians so like to say. Perhaps this dwelling place of YHWH was Mount Sinai where the Law was given (Exod. 24:16), but it could equally refer to his dwelling in the burning bush or sĕnê, a word that clearly alludes to “Sinai,” which takes place at Horeb, “the mountain of God” (Exod. 3:1–6; cf. Deut. 33:16). A third option is that this place of YHWH’s dwelling is neither the mountain nor the bush but the region of wilderness, of wildness, the wasteland between imperial Egypt and the tribes of Midian that we call the Sinai desert. Adducing this indeterminate topography, the biblical scholar Jon Levenson suggested that “there is a mysterious extraterritorial quality” to this mountain of God. This quality is distinctly political. Sinai is a place “where the authority of the state cannot reach.”25 That is why the journey of the people into freedom must take place through the wilderness of Sinai. In other passages, however, the tremendous freedom and power of YHWH are located, transferred from the wilderness of Sinai to the territory of Zion. The establishment of the Davidic monarchy brought with it the territorialization of YHWH. Of the God who revealed himself in the wild, in the extraterritoriality of Sinai, it is now said, “In Judah God has himself known . . . Zion is his abode” (Ps. 76:3). The God whom an early Psalm calls “the One of Sinai” (Ps. 68:9) became “he who dwells on Mount Zion” (Isa 8.18). The march of YHWH across the wilderness became a march “from Zion . . . a devouring fire” (Ps 50:2–3). As Levenson explains, The transfer of the divine home from Sinai to Zion meant that God was no longer seen as dwelling in an extraterritorial no man’s land, but within the borders of the Israelite community. This, in turn, means that the anarchistic tendencies associated with the Sinaitic traditions . . . will be somewhat mitigated or altered in the Zion traditions, which will see YHWH as less remote from the ordinary governance of human society.26

The entire political theology of Jewish historical existence is determined by this configured jointure of Sinai and Zion. Sinai/Zion is the Ereignis of Jewish beyng itself, an extraterritorial inception of the unfolding of the historial truth of the people, of the revealed language and the political homeland that makes the historical experience of the Jews possible.27 Sinai: the way YHWH is placed into the historical life of the people, wild and free, being whatever will be and having no determinate ontic location, an extraterritoriality from whence divine language speaks forth a people into being. Zion: the territorialization of YHWH into political form and place, where it becomes governance and temple that orient the existence of the people in history. The slash of Sinai/Zion tears the silence of beYng— YHWH or beyng, who can say?—into the theologico-political openness of Jewish historical existence.

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When Rav Froman (1945–2013) inverted the dominant theology of Zionism by saying that “the land of Israel does not belong to the people of Israel but the people of Israel belong to the land of Israel,” he was attempting to tilt the burden of the Jewish political imaginary in Israel back from Zion to Sinai, without for a moment denying the constitutive force of their fusion. One should not entertain the illusion that this way of thinking will afford easy or even any political solution; it may well only exacerbate problems.28 It nevertheless affords a redescription that is more faithful to the phenomenology of Jewish dwelling, as one of proximity and distance, not of presence or absence, of an intimacy that is neither unitive nor abstract. And it has the advantage of a place within the Jewish political imaginary of contemporary Israel, where a theology of Zion can neither be denied nor spiritualized into an abstraction, nor thought purely negatively or in terms of exile or diaspora. Within the Jewish political imaginary of contemporary Israel as it is, regardless of how one might like it to be, a phenomenology of Jewish dwelling in proximity offers a corrective to determinations of Zion as a territorial presence that can be occupied. EXCHANGED FRONTS (VERTAUSCHTE FRONTEN) The lectures on Hölderlin’s “Germania” and “The Rhine” attest to Heidegger’s “spiritual resistance” to National Socialism, as he called it, in the name of an even more antiliberal political ontology of proximity to the Fatherland. The lectures attempt to “configure” the poetic or prophetic dimension which alone can lead the people from slavery to beings, the reign of presence and absence, to the promised fatherland of beyng, where nearness to the originary openness is experienced in its freedom. The key sentence comes from a letter Hölderlin writes to his friend Böhlendorff, which says, “We learn nothing with greater difficulty than the free use of the national.” Like the idea of a promise or a promised land that can be kept only by never being fulfilled, Heidegger describes the “national” as “what is given us as a task” (GA 39: 292; 264). This task, he says, involves: the creating of a space of play within which the national can freely transform itself into history. The national by itself is nothing present at hand, not merely something at hand, not a history, but the national—what is given as endowment (Mitgegeben)—is the necessary, though not sufficient condition for historical Dasein, that is, for the free use of the national. (GA 39: 292; 264–65)

The denial of the national as being something “present at hand” could be taken in a minimalist or maximalist fashion, and along that spectrum, from



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quietism to anarchy or apocalypse, Heidegger’s “resistance” to National Socialism could be located. It is in any case a matter of letting the possibilities of an endowment (Mitgegeben) release themselves, as was indeed the case in section 74 of Being and Time.29 It is as though the entire lecture course on Hölderlin was a sustained account of how to exercise the free use of the national by drawing near the origin that is the Fatherland. This happens by transcending the present and thereby abandoning the people to their own foreignness to themselves. But how to transcend the present and become foreign to oneself? Enter the Greeks, who provide the old and foreign terrain on which present Germans can renew themselves without careering along the degenerate path of the present into scientism, machination, technicity and other such progressive forms of alienation, like “Americanism,” as Heidegger called it, or the uprootedness which constitutes the type of humanity he calls “World-Judaism.”30 This is why the Greeks loom so large for both Hölderlin and Heidegger (among many others); for if one can only move forward by moving back, as happens at the end of history, one had better have where to return to. The task of the Germans is to renew days as of old (Lam. 5:21)—the Greek old. The German renewal is inspired by the ancient Greeks because of the reciprocity of excess that obtains between that which is own (Eigene) and that which is foreign (Fremde) to each.31 It is therefore a matter of exchanging fronts, the Germans renewing themselves as Germans by exposing themselves to the Greek: The Greeks are given as their endowment: a rousing proximity (Nähe) to the fire from the heavens, being struck by the violence of beyng. Given to them as a task (Aufgabe) is harnessing the unharnessed in the struggle for the work—grasping, bringing to a stand. The Germans are given as their endowment: the ability to grasp, the preparation and planning of domains and calculating setting in order to the point of organization. It is given to them as a task to come to be struck by beyng. (GA 39: 293; 265)

The Germans, in other words, are masters of grasping, preparing, and calculating. Their task is therefore to create a space in which their endowment— preparation, planning, calculating, organization—can be struck by lightning. To be struck by lighting is to stand in the midst of the wildness of beyng, with poets that are prophetically exposed to spirit that measures the span between the prose of everyday life and the silence of the God, thereby making prophetic and poetic dwelling possible. To be struck by beyng is to be set asunder, to stray, to err into proximity with the origin of the truth of the people from whence “the spirit of thinking” whirls. This exchange of fronts between the German and the Greek is the task Hölderlin envisions as the free use of

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the national. Is it any wonder that the young Scholem saw in Hölderlin’s exposure to the immanent excess of life a “blessed lunacy” (allseligmachenden Blödsinn) that the Jews had borne throughout their wanderings? “Was Hölderlin a Jew?,” the precocious seventeen-year-old exclaimed upon reading “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny,” a poem that tells of a blind and restless falling into unknown depths. “With these words he chose sides. No wonder he went mad. Only a Jew can put up with life.”32 For Heidegger of course it was not the Jews but the Greeks who were out in the open, in the wild, amid the violence of beyng, where phusis strikes historically. Their task was therefore to bring to a stand, to come to terms with the objectivity that is also a manifestation of beyng, that which is ordered and calculable. The ancient Greeks succeeded, having become German. But in this cycle of eternal return, the task now befalls the Germans, who by now have been historically determined, according to Heidegger, as a calculating people who must relearn the free use of the national. Heidegger’s Germans of 1934/1935, then, are not properly rooted in the fatherland. Perhaps for this reason they resemble the malevolent portrait of the Jews in the Black Notebooks whose “emphatic talent for calculation” likewise results from their “absolutely unbound” type of humanity (GA 96: 56; 243). In mistaking the land for a territorial thing the National Socialists likewise remain uprooted and exiled from their poetic origin in the fatherland and therefore prize forms of thinking like grasping, setting in order, and organizing over the spiritual thinking that dwells in proximity to the wild origin. So too they objectify the Volk as a biological entity with the help of the so-called new science and expand the dimension of the land as Lebensraum modeled on a biological concept of growth. And therefore they too live in exile from the fatherland of spiritual dwelling and indeed from each other too. They make use of the national, but not free use. On the contrary, they instrumentalize the national by making it into a principle of calculation and objectification, of biological racialization and territorial expansion. They are too calculative for the wildness of the fatherland and are therefore unprepared to greet the spirit which blows freely from there. Their task, accordingly, is to draw near to the mystery of the concealed land, the one that can never be present, only promised. This free use of the national is always figured by Heidegger as a re-inception of the Greeks, but does it not secretly yearn for the land of the Jews? Not the state, but the extraterritorial Place where the people dwell historically, prophetically, and poetically, in proximity to the origin from which they are spoken forth. Scholem might have thought so. A few years after his diary entry about Hölderlin’s capacity to put up with the blessed lunacy of Jewish existence, Scholem wrote of the “pure interpretability” of Hölderlin’s wild figuring of the German national, which he now viewed as tantamount to the scriptural anarchism he was hoping for in



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Zion. The wild blessedness of living in the pure interpretability of being, in proximity to Zion/Sinai, can only be sustained by a community that was able to freely figure its own national. Hence the Heideggerian exemplar, avant la lettre, of the poetic fatherland of Zion. “Friedrich Hölderlin lived a Zionist life from within the German people.”33 Heidegger comes to curse the Jews, but perhaps like Balaam he will have blessed them. His political theology of proximity rather than presence affords a way of thinking of the connection between the Jewish people and the originary place that makes Jewish dwelling possible anywhere, including the Diaspora. This does not mean that Heidegger was a true prophet of political ontology for the wrong people. His falsity is betrayed when he extols silence over stuttered speech and the communicative struggle that is the people.34 This betrayal manifests in Heidegger’s shift from viewing the fatherland as near and intimate to his assertion that it is wholly withdrawn, like a Deus absconditus, an assertion that bites back in the form of apocalypticism, as if the Fatherland, “beyng itself,” having withdrawn, could unconceal itself anew, in person or presence, like the Son. But as the Place of our being, the fatherland can no more be wholly withdrawn in silence than manifest as such in a determined location. Just as a determined location cannot coincide with the Place of our being, so no apocalypse of silence can reveal a new beginning. Only a false God could accommodate these pretensions. We can no more appropriate beyng in a determined place than we can await its new inception from an apocalyptic absence. Only a false God could save us, which is to say that we cannot be saved. Prophetic dwelling in Zion would be a way of dwelling in the promised land without salvation. In that absence of salvation there perhaps still lies the prophetic mystery of proximity, of dwelling in one’s own by neighboring, as the sacred Hebrew of sh.k.n. promises. NOTES   1 This view, piercing through the polemicized tumult of much of the recent scholarship, was proposed by Derrida in the Heidelberg conference, proceedings of which were intentionally withheld from publication for twenty-five years and are therefore all the more timely; see Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference, ed. by Mireille Calle-Gruber, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).  2 Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 15. For endorsements of Zarader’s principal thesis see Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 274–76; Derrida in the interview with Janicaud, Heidegger

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in France (“Basically I think she is right”), 358; Levinas in his “Preface” to Marlène Zarader, Heidegger et les paroles de l’origins, Nouvelle édition (Paris: Vrin, 2013), 8; Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 177; John D. Caputo, “People of God, People of being: The Theological Presuppositions of Heidegger’s Path of Thought,” in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. Mark A. Wrathall and James E. Faulconer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85–100.  3 Of course it is controversial even to claim that Heidegger’s unthought of the Greeks arrives at a determinate place that can be named Jewish (or “Hebraic”). Much of the difficulty hinges on presuppositions about the very possibility of naming “Jewish thought” as such; a possibility that is as phenomenologically unavoidable as it is historically contestable. For Zarader’s account of the limits and nature of Heidegger’s debt see The Unthought Debt, 196–202; for concerns that come to the fore with a shift to historicism see Peter E. Gordon’s review of the English translation at http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-unthought-debt-heideggerand-the-hebraic-heritage/. In Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Gordon concluded by entertaining “the startling possibility” of Heidegger’s debt to Judaism and the “convergence in worship,” which this would imply if one could overcome the dogma of historicism (313–14).  4  Heidegger uses the term “de-theologization” in 1923 to describe Descartes’ epistemological application of the ontological argument and again in Being and Time to describe how modern philosophical anthropology “is rooted in Christian dogmatics” (GA 2: 65; MacQuarrie and Robinson 74). The extensive use Heidegger makes of theological concepts drawn from the Christian tradition has long been known. For a compelling recent defense of this view, including a detailed discussion of how “de-theologization” works across Heidegger’s corpus, see Ryan Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in “Being and Time” and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Coyne characterizes his work as “meant to complement” Zarader’s book (Heidegger’s Confessions, 244n.18). Coyne sensibly argues for Heidegger’s debt to Christian theology whereas Zarader argues that the “Hebraic heritage” is the truly unthought debt determining Heidegger’s thought. Needless to say, such a “complement” would also complicate matters, since it would seem to result in a “JudaeoChristian” conception of Heidegger’s debt to theology. The problematic character of such a conception from an historical point of view does not preclude a phenomenology of “Judaeo-Christian” theological concepts, even if there never was such a thing as Judaeo-Christianity. Such a phenomenological approach would be historial, not historical; formally indicative, not dogmatically determined.  5 Emil L. Fackenheim, Encounters Between Judaism and Modern Philosophy: A Preface to Future Jewish Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 218.  6 For a cultural history of the malediction Verjudung, Jewification, beginning with Wagner’s 1850 essay “Judaism in Music” through to Weimar texts, including Hitler’s Mein Kampf, see Steven E. Aschheim, see “ ‘The Jew Within’: The Myth of ‘Judaization’ in Germany,” in his Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (Houndmills: Macmillan



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Press, 1996), 45–68. Paul Celan re-signified the term in his notes to the Meridian speech, where he proposed that “one can jewify” and indeed that this was part of the essence of poetry; for a nuanced analysis see Vivian Liska, “ ‘Man kann verjuden’: Paradoxes of Exemplarity,” in Against the Grain: Jewish Intellectuals in Hard Times, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn, Stefani Hoffman, and Richard I. Cohen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 198–210. There is nothing poetic in Heidegger’s pejorative use of the term in various letters that are now well known. For a discussion and references see Gregory Fried, “A Letter to Emmanuel Faye,” Philosophy Today (Fall 2011), esp. 210–12. Dieter Thomä’s contribution to this volume concludes with a related account of how certain Jewish thinkers have reappropriated pejorative stereotypes.   7 I take my lead here from Paul Kahn’s work on the effects of popular sovereignty on American liberalism; see in particular his Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).  8 Martin Heidegger, On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The 1934–35 Seminar and Interpretative Essays, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, ed. Peter Trawny, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, and Michael Marder (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).  9 Heidegger, On Hegel, 186. 10 Ibid., 111. 11 Ibid., 183. 12 Ibid., 186. 13 Here I can only mention this motif, which calls for a longer analysis. 14  Gershom Scholem, “Bekenntnis über Unsere Sprache (1926),” http://www. steinheim-institut.de/edocs/bpdf/michael_brocke-franz_rosenzweig_und_gerhard_gershom_scholem.pdf, 21–22; Gershom Scholen, ‘On Our Language: A Confession’, trans. Ora Wiskind, History and Memory 2 (1990), 97–99. 15 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 33–34. 16 The earliest kabbalistic texts such as Sefer ha-Bahir and Sefer Yesirah already articulate an ontological conception of language and this continues to determine the ensuing tradition, as more recent scholarship amply confirms; for two formidable examples see Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) and Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalah Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Wolfson’s work, here as elsewhere, is particularly sensitive to the affinities between Heidegger’s account of the ontological dimension of language and that of many Kabbalists. I am focusing on Scholem’s account chiefly because he explicitly understands this divine conception of language as impacting on the Jewish theologico-political imagination, which he also promotes, and, as we shall see, he too viewed Hölderlin’s work in these terms. 17  On the uncanniness of the homeland see James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), ch. 4. 18 The celebration of diaspora by modern theorists does not escape its original determination in the Septuagint, where it translates a theological curse of banishment

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from the homeland, as, for example, in Deut. 28:25. Diaspora is a futural state of “horror” that will befall the people under certain theological conditions; it does not originally refer to the historical existence of a community living, much less flourishing, in a foreign land. For a sophisticated recent treatment, see Stephane Dufoix, Diasporas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 19 The temptation to view the establishment of the state of Israel as a return of the exile of the biblical word was briefly contemplated by Emmanuel Levinas during the fateful month of May 1948. See “Quand les mots reviennent de l’exil,” Cahiers d’Études Lévinassiennes, n°5, 2006 (original 1949), 215–17, which elaborates on his letter to Blanchot of May 21, 1948, translated by Sarah Hammerschlag as “Letter to Maurice Blanchot on the Creation of the State of Israel,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Summer 2010), 645–48. Heidegger’s attempt to distinguish Hölderlin’s prophecy from the “boom20  ing” prophets of the Old Testament is found in “Remembrance,” based on GA 59. The tendentious character of this gesture was lucidly criticized by Martin Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1988), 73. 21 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 21. 22 Even Daniel Boyarin, who goes to lengths to argue against “the lachrymose version of what makes a diaspora” and rejects the idea of Zion as the center or home of the Jews, admits an ontological dependence: “The Babylonian Talmud would have no existence were it not for the Torah of Palestine that is embedded in it as its soil and its seed”; Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 45. 23 For an elaboration see Yehuda Liebes, “The Zohar’s Connection to the Land of Israel [in Hebrew]” and Moshe Idel, “The Land of Secrets: A Response to Yehuda Liebes [in Hebrew],” in Zion and Zionism among Sephardi and Oriental Jews [Hebrew], ed. Z. Harvi et al. (Jerusalem: Miśgav Yerushalayim, 2002), 31–44; 45–49. 24 BT mo’ed katan 25a; Mekhilta parashat Bo, opening. 25 Jon D. Levenson, Sinai & Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 21. 26 Levenson, Sinai & Zion, 91. 27 We might also note that the giving of the law at Sinai is done for the sake of YHWH dwelling among the people, as indicated by the word, sh.k.n (Exod. 25:8), from whence shekhina. The same logic is reiterated in the Prologue to the Gospel of John, where the logos once again comes to dwell (the cognate ἐσκήνωσεν) among us, this time in flesh (John 1:14). Luther translates eskēnōsen as wohnte. Looking backward, as it were, the dwelling of YHWH in Exodus, which requires the building of a tabernacle, is clearly modeled on the creation of the world in Genesis 1, as biblical scholars have long noted. Creating, building, dwelling: this is how the biblical authors “measure out” earth and sky such that Presencing among the people may take place, whether in the tabernacle or the body of Christ. There is perhaps here an archeology of dwelling, from Heidegger to Hölderlin to Luther to the Gospel of John to Exodus to Genesis. 28 For more practical attempts to think through the idea of belonging to the land beyond the triangulation of people, political sovereignty, and territory, see “Two



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States One Homeland,” http://2states1homeland.org/en, and “Two States in One Place,” https://issuu.com/ipcri/docs/two_states_in_one_space. 29 To read section 74 of Being and Time as an “ethnic nationalist philosophy” of “fascistic antimodernism,” as Micha Brumlik does in this volume, is only possible if one fails to understand Heidegger’s philosophical motivations or simply refuses the entire question of being that concerns him. From the point of view of the question of being, there is no way of eliminating the ontological work of heritage, whose ontic figure is “a people” (though technology may be changing this). For Heidegger, to be is to be intelligible as thus or so, and this “as structure” is sustained by horizons that are held open by the temporal structuring of the world. That temporal structure involves heritage and “people,” who sustain possibilities for being-as. Derrida made a point of showing how Husserl understood even the validity of geometrical truth as dependent on this historical apriority of being. Would Husserl and Derrida also be ethno-nationalist antimodern fascists? That would be absurd. Or are we being asked to return to a myth of the Given that takes no account of its own conditions for being? It should at least be noted that the alternative to ontology as possibility-within-the-world (where there are, for the time being, people) risks rehashing a naïve realism based on a rigid program of univocal enlightenment. For what I take to be related concerns, see Thomä’s critique of Faye in this volume. 30 On this see the chapter by Gregory Fried in this volume. 31 For a compelling analysis of Heidegger’s account of this reciprocity of excess between the Germans and the Greeks, see Julia A. Ireland, “Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Eccentric Translation,” in Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking: Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad, ed. Frank Schalow (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2011), 253–67. 32 Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1995), vol. I, 47 (15 November 1914); Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, ed. and trans. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 34. 33 Gershom Scholem, Tagebücher vol. II, 347 (1919); Lamentations of Youth, 311. 34 As Yemima Hadad shows in her chapter to this volume, this was how Buber conceived his alternative recovery of Heilsgeschichte. Heidegger often cites Hölderlin’s line, “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind,” commenting, for example, that “Insofar as we stand within existence [Dasein], we ourselves are only a dialogue, and in such dialogue experience something like a world” (GA 39: 199; 218; see also 45; 45 and 68–71; 63–64). For Heidegger, however, the people being “a dialogue” means that its possibility for being itself, as a people, ranges from the poetic to the prosaic. To be a dialogue is not to be remembered as a solution to the historical problem of forgetting who we are but as a way of formulating the very problem of who we are. Our being manifests in the range between the poetic, whose limit is the silence of the word, and the ceaseless dispersions of the prosaic into various modes of forgetting of being, from everyday banter to professional jargon through to automated text prompting. Hölderlin’s presence in Buber’s early thought is palpable but implicit. For a later discussion see Martin Buber, “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind,” in Martin Buber, Werkausgabe, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Peter Schäfer, vol. 6, Sprachphilosophische Schriften, ed. Asher Biemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003), 83–86.

Chapter 14

People of Knowers: On the Political Epistemology of Heidegger and R. Chaim of Volozhin Elad Lapidot

ON POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY The current Heidegger controversy reveals a profound difficulty for our hegemonic theoretical and philosophical discourse in thinking the Jewish. By this I mean a difficulty in engaging with the historical-phenomenal complex of Jewish existence as figuring, that is, representing, manifesting, or performing something that belongs to the element of thought or knowledge, to the epistemic dimension, something that can be designated as a specifically Jewish knowledge or epistemology, or, as this volume names it, a specifically “Jewish thought.” At some moments in the current controversy regarding Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, the notion of “Jewish thought” seems even to be the controversial notion itself. As indicated in the introduction to this volume, one paradox or ambivalence in the current debate is that accusing the philosopher of “anti-Semitism” very often means accusing him not so much of philosophizing against Jews, but of philosophizing Jews at all. This ambivalence is perhaps constitutive for an entire discursive configuration of critique of anti-Semitism, so to speak a discourse of anti-antiSemitism. The fundamental ambivalence of the anti-anti-Semitic discourse consists in countering anti-Semitism in philosophy by precluding the Jewish from philosophy or thought altogether, a preclusion which at some critical moments risks reproducing anti-Semitic discourse itself. The problem of “Jewish Thought” would thus constitute the presence of the Jewish for thought as a problem—for thought or for a specific configuration of thought, perhaps philosophical thought. The Jewish as a problem for philosophy—is this a “Jewish” problem, a Jewish question? Or is this a philosophical question? The question lies precisely in the “or,” namely, in identifying, understanding, or deciding on the nature or on the subject of 269

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Jewish-being and of philosophy or, more generally, of thought itself. It is thus that the question of “Jewish Thought” invokes and itself features or embodies a paradigmatic and general question about thought—the question of the subject or agent of thought, or, more generally, to use Heideggerian language, the question of the existence or Dasein of thought, which at least for a certain Heidegger would amount to the question of Dasein tout court. What is called “Thinking”? What is called “Jewish”? The basic difficulty with the notion of Jewish Thought, as it has become visible in the framework of the current debate, seems to be located in the relation of Thought to the Jews as a particular historical collective. A dominant conception or intuition has become manifest, whereby pure thought, philosophical thought, as objective and universal, is not and should not be connected to concrete, particular, historical collectives, such as “the Jews,” and therefore should not think such collectives, much less criticize them. Thus, for instance, to quote a few examples, Peter Trawny, who opened and framed the current debate about Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, defined “anti-Semitism,” inter alia, as “whatever is meant to characterize the Jews as ‘the Jews’.”1 In his book, Trawny thus employed quotation marks to distance his philosophical thought and discourse from the supposed “Jews,” and extended this operation in his discussion of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks to “the Greeks,” “the Germans,” “the Romans,” “the Christians,” “the Jesuits,” “the Protestants,” “the Catholics,” “the Russians,” “the English people” [die Engländer], “the French people” [die Franzosen], “the Americans,” “the Europeans,” and “the Asians.” “For us today,” Trawny proclaimed-observed, “the use of such collective concepts has become problematic.”2 This formulation begs of course the question concerning the precise identity or mode of signification of this collective “us today,” for which such collective concepts has become problematic. May this “we” be designated by any of the collective concepts it finds problematic, or by similar “such” concepts? Would there be any other kind of collective concepts more appropriate for “us today”? Or are “we today” to be defined as the collective that rejects all collectivity, at least conceptually? Insofar as Trawny’s “we” designates the community of knowledge, of philosophers and scholars, which has expressed itself in the current Heidegger controversy, its reaction to anti-Semitism has in fact been an almost unanimous, virtually constitutive banishment of the aforementioned collective subjects from the epistemic realm of philosophy, condemning the contamination of Heidegger’s discourse by such concepts. Thomas Rohkrämer, for instance, denounced Heidegger’s “sweeping associations between nations and metaphysical positions,” while Andew Bowie criticized the “pernicious nonsense” of bringing together “ontological difference” and “politico-historical issues”; for Markus Gabriel, “Germans” and “Jews” are nothing but “figments of



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imagination” [Hirngespinst], and Thomas Vašek denounced the use of “dark, mystifying [raunende] concepts such as ‘soul,’ ‘blood,’ or ‘people’.”3 In the present volume, Trawny restates his uneasiness regarding collectives in philosophy in direct reference to the notion of “Jewish Thought”: “Is thinking not always and everywhere—thinking? Does not thinking have a universal matrix?”4 A similar concern has been voiced by Donatella Di Cesare, who in this volume repeats her analysis of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism as “metaphysical,” which for her consists in the attempt to turn “the Jews of flesh and blood” into a concept, an idea, a figure, namely, an element of thought: “Heidegger wants to define the Jew with a capital letter, to whose essence the Jews of flesh and blood are traced back and reduced. The metaphysics of the Jew gives rise to the metaphysical Jew, an abstract figure to which the qualities that supposedly pertain to the ‘idea’ of the Jew, the fantastic model of the figural Jew, are obscurely transferred.”5 As noted earlier, in these accounts, Heidegger’s philosophical anti-Semitism lies not in philosophizing against the Jews, that is, against some Jewish idea or thought, but in the very introduction of this collective name, of any collective name, into thought. The fundamental question that manifests itself in this conversation thus concerns the relation between thought and the collective—as a collective name, collective subject, collective being. What would be the locus of this question in our philosophical, theoretical, academic discourse? Of course, there is a place or even many places for collectives in our philosophy. Philosophy itself is very often placed within and characterized in reference to collectives. We speak of Anglo-American, French, or German philosophy. We also speak of Christian or Marxist thought. What is the difference between the philosophy of the Germans and of the Christians? Which is closer to Jewish philosophy? It seems that the answer lies in the extent to which we recognize these collectives themselves, their being and essence, as collectives of thought—in contrast to something else. But also within philosophy itself there are certain domains of thought that specifically concern human collectives. One such central domain is political thought—be it as political philosophy, theory, or science. In this domain, thought is brought into relation with human collective existence through the concept of the political, namely, by thinking human collective existence based on the paradigm of the polis. There is much to ask about this paradigm; for my preliminary purpose, however, it is sufficient to establish that it is at least one dominant paradigm in our discourse for thinking collectives. The general question concerning the interrelation between thought, science, or knowledge, that is, the “epistemic,” on the one hand, and on the other hand the human collective existence, namely, the question that I identify as conceptually underlying the—at least philosophical—“Jewish question,” I therefore call the epistemo-political question, and its domain—epistemo-politics

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or political epistemology. The epistemo-political question is the constitutive question of political thought. The current epistemo-political situation of “the Jews” is that for our dominant thought they appear to constitute a kind, even a paradigm of collective existence that lies or is found and grounded outside political thought, perhaps outside the polis. For this kind of collective I suggest here the concept of “a people.” This is a very common concept, also in political thought, which could be said to designate the very subject of political thought, “the people” quite trivially as the singular plurality, literally and simply the human collective, the subject of the polis par excellence. Proposing “the people” as the category of the collective that is grounded and thus essentially exists outside of the polis and political thought sounds paradoxical. But I wish to propose just that: a paradox of political thought, which would think its paradigmatic subject, “the people,” as something very foreign, maybe even opposite to the epistemic project of political thought itself. It seems to me that this paradox underlies the modern concept of the “nation,” which is currently still one of the most effective political figures, but for critical thought is nonetheless little more than an “imagined community,” a fiction. My critical interrogation here is in no way a call to go in the opposite direction and embrace nationalism or populism, which commonly constitutes an anti-intellectual call, in the name of action, to stop thinking. The very understanding of this kind of anti-intellectualism as “populism,” that is, as pertaining to the “people,” is another manifestation of the deep rupture I’m trying to indicate, a crisis between political thought and the collective political subject, “the people.” To what extent this crisis is modern, remains to be thought. Looking for premodern precursors, one could, for instance, point at Saint Paul, “apostle to the peoples [ethnoi]” (Rom. 11:3), who precisely places the difference between peoples and thus the very category of the people outside the salvific project of pneuma, outside spirit.6 And if “the people” may indeed be taken as a Jewish epistemo-political paradigm, then the rejection of the people from thought would constitute a tradition that could be designated as philosophical or “metaphysical” anti-Judaism. It is resistance to this rejection, and thus a counter-thought to “metaphysical” anti-Judaism, as just defined, which I recognize in Heidegger’s philosophy— which would thus be a window to see and a door to access something like Jewish Thought. More precisely, what I will suggest in the following is that, in contrast to a fundamental disposition of political thought, there is in Heidegger’s philosophy an attempt to connect or reconnect the political project of the people and the epistemological project of thought. I will suggest that it is through this attempt, which I call “a people of knowers,” that Heidegger’s thought opens, in contemporary philosophy, a point of access to Jewish political epistemology.



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I therefore claim that “politics” is not what prevents, but on the contrary what enables the configuration of “Heidegger and Jewish Thought”—both as a conjunction and as an opposition. To adequately develop and articulate this claim, especially in the context of the current controversy, I will need a larger framework. All I can offer here is a blueprint, so to speak, just a thought. THE SELF-AFFIRMATION OF THE GERMAN UNIVERSITY One of the common formulations for the core issue of the Heidegger controversy has long been the relation of his philosophy to politics. Since “politics” in this context is usually identified with National Socialism, both criticism and apology have tended to agree that the political engagement corrupted the philosophical work—prosecutors magnifying the corruption of philosophy by politics, defenders minimizing it.7 I proceed with caution, because I detect here fundamental questions, which we may not want to decide too quickly, certainly not unknowingly. In the first place, of course, the general question of the relation between philosophy and politics. I noted above that what motivates me is an observation of at least a certain distance that a contemporary project of philosophy, including (perhaps even paradigmatically) political philosophy, seems to take from the political project. This tendency to depoliticize thought can also be detected, in my view, in the debate regarding Heidegger’s politics. The immediate identification of the political in Heidegger’s thought with National Socialism risks suggesting that the adherence to National Socialism was and perhaps still is the simple and somehow necessary consequence of philosophy’s political engagement tout court. This is at least one way of interpreting the message of the famous anecdote, reported by Gadamer, about Heidegger’s colleague who, seeing him after he retired from his office as rector of the Freiburg University, asked him whether he was “back from Syracuse.”8 This is not Gadamer’s interpretation. He rather criticizes Heidegger’s defenders who say “his political errors have nothing to do with his philosophy.” Gadamer finds this defense “damaging” to Heidegger as a thinker. I agree with Gadamer and believe that the question of the “political” is crucial for understanding central dimensions of Heidegger’s philosophy. I mean the entire Heideggerian project, also before 1932 and after 1935: from very explicit manifestations, not just in words but also in deeds, in the early to mid-1930s, to a waxing silence after. What I mean by the “political” engagement of Heidegger’s philosophy is, very succinctly, its commitment to philosophy, thought and knowledge as a collective project, which is eo ipso a project of collective, what I call an epistemo-political project. Of course, the question of the exact “epistemic”

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nature of Heidegger’s thought in general, namely, the precise way in which his philosophy may be designated as a project of knowledge—if so, what kind of knowledge would that be?—is a difficult question. I think it is one of the basic questions posed and constantly examined by Heidegger’s philosophy itself, which for that reason throughout its development, in the light of its developed self-understanding, often reinterprets its own epistemic nature— whether it consists in understanding, knowledge, thought, or speech—and accordingly renames itself, thus calling into question the very name of “philosophy.” Nonetheless, it seems that there is at least one relatively constant self-designation of Heidegger’s epistemic project that can be used here heuristically, namely, the “question of being” (die Seinsfrage). Heidegger’s earlier important work, Being and Time, is dedicated precisely to the question concerning the meaning (Sinn) of the question of being. My claim is that in Being and Time the question of being is understood as a collective project, which is constitutive to the project of collective existence and thus of political being. I agree with James Phillips’ observation that “Being and Time is a political text.”9 My own understanding of this claim demands careful demonstration and discussion, also of Phillips’ analysis. I will only provide here a few brief indications. Thus, from the first pages of the book, the seminal gesture of asking about the meaning of the question of being is presented as an intervention in philosophy as an inter-subjective, inter-generational, namely, historical collective project, that is, as a tradition. The basic motivation for the book’s inquiry is expressed in the title of its §1 as “The Necessity of an Explicit Repetition [Wiederholung] of the Question Concerning Being” (GA 2: 3). As Heidegger says in the famous (or infamous, depending on the reading) “political” §74, “[r]epetition is the explicit tradition [Überlieferung]” (GA 2: 509). Indeed, as Heidegger makes clear, asking about the (meaning of the) question of being is not motivated by any immediately evident importance this question currently appears to have for anyone, philosopher or not. On the contrary, it is motivated by the evident unimportance of this question for contemporary philosophers, by contemporary philosophy’s oblivion of the question, which “animated the research of Plato and Aristotle” (GA 2: 3), namely, the foundational question of philosophy as a historical project. The book’s method for interrogating the meaning of the question of being does focus on this question’s meaning for the individual human existence, the individual Dasein, who is individuated by death. This has led to the dominant reception of the work as philosophical anthropology of human existence, as “existential philosophy,” a reading which Heidegger vigorously and consistently rejected, insisting on the primacy of the question of being.10 Indeed, the existential analytic of the individual Dasein is explicitly designated in the book’s introduction as a method for unveiling the meaning of the question of



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being, which is only the preliminary step toward the discussion of the question of being itself, which would proceed as a “Destruction of the History of Ontology” (GA 2: 27), namely, not as an existential but as a historical-hermeneutical investigation. Famously, the full project of Being and Time was never realized; the plan remained a plan, and the only part to see publication was the “Interpretation of Dasein.” Nonetheless, this part too, focused as it is on analyzing individual existence, explicitly seeks to move away from the transcendental individuality of the Cartesian ego. Dieter Thomä in his contribution to this volume indicates how in Being and Time Heidegger, criticizing the “worldlessness” of the human being depicted by Descartes, conceives of a human Dasein that is essentially worldly, of human being as essentially being-in-the-world.11 I wish to add the further indication that being in the world, for Heidegger, also means being with others. Dasein is essentially Mitdasein, coexistence.12 Accordingly, the two paradigmatic figures of human being in the world offered in Being and Time are both forms of collective. Improper (uneigentliche; often rendered “inauthentic”) existence is embodied by the Man, often translated as “the they,” who “is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as a sum” (GA 2: 169). The linguistic ambiguity between the singular Man and the plural “they” is inherent to the existential impropriety of the phenomenon. In the Man, the individual Dasein purports to see his or her “self” in a figure that is nothing but the “average man,” and is thus the furthest from any individual self. Rather, precisely to the contrary, the “they” constitutes a general and thus collective subject, which, however, is concealed and dissimulated as a neutral individual, das Man, that is, a collective Dasein that is unowned, improper. In contrast, proper (eigentliche; “authentic”) human existence manifests itself in the collective subjectivity that is at the center of my own reflection, and which I started by positing as the paradigm for the political subject, namely, the people, das Volk. In spite of its structural centrality, the Volk remains significantly undeveloped in Being and Time. In fact, this word is only used in the book once to describe the proper mode of the human existence—in the aforementioned §74, which is the only paragraph where Heidegger offers some rudimentary descriptions of Dasein’s proper existence. The basic perspective through which Being and Time perceives and interprets human being, and thus distinguishes between proper and improper existence, is temporality. In contrast to improper existence, which is constituted by the temporal mode of “everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit), based on the conception of time as the eternal continuum of “nows,” proper existence conceives of time more fundamentally as history (Geschichte), and is thus constituted through the temporal mode of “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit). §74 is dedicated to “The Basic Constitution of Historicity” (GA 2: 505). In this context, Heidegger points out that

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as essentially historical (geschichtlich) the happening (Geschehen) of human existence is not effectuated as a linear duration of life—day in, day out—for a certain chronological measure of life-time, but originally as a meaningful event, a story with beginning and end, a personal fate—Schicksal. But since, Heidegger notes, existence is originally coexistence, fate is never merely individual, but originally collective and plural—Schicksal (individual fate) is Geschick (collective fate, destiny or lot). The proper existential happening, proper existence, is a collective event—the event of “a people”: If fateful [schicksalhafte] Dasein, as being-in-the-world, exists essentially in being-with-others, its event [Geschehen] is a co-event [Mitgeschehen] and is characterized as a lot [Geschick]. This is how we designate the event of the community, of the people [Volk]. The lot is not composed of individual fates, any more than being-with-one-another can be conceived as several subjects occurring together. (GA 2: 508)

Micha Brumlik in his contribution to this volume recalls and subscribes to the reading that identifies in these words “central motifs of an ultimately ethnic-nationalist philosophy, a völkisch philosophy.”13 It seems to me that before clarifying what ethnos, nation, and Volk, what “people” means, this reading would not signify much more than a tautology. Anything more than that would be to impose on Heidegger’s text one’s own preconceived conceptions, a hermeneutical procedure of the problematic kind that Dieter Thomä describes in his essay in this volume.14 In my reading, the concept of Volk in the above quote, and thus in Being and Time, has the sole meaning of tentatively naming the phenomenon of collective historical existence, which is not just a collection of individuals, but has its own proper Dasein. The figure of the Volk becomes more and more central in the years following Being and Time as Heidegger—very much in line with the plan sketched in the book and with its conclusion—shifts the focus of the Seinsfrage, the question of being, from individual existence to human history to Seinsgeschichte, the history of being. The concept practically disappears in his late philosophy, making place to another figure of collective, namely, Sprache, language.15 The main appearance of the Volk in Heidegger’s text occurs during the new appearance of the Volk in Germany in the early 1930s. It features most prominently and publicly in the texts around the Rektoratzeit, in 1933–1934. For the reasons explained earlier, these texts are of particular interest for my own epistemo-political investigation, since they were written during the time when Heidegger directly involved his thought with the body of the National Socialist state, in an attempt to lead an actual, institutional epistemo-political project—an attempt to be the philosopher-Führer of a new



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Plato-inspired Republic of knowledge, whose heart is called the “German University.” One Black Notebook entry from the Rektoratzeit, for instance, summarizes Heidegger’s Volk project at that time as follows: “The metaphysics of Dasein must become deeper in accord with the innermost structure of that metaphysics and must expand into the metapolitics ‘of’ the historical people” (GA 94: 124; Rojcewicz: 91). Heidegger inscribes here his notion of the Volk in the context of his existential ontology, such that this formulation can be read as a direct translation of the idea of proper existence, as sketched in §74 of Being and Time, into an epistemo-political program. The turn from improper to proper existence would signify, for philosophy and the epistemic project altogether, a profound shift from meta-physics of Dasein, that is, a theory of the individual human being as belonging to the realm of physis, as organic life, as animal, to meta-politics of the historical people, that is, a theory of human being as inherently belonging to the realm of polis, the properly human, which is essentially collective and historical.16 What I want to highlight here, as a preliminary observation, is that Heidegger’s notion of Volk, even during his most intensive Nazi engagement, cannot be simply designated as based on race in the biological, primarily physical sense. This has already been noticed and was commented upon recently, for example, by Trawny and Jean-Luc Nancy.17 Rather, Heidegger repeatedly rejects the “biologistic” understanding of the Volk and instead consistently conceptualizes it in the basic epistemic terms of “will,” “knowledge,” and “spirit.” As he says in the 1934 lecture “Logic as the Question about the Essence of Language,” originally titled “State and Science,” the human event or occurrence (Geschehen) of the Volk, of the “we,” is always history, and thus “willentlich und deshalb wissend”—“willed and therefore knowing” (GA 38: 86). However, as critics further noticed, grounding Volk on knowledge or consciousness (the metaphysical) instead of race (the physical) does not necessarily solve the problem, but in many important ways—poses it, namely, poses the epistemo-political question. I argue that the Black Notebooks show that one of the first critics to have noticed that is Heidegger himself, who identified the intimate interdependence of and close solidarity between the physical and the metaphysical, as well as the challenge they both pose to the human as political. I will now sketch the outline of my argument. The first formulation of Heidegger’s epistemo-politics, namely, his understanding of Volk in terms of knowledge, is found in his public lectures and speeches of 1933–1935. The central text is the Rektoratsrede, Heidegger’s public address upon entering the office of the rector of the University of Freiburg. This text constitutes a proper epistemo-political manifesto. The title of the speech is “Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universität,” “The

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Self-Assertion of the German University” (GA 16: 107–17). Heidegger’s basic assertion is indeed of the independent “Self” of the university vis-àvis the state. But this independence does not mean political detachment. On the contrary, in Heidegger’s vision, it is rather the university, the institution of self-knowing knowledge, which constitutes the “self-consciousness,” the Selbst, of the political subject, of the people, the Volk: “The will to the essence of the German university is the will to science as the will to the historical spiritual task of the German people as self-knowing people in its state” (GA 16: 108). Inspired by Plato’s philosopher-king, Heidegger thus envisions the University as the people’s true government—as he calls it: “the site of spiritual legislation” (GA16: 116). However, unlike Plato’s aristocratic politeia, where only the king is philosopher, in Heidegger’s vision philosophy and science are to become not just the know-how of the ruler, but the selfconsciousness of the people—a fundamentally demo-cratic vision. What is the “spiritual task” of the people, exactly? What does the selfknowing people know? What is its science? Does its knowledge go beyond its “Self”? In other words, what constitutes what: knowledge the people or the people knowledge? Is the state the foundation of the university, or the university the foundation of the state? I think this is the fundamental question of epistemo-politics, which may serve as a key for reading the development of Heidegger’s thought during these critical years. The public texts of 1933–1935 remain vague on this point, of course. The Black Notebooks are much more explicit—and critical. In an entry from around 1935 with the header “On the Situation” (Zur Lage), Heidegger criticizes the “völkisches Denken,” pointing out that a Volk’s consciousness of itself as “Selbtzweck,” as “end in itself,” is “Egoismus ins Riesige”—“egoism gigantically magnified” (GA 94: 233). It is precisely this egoistic selfknowledge, says Heidegger, that manifests itself in the figure of “biologism,” which would thus itself be an epistemo-political figure. It should be noted, that in Heidegger’s discourse “egoism” does not invoke a simple perversity of knowledge, something like a national “particular identity” that counters the universality of science and reason. On the contrary, the ego cogito is the modern universal paradigm of knowledge. And this paradigm, according to Heidegger, is a developed version of the more basic figure of human knowledge in the metaphysical tradition, namely, the animal rationale, the “rational animal,” connecting from its inception the physical and the metaphysical, “race and reason” [Rasse und Vernunft] (GA 94: 370). Völkische biologism is thus no counter-enlightenment, but the very consummation of what Heidegger identifies as “the ‘liberal’ idea of progress” (GA 94: 365), which is intimately connected to Darwinist “liberalistic biology” (GA 94: 178).18 In other words, racial bio-politics would be the ultimate result of the Volk’s self-consciousness not as particular but precisely as the



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incarnation of the absolute, universal, self-referential, and self-reflective subject, what Hegel called Geist.19 Indeed, it was Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which Heidegger read and commented on during those years (cf. GA 86), that identified the End of History in the Science and State of the “Germanic people.”20 It is against this position that Heidegger, in the Black Notebooks, formulates his own, which I would describe as the epistemo-political Kehre. In a nutshell, the Kehre designates the “turn,” the shift of perspectives in the Seinsfrage: instead of initially thinking being from the perspective of the human being, like in Being and Time, thinking being in itself, and only from that perspective—also thinking human being.21 This is exactly what happens with the Volk. In a Black Notebooks entry from 1935, for instance, Heidegger adds what he believes was missing from the Rektoratsrede: “That the self-affirmation . . . should be grounded in questioning what most merits questioning [das Fragen nach dem Frag-würdigsten]” (GA 94: 286), namely, being. In other words, the “self” and being of the people is not the ground for, but is rather grounded in and constituted by the question of being, namely, by the project of knowledge as conceived by Heidegger. Other entries specify that the “self-preservation of the Volk” is only a condition for the “truth of being” (GA 94: 316), which means that the collective project, people and polis, is not there for its own sake, but is “needed” and “used” (gebraucht) for the manifestation of being, which thus constitutes the human as the site of this manifestation. Being manifests itself in the knowledge of human beings, which is not only theoretical knowledge, but existential knowledge that determines their “essential decisions,” namely, the decisions that determine human existence and life, human bios, in the most physical way: their land, their blood, their language—their collective lot as people. Heidegger consequently points out the inherent and equally necessary danger, that this condition of human being, the Volk, forgets its conditioning, namely, its constitutive relation to being itself, and renders itself absolute, beyond any decision (GA 94: 189; 446–47). This is what he gradually recognizes has happened to his own Volk, the Germans. For him, the mission of the Germans, their raison d’être, was not to bring Western history to completion, in the sense of perfection and absolutization, but, on the contrary, to bring it to its end, to end it—to bring about its Untergang (GA 94: 66; GA 95: 312). In retrospect, this vision is no doubt a better description than Hegel’s for the actual historical events that have taken place. But for Heidegger, the Germans in no way realized his vision but failed to live up to his idea of Volk. This idea he formulated in purely epistemo-political terms in 1934, immediately after the failure of his Raktorat: “In this age, which not only appraises everything according to use value but also seeks to see everything exclusively from this perspective, the demand must be set down to the effect that knowledge be

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given in knowers, who for their own sake exist in a people” (GA 94: 166). And I interpret: “for their own sake” as knowers. In other words, the knowers should not be there for the people, but the people for the knowers, namely, for the sake of knowledge itself, for knowledge to be “given.” This immediately raises the question about the exact meaning of this vision, the question of the exact nature and identity of the necessary—but still missing—knowledge, knowers, and people, which Heidegger considered to be the historical epistemo-political mission of the German people. What is the nature of the knowledge that is to determine the German? It would no longer be metaphysics, and in this sense no longer Greek. What would it be? In the limited scope of this chapter, I must limit myself to a very brief indication that I will provide at the end by way of a conclusion that, for that reason, will be inconclusive. At this point in my meditation on Heidegger and Jewish thought I will first use my interpretation of Heidegger’s anti-metaphysical epistemo-politics to point out a similar epistemo-political figure in a certain Jewish modernity, which could thus be understood as non-metaphysical thought, or even, to think further with Heidegger, as the non-metaphysics that is thought. “TORAH AND YISRAEL ARE ONE” Any attempt to indicate similarities between Heideggerian and Jewish thought must now also account for the explicit anti-Judaism in Heidegger’s thought. With respect to this, I think we should ask who the “Jews” are that Heidegger criticizes. By asking this I certainly do not mean to subscribe to the discourse, which I explicitly criticized earlier, that condemns Heidegger for philosophizing about Jews at all, thus substituting “flesh and blood” Jews with an “abstract” figure. Just the contrary: I plead for the recognition of Jewish thought. What I am asking is therefore more precisely: what “Jewish thought” or what Jewishness was Heidegger criticizing? This question opens up, of course, the more general question as to what knowledge or thought can at all be considered “Jewish.” Here I only focus on Heidegger’s case. In general, there is no evidence in his extensive oeuvre of any substantial engagement on any text that could be meaningfully called traditional “Jewish,” including the Bible.22 The most significant identified tradition of knowledge to which Heidegger systematically links Jewishness is the Christian (GA 94: 475; GA 97: 20, 438). In fact, there are good reasons to say that “the Jewish” for him is an element in the history of Christianity.23 So it seems to me that what the anti-Jewish Heidegger criticizes is the specific figure of the “Jew” as it has been developed in the tradition that he considered his own, and which he sought to overcome: the metaphysical-Christian. It is



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in this precise sense that I think his is a “metaphysical” anti-Semitism, which means the fundamental critique of the Christian-metaphysical Geist tradition, from Paul to Hegel, against the “Jew” that this tradition itself has constructed, namely, the paradigm of ethnos, a people, without pneuma, without any essential, salutary, truly human knowledge, but only with psyche and ratio (animal intelligence).24 I wonder whether this figure doesn’t still dominate also the current opposition to anti-Semitism in the name of the Jew beyond thought, the Jews of “flesh and blood.” In any case, countering metaphysics’ critique of the Jew by defending metaphysics’ own image of the Jew seems to me as ultimately self-defeating (or self-affirming, depending on one’s perspective). Accordingly, what I wish to suggest here is a modern figure of nonmetaphysical Jews, already non-metaphysical in that they do not even refer to themselves by the metaphysical designation “Jews.”25 I mean the rabbinic world, who in its traditional discourse designates itself—when it names itself at all—by other names, most commonly as Yisrael. For my present theme, what interests me in the rabbinic collective, is the constitutive relation to knowledge and learning in its own self-understanding as a collective, namely, its explicit epistemo-political self-knowledge. I emphasize that I look at modern rabbinic epistemo-politics, namely, as modern, and this in explicit polemos with a prevalent—perhaps even constitutive—tendency of modern Jewish discourse to understand itself as “modern” (and ultimately also as “Jewish”) precisely by distancing itself from the supposedly “pre-modern” rabbinic tradition.26 The modern rabbinic self-understanding I would like to briefly indicate here is that located in the work of R. Chaim of Volozhin. R. Chaim lived from 1749 to 1821 in the town of Volozhin, which belonged to the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, then the Russian empire, and then the Soviet Union, and today belongs to Belarus. He is the founder of the seminal institution of the modern rabbinic polis as a “city of knowers,” the model rabbinic universitas magistrorum et scholarium: the Lithuanian yeshiva.27 R. Chaim’s epistemo-political manifesto from around 1815 is called Nefesh Ha-Chaim [‫]נפש החיים‬, “The Soul of Life.”28 It has been described as “the theoretical basis of the great yeshivot in 19th century Lithuania.”29 These descriptions—“manifesto,” “theory,” and so on—are of course already predetermined through a certain epistemic tradition, and thus—in a positive, necessary sense—problematic in the context of a comparative epistemological investigation. Within its own tradition of discourse, this work has been famously described as “Shulchan Aruch [the most widely accepted codex of Jewish law] of Hashakfa [view, worldview, sight],” which Avinoam Fraenkel explains as meaning “a formal representation of how a Jew is to view and philosophically interact with the world.”30 A more accurate description of

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the nature of this work will require clearer and more exact concepts for the episteme or the form of knowledge that it embodies. The question concerning the nature of the rabbinic episteme is a fundamental question of its epistemopolitical investigation, of which this chapter is just a preliminary indication. “The Soul of Life” features a mix, not untypical for modern rabbinical literature, of various rabbinic genres. Essentially rabbinic, it is hermeneutical and dialogical through and through, that is, it proceeds by the classic rabbinic means of exegetical discussion of textual tradition. Being postclassical, it does consist, however, of a more or less sustained underlying argument of conceptual nature, concerning fundamental elements of knowledge, such as the essence and being of the human, the divine, the world, and knowledge itself. It would be inappropriate to call it metaphysics or philosophy, inasmuch as it almost never refers to the specifically and explicitly (mostly Aristotelian and medieval) philosophical rabbinic tradition (with the exception of Maimonides).31 More appropriately it relates to Kabbalah, both in its own discourse and in literary references,32 which in the context of this chapter raises the question of the exact nature of kabbalistic episteme (mystical, mythological, religious, theological?) and its relation to philosophy.33 I will leave these questions open here and focus on R. Chaim’s basic argument, highlighting the elements of what I read as his epistemo-political vision. “The Soul of Life” sets out from a discussion concerning the essence of the human being, which Norman Lamm designated as “philosophical anthropology.”34 However, as Emmanuel Levinas noted, R. Chaim’s discourse is not based on Greek philosophy’s paradigm of the animal rationale, which would be determinant for anthropology, but on the biblical “God’s image.”35 The concept of “God’s image” (Gen. 1:27), taken from the first biblical version of the creation story, the more “evolutionary” version, R. Chaim interprets by referring to a concept from the second narrative of creation, in Genesis 2, according to which man is a “living soul” (Gen. 2:7), which he interprets with the Targum as “speaking spirit” (‫)רוח ממללא‬. Speaking living soul—would that not be precisely zoon logon echon? Referring to Nachmanides’ reading, R. Chaim, however, explicitly rejects the interpretation of this concept as reducing the human to the animal (or the ontic in general), such that man would be an organism (or a thing) having speech. Rather, human being is, as speaking, the “living soul” of all creation, of all beings, namely, the “Soul of Life.” Being created in the image of the creator thus means that the human being is not just another being, but is intimately connected to the very being of beings: it is “the force and living soul” not just of its own self, but “of innumerable upper and lower worlds” (19). In Heideggerian language, we can say that the human being, as the “soul of life,” is not just ontic but also ontological. Like his contemporary and geographically neighboring German philosophers, like



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Kant and Hegel, the Volozhiner rabbi too understands human agency as being essentially epistemic: man’s ontological function requires that he “raise the purity of his thought and intention and turn it upwards to repair and purify the holy worlds” (44). As mentioned earlier, like in later Heidegger, for R. Chaim the ontological element of human thought is language.36 There is much more to be said about the ontology and epistemology of “The Soul of Life.” For the sake of the present epistemo-political essay, of central importance is indeed the essentially inter-subjective, collective dimension of man’s ontological being, that is, of human being in its constitutive relation to the being of all beings (“world”). Like Heidegger, R. Chaim too identifies the agency of human knowledge in a historical collective figure: namely, knesset yisrael, the “assembly” or “collective of yisrael” (66). The people of yisrael is thus not understood as a particular nation, race, or culture, whose self-knowledge would be no more than its “identity,” but as an agency of universal ontological knowledge, as the Soul of Life in history. What makes yisrael a “holy people” [‫( ]עם הקדש‬56), is its cosmic-ontological role: “The world is impossible without yisrael” [‫( ]א”א לעולם בלא ישראל‬53; quoting b.Ta’anit.3b, which interprets Zechariah 2:10).37 This sounds a lot like Hegel and involves the exact same danger of selfaffirmation to which post-rectorate Heidegger refers. R. Chaim recognizes this danger too. In fact, I contend, it is precisely against its modern manifestation that he writes his own manifesto. Like Heidegger’s, R. Chaim’s ontological history is also a story of decline, which reaches its all-time low in his own time, in modernity. The epistemic crisis is the perversion of yisrael’s epistemo-political project, the project of torah. For R. Chaim, the immediate figure of this perversion is the Hassidic movement,38 but his diagnosis applies, I think, to the basic modern ego-cogito-oriented idea of enlightenment. Indeed, the crisis lies in placing at the center of knowledge the individual mental disposition of the knower—his “intention” (‫ )כוונה‬and “devotion” (‫( )דבקות‬87). This means, R. Chaim indicates, that one’s engagement with torah becomes secondary to one’s engagement with oneself. Torah becomes a means for subjective self-affirmation. I wonder to what extent this distortion is identifiable in the modern collective project of Israel as a nationstate, up to its current condition. It is against this epistemo-political catastrophe that R. Chaim of Volozhin presents his conception of torah. At the basis lies the idea that the torah is the world-knowledge that appears in world history in itself—and not primarily in people. Torah is the knowledge that was “brought down to earth” (45), namely, by receiving a worldly corporeal presence and becoming, in both phenomenological and rabbinic terms, given. Thus embodied, torah has, so to speak, its own persona, its own Dasein—it is not just a means to another end, but is entelechia, “end-in-itself,” which is how R. Chaim interprets the

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ur-rabbinic expression torah li-shma, “torah for torah’s own sake” (m.Avot. 6:1). It is the very purpose of the world, R. Chaim writes, that this knowledge exists, that is, be known. Creation was required for torah learning. And thus is yisrael also required, ontologically conditioned, in R. Chaim’s words: “The Holy, blessed be He, and torah and yisrael are all one” [‫וישראל כולא חד‬ ‫( ]קב”ה ואורייתא‬100).39 Yisrael, to use Heidegger’s formulation, is the people of knowers required for the sake of knowledge. Accordingly, R. Chaim’s epistemo-political project, the Volozhin yeshiva, serves no people, no nationstate, but in itself constitutes the paradigm of the Jewish polis, the “republic” of yisrael. CONCLUDING REFLECTION To conclude this chapter, I will indicate one direction in which its comparative investigation should further advance. Both in Heidegger and in R. Chaim I identified radical and in many ways similar critiques of modern epistemopolitics, namely, of the way in which the modern conception of knowledge relates to the modern conception of the political subject, that is, the people or the nation. Both critiques point to the problematic modern phenomenon of knowledge subjugated to the identity and auto-affirmation of the self. Both resist this subjugation in their own analysis of the situation by refraining from attributing the modern perversion of knowledge to a sovereign act of subjective will, to a simple error of judgment, inscribing it instead in a historical-temporal dynamic of knowledge itself, of the question of being and of torah respectively. This critique of the individual willing subject leads, however, neither of these thinkers to quietism or fatalism, but rather to contemplate, articulate, and engage with alternative epistemo-political projects. It is regarding the exact nature of these projects, most particularly regarding their awareness and responsiveness to their specific historical moments as such, that I think further reflection is especially required. With respect to Heidegger, his vision for the Germans consists, in fact, not just in ending but also in overcoming metaphysics, namely, in effecting a passage, an Übergang to a new beginning (GA 95: 7, GA 96: 95). The epistemo-political figure that seems to command his meditations after the failed rectorate is no longer the university, but “the people of poets and thinkers.” Denken and Dichten become the fundamental forms of knowledge. The primary historical location of this knowledge and of the reflection thereon bears the name Hölderlin, whose work Heidegger deems the constitution or, actually, the foundation, the Stiftung, of the poetizing and thinking German people, which is thus not just fantasy but already in history: “The German future not only later ‘will be’, it ‘is’ already, since Hölderlin founded it”



People of Knowers 285

(GA 95: 198). It is in fact in his readings of Hölderlin during the dürftige Zeit of 1934–1943 that Heidegger developed most explicitly his positive alternative epistemo-political vision. It is in these texts that the most direct polemos with this vision should take place. The fundamental question is, I think, to what extent poetry, as foundational act, namely, as enacting origin, beginning, inasmuch as it presents a real alternative to metaphysics, is nonetheless able to properly effect the essentially historical act of passage, namely, to operate also from within metaphysics, which would mean not being an absolute foundation.40 The same question should also guide a more comprehensive and persistent reflection on the underlying epistemo-politics of the modern rabbinic project. Two contributions in this volume point to the fundamental place of the question of ground (Boden), one in non-rabbinic modern Jewish thinkers (Thomä) and one in the historical location of the rabbinic episteme, namely, the Talmud (Dolgopolski). For my inquiry, it would be essential to ask about the way in which the Talmud grounds a historical or temporal project of collective knowledge (torah) and knowledge collective (yisrael), a “people of rabbis.” The question focuses in particular on the modern moment of this temporality, namely, on the engagement of the rabbinic project with its internal modern crisis, entailing phenomena of end, passage, and new beginnings, and thus a renegotiation of its epistemo-political foundations. To me, the project of the Lithuanian yeshiva, which was founded in practice and has become foundational for contemporary rabbinic existence, seems a powerful example for epistemo-politics that counters the prevalent model of the sovereign nation-state, without replacing it, that is, without proclaiming a new origin, and that does so in a way that profoundly connects political thought and political performance. This Lithuanian republic of yisrael has remained outside our thought, that is, outside the epistemic world in which this chapter sees its place. It has been largely rejected by hegemonic modernity, which preferred, both in practice and in thought, the State of Israel. Having Heidegger’s thought provide access to Lithuanian yisrael would perhaps constitute a grain of teshuva. NOTES  1 Peter Trawny, Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2014), 11.  2 Trawny, Heidegger, 27.  3 Respectively: Thomas Rohkrämer, “Heidegger and National Socialism: Great Hopes, Despair, and Resilience,” in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941, ed. Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 248;

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ibid., “Heidegger, Kulturktirik und völkische Ideologie,” in Martin Heideggers “Schwarze Hefte.” Eine philosophische-politische Debatte, ed. Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016), 274; Andrew Bowie, “Philosophy, Science and Politics in the Black Notebooks,” Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 258; Markus Gabriel, “Heideggers antisemitische Stereotypen,” in Heidegger und der Antisemitismus. Positionen im Widerstreit, ed. Walter Homolka and Arnulf Heidegger (Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 2016), 225; Thomas Vašek, “Schluss mit Heidegger?,” Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 393.   4 See Trawny in this volume.   5 See Donatella di Cesare in this volume; see also ibid., Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2015), 254–63; ibid., “Heidegger’s Metaphysical Anti-Semitism,” in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 188–89; ibid., “Das Sein und der Jude. Heideggers metaphysischer Antisemitismus,” in Heidegger und der Antisemitismus, 68.   6 Which of course cannot be simply and too quickly identified as an epistemic project, pace Hegel, considering that for Paul the essentially spiritual is neither gnosis (knowledge) nor sophia (wisdom), but rather pistis (faith).  7 The exemplary poles in the current Heidegger controversy would be, for the prosecutors, the scholarship led by Marion Heinz and Sidonie Kellerer, who in fact interpreted the debate regarding Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism as “a philosophical-political debate,” as their collected volume was subtitled, concerning the “intertwinement (Verflechtung) of philosophy and politics in the Black Notebooks,” see Heinz and Kellerer, Martin Heideggers, 29; for the defense— Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, “The Role of Martin Heidegger’s Notebooks within the Context of His Oeuvre,” in Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, 89–94.   8 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Back from Syracuse?,” trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15.2 (1989): 427–30.  9 James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk. Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 13. 10 See Heidegger’s marginal note in his private copy of Being and Time on the guiding principle formulated on the last page of the book, whereby “philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, taking its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which as analytic of the existence, has bound the end of the guidingthread of all philosophical questioning at the point where it arises and to which it returns”; that is, the analysis of existence is just the method of ontology, which is the essence of philosophy, and “thus,” so Heidegger’s note, “no Existenzphilosophie” (GA 2: 576). 11 See Thomä in this volume. 12 Emmanuel Levinas’ critiques Heidegger on this point. He notes that “the proposition mit (with)” describes a relation of “association side by side, around something, around a common term, and, more precisely for Heidegger, around the truth.” The association of the collective around truth, however, is not a radical relation for Levinas, not “face to face,” and thus ultimately does not liberate Dasein from its basic solitary being; see Levinas, Le temps et l’autre (Paris: Quadrige/ PUF, 1983), 19. Levinas’ point does not contradict mine, namely, that Dasein



People of Knowers 287

essentially exits as a collective, an epistemo-political one, “around truth”; only for him there must be a more original dimension of relation to the other. 13 See Brumlik in this volume. 14 See Thomä in this volume. 15 On language and politics in Heidegger, see Elad Lapidot, “Die Versammlung. Über Heideggers Logopolitik,” in Martin Heidegger: Die Falte der Sprache, ed. Michael Friedman and Angelika Seppi (Wien-Berlin: Turian + Kant, 2017), 227–53. Phillips also points at the concept of Geschlecht (species, ethnic group, gender, family, stock, generation), in Heidegger’s 1952 essay on Trakl, “The Language of the Poem” (GA 12: 31–78), as “an exception to the apparent ban imposed on ‘Volk’ ” in later Heidegger (Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk, 218). 16 I therefore agree with Emmanuel Faye, who equally identifies the continuity of this passage with §74 of Being and Time (see Faye, “Kategorien oder Existenzialien. Von der Metaphysik zur Metapolitik,” in Martin Heideggers, 118–19). Unlike Faye, however, once again, I do not see how interpreting Heidegger’s discourse on the Volk as völkisch is more than tautology, and calling it “totalitarian” more than dogmatic. 17 See Trawny, Heidegger, 39–40; Jean-Luc Nancy, Banalité de Heidegger (Paris: Galilée, 2015), 76. 18 It is here that I once again agree with Faye, that Heidegger does not preclude biology altogether from politics, but a specific conception of biology, namely the metaphysical (see Faye, “Kategorien,” 112). My argument, however, is that Heidegger’s aim is not to subject the political to the biological, but on the exact contrary, to assert the epistemic primacy of the polis, of the human, over the physis, the natural. 19 It is in this sense that I subscribe to the analysis of Jacques Derrida on this point, in De l’esprit. Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 65. 20 See G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 512. 21 For more on the Kehre, see Elad Lapidot, “Heidegger’s Tshuva?,” Heidegger Studies 32 (2016): 49–50, and the literature referenced there. 22 A fact that led Marlène Zarader to speak not just of “avoidance” (Ricœur), but of an “erasure” of the “Hebraic heritage” by Heidegger—see ibid., La dette impensée. Heidegger et l’héritage hébraïque (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 230. Cf. Paul Ricœur, “Note introductive,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980); quoted by Zarader on pages 25–26. See also Fagenblat in this volume. 23 Thus, in one of the very rare moments in which Heidegger does refer to the Bible, namely, the reference to Gen. 1:26 (man’s creation in God’s image) in Being and Time, he quotes only in Greek and Latin, and ascribes the passage to “Christiantheological anthropology” (GA 2: 65; see also GA 9: 239, 319). 24  Two most prominent epistemic figures in Heidegger’s anti-Jewish passages are indeed Freudian psychoanalysis (GA 95: 258; GA 96: 218) and Husserl’s rationality (GA 96: 46). Ethnos built on calculative rationality is, for Heidegger, precisely what constitutes race, which for that reason he understands as a Jewish principle (GA 96: 56).

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25 For a discussion of this point, see Sergey Dolgopolski’s essay in this volume. See also Elad Lapidot, “Paulus und die Grundlegung des Judentums,” in Täter und Opfer. Verbrechen und Stigma im europäischen-jüdischen Kontext, ed. Claudia Simone Dorchain and Tommaso Speccher (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014), 19–41. 26 For a discussion of the dynamics of this conceptual event in the writings of the founder of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Leopold Zunz, see Elad Lapidot, “On the Translation of Philosophy and ‫[ תרגום התורה‬targum ha-tora] in German,” in Sprache, Erkenntnis und Bedeutung. Deutsch in der jüdischen Wissenskultur, ed. Arndt Engelhardt and Susanne Zepp (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015), 28–30; for the linguistic dimension of this event, see Elad Lapidot, “Sovereign ivrit be-ivrit, Exilic loshn koydesh: On Modern Logo-Politics,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 23.4 (2016): 314–44. 27 For a history of modern Lithuanian yeshivot, see Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2012); for a discussion of R. Chaim of Volozhin’s work, see Nachum (Norman) Lamm, torah lishmah be-mishnat rabbi chaim mi-volozhyn ube-makhshevet hador [Torah for Torah’s Sake in the Works of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries] (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1972). 28 R. Chaim von Waloschyn, Nefesh Ha-Chaim (Vilnius: 1837 [18231]). The following quotes will be followed by page numbers of this edition in brackets. For a recent edition see Avinoam Fraenkel, Nefesh HaTzimtzum. Rabbi Chaim Volozhin’s Nefesh HaCaim with Translation and Commentary (Jerusalem/New York: Urim, 2015). 29 Lamm, Torah, 38. 30 Fraenkel, Nefesh HaTzimtzum, 29. 31 See similar reflections on the essence of Nefesh Ha-Chaim in Emmanuel Levinas, “ ‘A l’image de Dieu’, d’Après Rabbi Haim Voloziner,” in L’au-delà du verset. Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982), 184–85. 32 So much so, that Lamm can call it “a book of Kabbalah” (ibid.). 33 For a contemporary effort to bring into conversation Kabbalah and philosophy, importantly Heidegger’s, see the extensive work of Elliot Wolfson, as exemplified in his contribution to this volume. 34 Lamm, Torah, 64. 35 Levinas, A l’image, 187. 36 On the affinity between Heidegger and the Jewish tradition on the understanding of language, see Zarader, La dette, 55–76. 37 The collective—and thus political—nature of the human being’s ontological function as “the soul of life” has no significant role in Levinas’ reading, who rather focuses on the ethical quality of human responsibility toward the entire world, what he calls its “being-for-the-other” (Levinas, L’image, 192). The reference to yisrael seems rather to embarrass Levinas, who, in a footnote, concedes that “[t]his convention must be admitted: authentic humanity is always synonymous to Israel in this text that is theologically thought and articulated”; he notes however



People of Knowers 289

that “this synonym is in no way ‘racist’ . . . as the notion of Israel has nothing exclusive in its most common use, and it signifies an order open to joining” (ibid., 190). To a conception of Israel that draws the universal essence of this collective not from the possibility of joining it (through giyur, conversion), but due to its historical mission for the well-being of all humanity, see Hadad’s discussion of Buber in this volume. 38 Nefesh ha-Chaim’s relation to Hassidism is a complex question. R. Chaim of Volozhin, the prominent student of the Vilna Gaon, head of the mitnagdim, the “opponent” of the Hassidic movement, no doubt responds to Hassidism, however in a more conciliatory manner than his master—see the discussion in Lamm, Torah, 9–25. 39 R. Chaim refers here to Zohar III Acharei Mot 73a, where it is written “the Holy blessed be he, the Torah and Yisrael are connected to each other.” Fraenkel (Nefesh HaTzimtzum, 672–73) attributes R. Chaim’s version to Moshe Chaim Luzzatto’s (RaMCHaL) commentary on the Zohar. 40 See also Fagenblat in this volume, who indeed highlights in Heidegger’s 1934 reading of Hölderlin the epistemo-political notion of the “truth of the people,” as “originally founded (ursprünglich gestiftet) by the poet” (GA 39: 144; 126).

Bibliography

HEIDEGGER’S GERMAN TEXTS AND THEIR ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS (AS OF SEPTEMBER 2017)

I. TEXTS ALREADY PUBLISHED BETWEEN 1910 AND 1976: • GA 2: Sein und Zeit, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1977; first edition 1927. ◦ Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York: Harper Row, 1962. ◦ Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2010. • GA 5: Holzwege, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1977, 2003; first edition 1950. Texts from 1935 to 1946. ◦ Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [Earlier: ◦ GA 5: 1–74, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935/36)” = “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. David Farrell Krell, Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), revised and expanded edition, ed. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992, 143–212. ◦ GA 5: 75–113, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938)”  =  “The Age of the World Picture,” trans. William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 115–54. [Earlier: “The Age of the World View,” trans. Marjorie Grene, Measure: A Critical Journal, 2 (1951), 269–84.] ◦ GA 5: 115–208, “Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung (1942/43),” = Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. J. Glenn Gray and Fred D. Wieck, New York: Harper & Row, 1970. 291

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Bibliography

◦ GA 5: 209–67, “Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist tot’ (1943)” = “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’ ” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 53–112. (See above.) ◦ GA 5: 269–320, “Wozu Dichter? (1946)” = “What Are Poets For?” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper & Row, 1971, 91–142. ◦ GA 5: 321–73, “Der Spruch des Anaximander (1946)”  =  “The Anaximander Fragment,” trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, Early Greek Thinking, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 13–58.] • GA 7: Vortäge und Aufsätze, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2000; first edition 1954. Texts from 1936 to 1953.

PART ONE: ◦ GA 7: 7–36, “Die Frage nach der Technik” (1953)  =  “The Question Concerning Technology,” trans. William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper and Row, 1982, 3–35. ◦ GA 7: 39–65, “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” (1953) = “Science and Reflection,” trans. William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 155–82. (See above.) ◦ GA 7: 69–98, “Überwindung der Metaphysik” (1936–1946) = “Overcoming Metaphysics,” trans. Joan Stambaugh, The End of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 2003, 84–110; originally New York: Harper & Row, 1973. ◦ GA 7: 101–24, “Wer Ist Nietzsches Zarathustra?”= “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” trans. David Farrell Krell, Nietzsche, Volume Two: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, New York: Harper & Row, 1984, 211–33.

PART TWO: ◦ GA 7: 129–43, “Was heißt Denken?” [not translated]. ◦ GA 7: 147–64, “Bauen Wohnen Denken” = “Building Dwelling Thinking,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, 145–61. See also GA 79. [Also in Basic Writings, revised and expanded edition, ed. David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, 343–63.] ◦ GA 7: 167–87, “Das Ding” = “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 165–86. (See above.) ◦ GA 7: 191–208, “. . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch. . . ” = “. . . Poetically Man Dwells. . .,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, 213–29. (See above.)

PART THREE: ◦ GA 7: 213–34, “Logos (Heraklit, Fragment 50)”  =  “Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50),” trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank Capuzzi, Early Greek Thinking, New York: Harper and Row, 1985, 59–78. ◦ GA 7: 237–61, “Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34–41)”  =  “Moira (Parmenides VIII, 34–41),” trans. Frank Capuzzi, Early Greek Thinking, 79–101. (See previous entry.)



Bibliography 293

◦ GA 7: 265–88, “Aletheia (Heraklit Fragment 16)” = “Al theia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16),” trans. Frank Capuzzi, Early Greek Thinking, 102–23. (See previous entry.) • GA 9: Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1976; first edition 1967. Texts from 1919 to 1958. ◦ Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ◦ GA 9: 1–44, “Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Waltanschauungen (1919/21)” = “Comments on Karl Jasper’s Psychology of Worldviews (1919/21),” trans. John van Buren, 1–38. [Also, “Critical Comments on Karl Jasper’s Psychology of Worldviews,” trans. Theodore Kisiel, Becoming Heidegger, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007, 111–49.] ◦ GA 9: 45–67, “Phänomenologie und Theologie (1927)” = “Phenomenology and Theology (1927),” trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, 39–54.17. (See GA 80.) ◦ GA 9: 68–77, “Einige Hinweise auf Hauptgesichtpunke für das theologische Gespräch über ‘Das Problem eines nichtobjektivierenden Denkens und Sprechens in her heutigen Theologie’ ” (March 11, 1964) = “The Theological Discussion of ‘The Problem of a Nonobjectifying Thinking and Speaking in Today’s Theology’—Some Pointers to Its Major Aspects,” trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, 54–62. ◦ GA 9: 79–101, “Aus der letzten Marburger Vorlesung (1928)” = “From the Last Marburg Lecture Course (1928),” trans. Michael Heim, 63–81. ◦ GA 9: 103–22, “Was ist Metaphysik? (1929)” = “What Is Metaphysics?” trans. David Farrell Krell, 82–96. ◦ GA 9: 123–75, “Vom Wesen des Grundes (1929)” = “On the Essence of Ground (1929),” trans. William McNeill, 97–135. ◦ GA 9: 177–202, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1930)” = “On the Essence of Truth (1930),” trans. John Sallis, 136–54. ◦ GA 9: 203–38, “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (1931/32, 1940)”  =  “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1931/32, 1940),” trans. Thomas Sheehan, 155–82. ◦ GA 9: 239–301: “Vom Wesen und Begriff der Φύσις. Arstoteles, Physik B, 1 (1939)”  =  “On the Essence and Concept of Φύσις in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1 (1939),” trans. Thomas Sheehan, 183–230. ◦ GA 9: 303–12, “Nachwort zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ (1943)”  =  “Postscript to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ (1949),” 231–38. ◦ GA 9: 313–64, “Brief über den Humanismus (1946)” = “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ (1946),” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, 239–76. ◦ GA 9: 365–83, “Einleitung zu ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’ (1949)” = “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ (1949),” trans. Walter Kaufmann, 177–290. ◦ GA 9: 385–426, “Zur Seinsfrage (1955)” = “On the Question of Being,” trans. William McNeill, 291–322. ◦ GA 9: 427–44, “Hegel und die Griechen (1958)”  =  “Hegel and the Greeks (1958),” trans. Robert Metcalf, 323–36. ◦ GA 9: 445–80, “Kants These über das Sein (1961)”  =  “Kant’s Thesis about Being, (1961),” trans. Ted E. Klein, Jr. and William E. Pohl, 337–63. • GA 11: Identität und Differenz, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2006.

294

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◦ GA 11: 3–26, “Was ist das—die Philosophie? (1955),” = What Is Philosophy? trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003; originally New York: Twayne, 1958. ◦ GA 11: 27–50, “Identität und Differenz” = “Identity and Difference,” trans. Joan Stambaugh, Identity and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002; originally New York: Harper & Row, 1969, 21–41. (See GA 79.) [Also GA 11: 31–50, “Der Satz der Identität (1957)” without GA 11: 29, “Vorwort”  =  “The Principle of Identity revised by Jerome Veith,” The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 284–94.] ◦ GA 11: 113–24, “Die Kehre (1949)”  =  “The Turning,” trans. William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. William Lovitt, New York: Harper Row, 1977, 36–49. (See GA 79.) ◦ GA 11: 125–40 (= GA 79: 81–96), “Grundsätze des Denkens (1957)” = “Basic Principles of Thinking: Freiburg Lectures 1957. Lecture I,” trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012, 77–91. (See GA 79.) [Earlier: “Principles of Thinking,” trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo, The Piety of Thinking, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976, 46–58.] ◦ GA 11: 143–52, “Ein Vorwort. Brief an Pater William J. Richardson (1962)”  =  “Preface,” trans. William J. Richardson, in his Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963; fourth expanded edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003, viii–xxii. ◦ GA 11: 153–61, “Brief an Takehiko Kojima (1963)” [not translated]. • GA 12: Unterwegs zur Sprache, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1985; first edition 1959. ◦ GA 12: 7–30, “Die Sprache” (1950)  =  “Language,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, 189–210. ◦ GA 12: 33–78, “Die “Sprache im Gedicht. Ein Erörterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht” (1952) = “Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work,” trans. Peter D. Hertz, On the Way to Language, New York: Harper Row, 1971, 159–98. ◦ GA 12: 81–146, “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache. Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden” (1953/54) = “A Dialogue on Language,” trans. Peter Hertz, On the Way to Language, 1–54. (See above.) ◦ GA 12: 149–204, “Das Wesen der Sprache” (1957–1958) = “The Nature of Language,” trans. Peter Hertz, On the Way to Language, 57–108. (See above.) ◦ GA 12: 207–25, “Das Wort” (1958) = “Words,” trans. Joan Stambaugh, On the Way to Language, 139–56. (See above.) ◦ GA 12: 229–57, “Der Weg zur Sprache” (1959) = “The Way to Language,” trans. Peter Hertz, On the Way to Language, 111–36. [Also in Basic Writings, revised and expanded edition by David Farrell Krell, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, 397–426.] • GA 13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. Hermann Heidegger. Texts from 1910 to 1976. ◦ GA 13: 7, “Abendgang auf der Reichenau” (1916) = “Eventide on Reichenau,” trans. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought, The













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Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963; fourth expanded edition, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003, 1. ◦ GA 13: 9–13, “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? (1933)” = “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981, 27–30. ◦ GA 13: 35–36, “Chorlied aus der Antigone des Sophocles (1943)” = [The First Choral Ode from Sophocles’ Antigone, lines 279–330] trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000; 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2014, 156.6–158.3. ◦ GA 13: 37–74 (which mostly correspond to GA 77: 105.18–123.25; 138.16–153.19; and 156.13–157.10)  =  “Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit. Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken (1944/45)”  =  “Αγχιβασίη: A  Triadic Conversation on a Country Path between a Scientist, a Scholar, and a Guide,” trans. Bret W. Davis, Country Path Conversations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, 68.5–80.24; 90.1–100.25; 102.26–103.4. [Earlier: “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking,” trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, ed. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, New York: Harper & Row, 1966, 58–90.] ◦ GA 13: 75–86, “Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1947)”  =  “The Thinker as Poet,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, 1–14. ◦ GA 13: 87–90, “Der Feldweg (1949)”  =  “The Pathway,” trans. Thomas F. O’Meara; revised, Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, 45–67. (See above.) ◦ GA 13: 93–109, “Zu einem Vers von Mörike. Ein Briefwechsel mit Martin Heidegger von Emil Staiger (1951)” = “The Staiger-Heidegger Correspondence,” trans. Arthur A. Grugan, Man and World, 14 (1981), 291–307. ◦ GA 13: 111, “Was heißt Lesen? (1954)” = “What Is Reading?” trans. John Sallis, Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, 2. ◦ GA 13: 123–25, “Die Sprache Johann Peter Hebels (1955)” = “The Language of Johann Peter Hebel,” trans. Jerome Veith, The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 295–97. ◦ GA 13: 133–50, “Hebel—der Hausfreund (1957)”  =  “Hebel—Friend of the House,” trans. Bruce V. Foltz and Michael Heim, Contemporary German Philosophy, ed. Darrel E. Christensen, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983, III, 89–101. ◦ GA 13: 185–98, “Adalbert Stifters ‘Eisengeschichte’ (1964)” = Adalbert Stifter’s “Ice Tale” by Martin Heidegger, trans. Miles Groth, New York: Nino Press, 1993. ◦ GA 13: 203–10, “Die Kunst und der Raum (1969)”  =  “Art and Space,” trans. Jerome Veith, in Günter Figal, The Heidegger Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 305–9. [Earlier, “Art and Space,” trans. Charles Seibert, Man and World, 6 (1973), 3–8.] ◦ GA 13: 221–24, “Gedachtes (1970)” = “Thoughts,” trans. Keith Hoeller, Philosophy Today, 20, 4 (1976), 286–90.

296

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◦ GA 13: 229 (see GA 81: 289.1–14), “Sprache (1972)”  =  “Language,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Philosophy Today, 20, 4 (1976), 291. ◦ GA 13: 231–5, “Der Fehl heilger Namen (1974)” = “The Want of Holy Names,” trans. Bernhard Radloff, Man and World, 18 (1985), 261–67. • GA 14: Zur Sache des Denkens, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2007; first edition 1962. ◦ GA 14: 3–104, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; originally New York: Harper & Row, 1972. • GA 16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebens, 1910–1976, ed. Hermann Heidegger, 2000. Texts from 1910 to 1976. ◦ GA 16: 3–6 (no. 1) “Per mortem ad vitam” = “Per mortem ad vitam,” trans. John Protevi and John van Buren, Supplements, ed. John van Buren, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, 35–37. ◦ GA 16: 7–8 (no. 2), review of Fr. W. Förster, Autorität und Freiheit = trans. John Protevi, Becoming Heidegger, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007, 13–14. ◦ GA 16: 9 (no. 3), review of Ad. Jos. Cüppers, Versiegelte Lippen = trans. John Protevi, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14–15 (1991), 495. ◦ GA 16: 10 (no. 4), review of Johannes Jörgensen, Das Reisebuch = trans. John Protevi, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14–15 (1991), 495. ◦ GA 16: 11–14 (no. 5), “Zur philosophischen Orientierung für Akademiker” = “On a Philosophical Orientation for Academics” (Der Akademiker 3, No. 5 [March 1911]: 66–67),” trans. John Protevi, Becoming Heidegger, 14–16. (See no. 2 above.) ◦ GA 16: 16 (no. 7), “Auf stillen Pfaden (Juli 1911)” = “On Still Paths,” trans. Allan Blunden, in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, London: Basic Books, 1993, 68. ◦ GA 16: 18–28 (no. 9), “Religionspsychologie und Unterbewusstsein”  =  “Psychology of Religion and the Subconscious,” trans. John Protevi, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14–15 (1991), 503–17. ◦ GA 16: 29–30 (no. 10), review of Jos. Gredt, Elementa philosophiae aristotelico-thomisticae = trans. John Protevi, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14–15 (1991), 517–19. ◦ GA 16: 31 (no. 11), review of Bibliothek wertvoller Novellen und Erzählungen, ed. D. Hellinghaus  =  trans. John Protevi, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 14–15 (1991), 519. ◦ GA 16: 32 (no. 12), “Lebenslauf (Zur Promotion 1913)”  =  “Curriculum Vitae 1913,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, 6–7. (See no. 2 above.) ◦ GA 16: 36 (no. 14), “Trost (1915)”  =  “Consolation,” trans. Allan Blunden, in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 88–9. (See no. 7 above.) ◦ GA 16: 37–39 (no. 15), “Lebenslauf (Zur Habilitation 1915)”  =  “Curriculum Vitae 1915,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, 7–9. (See no. 2 above.) ◦ GA 16: 41–45 (no. 17), “Vita (1922)” = “Vita,” trans. Theodore Kisiel, Becoming Heidegger, 106–9. (See no. 2 above.) ◦ GA 16: 49–51 (no. 18), “Wilhelm Diltheys Forschungsarbeit und der Kampf um einehistorische Weltanschauung” (Kasseler Vorträge, April 16–25,















Bibliography 297

1925)  =  “Wilhelm Dilthey’s Research and the Current Struggle for a Historical Worldview, (1925),” trans. Charles Bambach, Supplements, ed. John Van Buren, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, 147–76. See GA 80. ◦ GA 16: 56–60 (no. 21), “Edmund Husserl zum siebenzigsten Geburtstag (8. April 1929)” = “For Edmund Husserl on his Seventieth Birthday (April 8, 1929),” trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer, in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, 475–77. ◦ GA 16: 104 (no. 48), “Nach der Rede des Führers am 17. Mai 1933” = “Announcement from the University,” trans. Dagobert D. Runes, German Existentialism, New York: Philosophical Library, 1965, 48. ◦ GA 16: 107–17 (no. 51), “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität” = “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” trans. Lisa Harries, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Günter Neske and Emil Kettering, New York: Paragon House, 1990, 5–13. ◦ GA 16: 125–26 (no. 59), “Arbeitsdienst und Universität” (June 14, 1933) = “Labor Service and the University,” trans. Dagobert D. Runes, German Existentialism, 21–22. (See no. 48 above.) ◦ GA 16: 156 (no. 80), “Hier ist es leider sehr trostlos (22. August 1933)” = “Letter to Carl Schmitt,” no translator listed, Telos 72 (summer 1987), 132. ◦ GA 16: 184–85 (no. 101), “Zum Semesterbeginn vgl. Universitätsführer Wintersemester 1933/34)”  =  “German Students,” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 46–47. ◦ GA 16: 188–89 (no. 103), “Aufruf zur Wahl (10. November 1933)” = “German Men and Women!” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 47–49. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 190–93 (no. 104), “Ansprache am 11. November 1933 in Leipzig” = “Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State (November 11, 1933),” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 49–52. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 227 (no. 121), “Das Geleitwort der Universität (6. January 1934)” = “A Word from the University,” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 52–53. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 232–37 (no. 124), “Zur Eröffnung der Schulungskurse für die Notstandsarbeiter der Stadt an der Universität (22. January  1934)”  =  “National Socialist Education (January 22, 1934),” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 55–60. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 238–39 (no. 125), “Der Ruf zum Arbeitsdienst (23. Januar 1934)” = “The Call to the Labor Service (January 23, 1934),” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 53–55. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 372–94 (no. 180), “Das Rektorat 1933/34—Tatsachen und Gedanken (1945)” = “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” trans. Lisa Harries, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 15–32. (See no. 51 above.)

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◦ GA 16: 397–404 (no. 182), “Antrag auf die Wiedereinstellung in die Lehrtätigkeit (Reintegrierung—4. November 1945)” = “Letter to the Rector of Freiburg University, November 4, 1945,” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 61–66. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 423–25 (no. 189) “Was ist das Sein selbst? (12. September 1946)” = “The Basic Question of Being as Such,” trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Heidegger Studies, 2 (1986), 4–6. ◦ GA 16: 430–31.24 (no. 192), “Zu 1933–1945 (Brief an Marcuse, 20 Januar 1948)” = “Letter from Heidegger to Marcuse of January 20, 1948,” trans. Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin, 162–63. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 452–53 (no. 204), “Betr. die Notiz ‘Hanfstaengl contra Heidegger’ in der Münchner Süddeutschen Zeitung von Mittwoch, den 14. Juni 1950”  =  “On My Relation to National Socialism,” trans. Frank Meklenberg, Semiotext(e), 4, 2 (1982), 253–54. ◦ GA 16: 517–29 (no. 224), “Gelassenheit (30. Oktober 1955)”  =  “Memorial Address,” trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, Discourse on Thinking, ed. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, 43–57. ◦ GA 16: 552–57 (no. 230), “Die Kunst und das Denken (18. Mai 1958)” = “Art and Thinking,” trans. Hannah Arendt, in Alfred L. Copley, Listening to Heidegger and Hisamatsu, Kyoto: Bokubi Press, 48–78. ◦ GA 16: 565–67 (no. 234), “Dank bei der Verleihung des staatlichen Hebelgedenkpreises (10. Mai 1960)”  =  “Acknowledgment on the Conferment of the National Hebel Memorial Prize,” trans. Miles Groth, Delos 19/20, April 1997 (Summer-Winter 1994), 30–34. ◦ GA 16: 574–82 (no. 236), “700 Jahre Meßkirch (Ansprache zum Heimatabend am 22. Juli 1961)” = “Messkirch’s Seventh Centennial,” trans. Thomas Sheehan, Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture, 1–3 (1973), 40–57. ◦ GA 16: 620–33 (no. 246) “Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens (30. Oktober 1965)”  =  “On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking,” trans. Richard Capobianco and Marie Göbel, Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 14:2 (Spring 2010), 213–23. ◦ GA 16: 650–51 (no. 252), “Grußwort an das Symposium über Heideggers Philosophie an der Duquesne-Universität in Pittsburgh 15./16. Oktober 1966 (20. September 1966)” = “A Letter from Martin Heidegger,” trans. Arthur H. Schrynemakers, Heidegger and the Path of Thinking, ed. John Sallis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970, 9–10. ◦ GA 16: 652–83 (no. 253) “Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger (23. September 1966)” = “ ‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview (1966),” trans. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981, 45–67. [Also “Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” trans. Jerome Veith, The Heidegger Reader, ed. Günter Figal, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, 313–33.]



Bibliography 299

◦ GA 16: 684–86 (no. 254), “Grußwort an das Heidegger-Symposium Chicago 11./12. November 1966 (20. Oktober 1966)” = “A Letter from Heidegger,” trans. William J. Richardson, Heidegger and the Quest for Truth, ed. Manfred S. Frings, Chicago: Quadrangle, 19–21. ◦ GA 16: 702–10 (no. 262) “Martin Heidegger im Gespräch” = “Martin Heidegger in Conversation,” trans. Lisa Harries, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 81–87. (See no. 51 above.) ◦ GA 16: 721–22 (269), “Gruß und Dank an die Teilnehmer der Heidegger-Konferenz in Honolulu auf Hawai 17.-21. November  1969”  =  “Letter from Heidegger,” trans. Albert Borgmann, in Winfield E. Nagley, “Introduction to the Symposium and Reading of a Letter from Martin Heidegger,” Philosophy East and West, 20 (1970), 221. ◦ GA 16: 744–45 (no. 279), “Ein Grußwort für das Symposium in Beirut November 1974” = “A Greeting to the Symposium in Beirut in November 1974,” trans. Lisa Harries, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 253–54. (See no. 51 above.) ◦ GA 16: 747–48 (282), “Neuzeitliche Naturwissenschaft und moderne Technik—Grußwort an die Teilnehmer des zehnten Colloquiums von 14.-16. Mai 1976 in Chicago (11. April 1976)” = “Modern Natural Science and Technology,” trans. John Sallis, Radical Phenomenology, ed. John Sallis, Englewood Cliffs: Humanities Press, 1978, 1–2. ◦ GA 16: 759–60 (no. 285) “Gedenkworte zu Schlageter (26. Mai 1933 vor der Universität)” = “Schlageter (May 26, 1933),” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 40–42. (See no. 101 above.) ◦ GA 16: 761–63 (no. 286), “Die Universität im Neuen Reich (30. Juni 1933)” = “The University in the New Reich,” trans. William S. Lewis, The Heidegger Controversy, 43–45. (See no. 101 above.)

II. LECTURE COURSES 1919–1944: AT FREIBURG UNIVERSITY, 1928–1944: • GA 28: Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart, ed. Claudius Strube, 1997; lecture course, summer 1929. ◦ German Idealism, trans. Peter Warnek, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming. • GA 36/37: Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie (lecture course, summer 1933), 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (lecture course, winter 1933/34), ed. Hartmut Tietjen, 2001. ◦ Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. • GA 38: Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, ed. Günter Seubold, 1998; lecture course summer 1934.

300

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◦ Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, trans. Wanda Torres Gregory and Yvonne Unna, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. • GA 39: Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” ed. Susanne Ziegler, 1980; lecture course, winter 1934–1935. ◦ Hölderlin’s Hymn “Germania” and “The Rhein,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. • GA 40: Einführung in die Metaphysik, ed. Petra Jaeger, 1983; lecture course, summer, 1935; first edition 1953. ◦ Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000; 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2014.

AT FREIBURG UNIVERSITY, 1919–1923: • GA 59: Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks, ed. Claudius Strube, 1993; lecture course, summer 1920. ◦ Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, trans. Tracy Colony, London: Bloomsbury (Continuum), 2010. • GA 63: Ontologie. Hermeneutik der Faktizität, ed. Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, 1988; lecture course, summer 1923. ◦ Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

III. PAPERS, CONFERENCES, AND THOUGHTS NOT PUBLISHED DURING HEIDEGGER’S LIFETIME: • GA 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 1989; notes from 1936 to 1938. ◦ Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. [Earlier, Contributions to Philosophy: (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.] • GA 68: Hegel, ed. Ingrid Schüßler, 1993. ◦ Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. • GA 77: Feldwege-Gespräche 1944/45 (1995, second edition 2007). ◦ Country PathConversations, trans. Bret W. Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. [GA 77: 105.18–23.25; 138.16–53.19; and 156.13–57.10 mostly correspond to GA 13: 37–74, an earlier translation of which  =  “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking,” trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, ed., John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.] • GA 86: Seminare: Hegel—Schelling, ed. Peter Trawny, 2011. ◦ GA 86: 55–184, Heidegger on Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”: The 1934–5 Seminar and Interpretative Essays, ed. and trans. Peter Trawny, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, and Michael Marder, London: Bloomsbury, 2014.



Bibliography 301

IV. INDICATIONS AND SKETCHES: • GA 94: Überlegungen II-VI (Schwarze Hefte 1931–1938), ed. Peter Trawny, 2014. ◦ Ponderings II—VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2016. • GA 95: Überlegungen VII-XI (Schwarze Hefte 1938–1939), ed. Peter Trawny, 2014. ◦ Ponderings VII—XI: Black Notebooks 1938–1939, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2017. • GA 96: Überlegungen XII-XV (Schwarze Hefte 1939–1941), ed. Peter Trawny, 2014. ◦ Ponderings XII—XV: Black Notebooks 1939–1941, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2017. • GA 97: Anmerkungen II-V (Schwarze Hefte 1941–1944), ed. Peter Trawny, 2015.

Index

Abraham (biblical figure), 84 Adam (biblical figure), 92, 97 Adorno, Theodor W., 38, 100 – 101, 138, 145 – 50 Akiva, R., 233 – 35 Aletheia (unconcealment, truth), 16, 104, 204 – 5 Altmann, Alexander, 247 America, Americanism, 45, 67 – 69, 261; anti-Americanism, 7, 56 – 60 Andenken (commemoration, observance), 46, 239, 253 Anders (Stern), Günther, 137 – 38 animal rationale, 278, 282 anti-Christ, 33. See also Christianity anti-Judaism, 190, 272, 280. See also Anti-Semitism anti-Semitism, anti-Semite, 2, 7, 31n4, 71, 75, 103, 110 – 29, 190 – 91, 207 – 9, 246 – 48, 269 – 71; anti-antiSemitism, 3, 269; anti-Semitic myth, 204, 206; being-historical (seinsgeschichtlicher), 37, 42, 43, 57, 76, 135, 145, 149, 207; metaphysical, 43, 70, 281. See also anti-Judaism; mythology apocalypse, 16 – 17, 203, 261, 263 Arabs, 215 arche-writing, 184

Arendt, Hannah, 8, 89, 123 – 24, 136 – 37, 145, 148, 156 Ari, 185. See also Lurianic (kabbalah) Aristotle, 38, 94, 135 – 37, 142, 179, 274, 282; description of God as the unmoved mover, 178, 202 atheism, 157, 188, 190 authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), 48, 84, 94, 100 – 101, 150, 161, 164 Bachrach, Naftali, 183 – 84 Barth, Karl, 168 Beaufret, Jean, 177 Being (das Sein): Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), 44, 47 – 48, 110 – 11, 114, 118 – 19, 135, 155 – 57, 163 – 64, 168, 201, 247, 254 – 57, 261, 274 – 79; history of (Seinsgeschichte), 17, 20, 21, 29 – 30, 35 – 36, 56, 58, 64, 69 – 70, 76, 79, 191, 202, 207, 247, 276; oblivion of (Seinsvergessenheit), 7, 9, 31, 60, 69 – 70, 75, 78, 201 – 10; question of (die Seinsfrage), 16, 19, 59, 63, 78 – 79, 135, 221, 239, 274 – 79; thinking of (Besinnung), 38, 56; toward death (zum Tode), 94; truth of, 17, 21 – 22, 27, 204, 205, 239; in-the-world, 95, 156, 275. See also ontological difference; ontology

303

304

Index

Benjamin, Walter, 93, 141 Benoist, Alain de, 49 Bergman, Hugo, 8, 155, 158, 163 – 69 Bergson, Henri, 225, 227 Bestand (standing reserve), 245 Bible, 90, 92, 160, 202, 205 – 6, 280, 282; biblical myth, 217; biblical prophet, 216; Hebrew, 26, 64, 210, 258; Jewish, 162, 164 – 65. See also New Testament; Old Testament Bikkhu Maha Mani, 187 bio-politics, 278 the blessed holy One (ha-qadosh barukh hu), 181, 190 Böhme, Jakob, 189 Bolshevism, 42, 45, 59 Bourdieu, Pierre, 148 Brock, Werner, 44, 146 – 47 Brüning, Heinrich, 42 Buber, Martin, 8 – 9, 34, 100, 155, 158 – 63, 168, 201, 206, 210 – 17; dialogue in the thought of, 9, 159 – 63, 168 – 69, 201, 210 – 15, 217 Buddhism, 186, 190; Chinese, 188 Cassirer, Ernst, 117, 124, 130, 132, 173 Celan, Paul, 8, 110, 126 – 27 Chagall, Marc, 136, 143 Chamberlain, Steward, 116 the chosen people, 202, 205 – 6, 213, 217 Christianity, 16 – 28, 30 – 31n1, 92, 96, 161, 179, 206, 208, 280; ancient, 211; Catholicism, 42, 46; God, 253; modern, 211; mysticism, 51; Protestant Christianity, 165, 170. See also Paul (the Apostle) Christian theology. See theology, Christian Cogito, 93 – 94, 115, 127, 161, 275, 278, 283. See also Descartes, René Cohen, Hermann, 79, 90, 92, 166 – 68, 223, 240 Comte, Auguste, 116 conscience: call of, 102, 163 – 64

Cordovero, Moses, 180 – 81, 190 creation and creator (of the world), 166 – 67, 180, 215, 282, 284; notion of, 207 Dasein, 82, 89, 95, 157 – 62, 164 – 65, 167 – 68, 170, 179 – 80, 202 – 3, 250, 254, 274 – 77, 283; of thought, 270 das Man (“they”), 42, 156, 161 – 62, 164, 209, 275 Deleuze, Gilles, 222, 225 – 29, 236 – 37, 239 Derrida, Jacques, 29 – 30, 76, 93, 148, 177, 186, 243 Descartes, René, 93 – 94, 114, 119, 275 Diaspora, diasporic, 248, 257 – 58, 263 Diels, Hermann, 144 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 116, 163 Douglass, Frederick, 68 – 69 Dugin, Alexander, 48 – 49 Duhem, Pierre, 143 Eckhart, Meister, 185 Ein Sof, 177, 181 – 84, 186, 188 – 91 Eliashin, Solomon ben Hayyim, 183 – 84 Elsässer, Jürgen Engels, Friedrich, 35 the Enlightenment, 60 – 62, 283. See also liberalism epistemology: political (epistemo-politics), 191, 269 Ereignis (appropriating event), 179 – 80, 187, 189 eschatology, 6, 16, 28, 204 ethics: the ethical, 55, 68, 89, 91, 93, 95 everydayness, 275 Evola, Julius, 49 exile: exiled, 211 – 12, 257, 262 existence: proper or authentic (eigentlich) and improper or inauthentic (uneingentlich), 275, 277 existential philosophy, 163, 274 fatherland, 255 – 58, 260, 262 – 63 Flusser, Vilém, 127 – 28



Index 305

Frankel, Eduard, 44 Fritsche, Johannes Froman, Rav, 260 – 61 Fukuyama, Francis, 61 gender, 184 geo-philosophy, 221, 236, 239 German identity, 38; philosophical tradition, 162 globalization, 48, 50, 222 Gnostic, 161, 217 Gnosticism, 161 Gramsci, 222 groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit), 8, 114, 119 – 21, 123 – 29. See also worldlessness guilt (Schuld), 164, 166 “Gush Emunim,” 215 Habermas, Jürgen, 37 Hartmann, Nicolai, 113 Hasidism, 162, 211 – 12, 214, 217 – 19; Hassidic movement, 283; Hassidic story, 257; Hassidic teachings, 214 Ḥayyim of Volozhin. See also Chaim of Volozhin; Ickovits, Hayyim, 184, 269, 281 – 84 Hebrew (language), 163, 248 Hegel, G. W. F., 16, 18, 34 – 35, 70, 76 – 78, 86, 91, 119, 121, 155, 173, 178, 237, 279, 283; Hegelian Aufhebung (sublation), 234 – 35, 237; Hegelian dialectic, 91, 178; Hegel’s Geist, 279 Heidegger, Fritz (brother of Martin), 42 – 47 Heimat (homeland), 46 Heraclitus, 1, 61 – 62, 64, 221, 225, 238. See also polemos Herder, Johann Gottfried, 117 hermeneutics, 177; phenomenological, 260 Hillel, house of, 230 – 31, 234 Hindenburg, Paul von, 42 – 43 Hitler, Adolf, 35 – 36, 39, 42 – 45, 47, 49, 55, 76, 82 – 86, 133, 140, 264

Hölderlin, 201, 249 – 54, 257, 260 – 62, 284 Horkheimer, Max, 138 – 39 humanism, 34, 38, 89 – 90, 167, 174, 245 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 42, 44, 51, 95, 136 – 37, 144, 151, 222, 225 – 26, 229, 235 – 36, 240 – 44 idealism, 121, 155 idolatry, 212, 214 Islam, 179 Israel, Yisrael, 9, 10, 32, 70 – 71, 81 – 85, 92, 101 – 2, 205, 210 – 12, 216, 222, 280 – 85; children of, 223; election of, 212 – 14; land of, 224, 248 – 49, 257 – 58; nation of, 214; the state of, 191, 245 – 48, 260, 283, 285 Jacob (biblical figure), 64 Jaspers, Karl, 145 – 46 Jesus, 160, 162 Jewish, esoteric doctrines, 183, 191; Christian, 207; history, 162; International Jewry of finance (Finanzjudentum), 122; knowledge, 269; law (halakha), 209 – 10, 212; metaphysical essence, 77 – 79; modernity, 280; nation, 201; people, 248 – 49, 263; philosopher, 79 – 80, 137, 162, 247; question (Judenfrage), 75, 79, 269, 271; religion, 160; thinking, thought, 38, 123 – 29, 191, 222, 247, 254, 269 – 72, 280; tradition, 96; world Jewry (Weltjudentum), 36, 58, 76, 142, 209. See also Old Testament; Tanach Job (biblical figure), 64 – 65 Jonas, Hans, 124, 161 Jongen, Marc, 50 Judaism, 69 – 70, 76, 155, 161, 165 – 69, 179, 201, 206 – 8, 211, 215; ancient, 211; rabbinic, 211 justice, 6, 29 – 30, 65, 67 – 68, 98. See also Messiah

306

Index

Kabbalah, Kabbalist, 8, 177, 255, 282 Kafka, Franz, 95, 136, 163 Kant, Immanuel, 66, 76, 78, 159, 163, 166, 227, 283 Kierkegaard, Søren, 8, 155 – 74 Kook, Abraham Isaac, 188 Kracauer, Siegfried, 8, 124, 126 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 257 the last god, 180 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 33 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu, 248 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5 – 8, 11, 29, 32 – 33, 70, 75, 80, 82 – 107, 127 – 28, 223, 240, 247 Lewkowitz, Albert, 158, 168 liberalism, liberal, 245 – 49; the liberal Enlightenment, 56, 60; liberal universalism, 71. See also the Enlightenment Liebermann, Max, 143 logocentrically, 186 logos, 15 – 30, 82, 94 Löwith, Karl, 55, 89 Lurianic (kabbalah), 181, 184 – 85, 192; pre-Lurianic kabbalah, 247. See also Ari Luther, Martin, 76, 156 machination (Machenschaft), 21, 56, 76, 119, 139, 144, 148, 203 – 5, 207 – 9, 217, 261 machloykes, 1, 4, 5 madhyamaka (the middle way), 186, 188 Mahāyāna, 186 – 88 Maimonides, 282 Marcuse, Herbert, 68, 138 Marx, Karl, 6, 33 – 34, 37 – 39; Marxist, 248. See also Bolshevism Mendelssohn, Moses, 79, 136 Messiah, Messianism, 25, 28 – 30, 83, 99, 248; Messianic age, 100, 215; Messianicity of justice, 6, 29 – 30; Messianic “rest,” 206 metaontology, 177 – 78, 186, 188, 191

midrash, 229 Mishnah, 230, 235 Mitsein (Being-together), 67, 160 modernity, 7 – 8, 56, 201, 204, 207, 215 monotheism, 248 morality, 56 Moran, Dermot, 136 Moses, 64, 96 – 97, 101, 252, 257 mythology, 204; anti-Semitic myth, 204. See also anti-Semitism Nachmanides, 282 nationalism, 201, 204, 213 – 16, 272 National Socialism, national-socialist (Nazism, Nazi), 7, 42, 45 – 48, 63, 75, 82, 121, 142, 174, 190 – 91, 205 – 9, 213, 246 – 47, 249, 251, 260 – 62, 273, 276. See also race: racial doctrines; race: racism neoplatonic tradition, 190 the New Left, 68 the New Right, 7, 42, 48 – 49 New Testament, 165 Nicolas of Cusa, 177 Nietzsche, 31, 33, 34, 35, 46, 56, 61, 78, 68, 70, 76, 78, 141 – 42, 144 – 47, 149 – 50, 160, 168, 202, 225, 227, 252; concept of the Übermensch, 139 – 40 nihilism, 60, 168 Nirenberg, David, 37, 121 nothingness, nothing (das Nichts), 177 – 78, 180, 185 – 90 Old Testament, 160, 165, 216, 224. See also Bible: Jewish; Tanach ontological difference, 47, 76, 161, 178, 185, 202; errancy, 66, 68 ontology, 91; existential, 277; fundamental, 156, 186, 202; political, 191, 224, 245 – 47, 249, 251 – 52, 260, 263 onto-political, 216 onto-theology, 16, 35, 66, 186, 190. Orientalism (orientalist attitude), 215



Index 307

the Other: Otherness, 5, 33, 37, 82 – 83, 96 – 97, 100, 104. See also Levinas, Emmanuel the other beginning (der andere Anfag), 16, 32, 45, 77 Ott, Hugo, 47 Overbeck, Franz, 156 Papen, Franz von, 42 Park, Robert Ezra, 8, 125 Paul (the Apostle), 16, 19 – 26; Heidegger’s lecture on, 19 – 26, 156 Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand, 187 phenomenology: phenomenological, 177, 222, 226, 247, 260 Plato, 60 – 61, 63, 91, 100, 202, 221, 225, 277 – 78 Plessner, Helmuth, 117 poetry, 33 polemos (Auseinandersetzung), 1, 61 – 62, 64 – 65 polis, 205, 271 – 72, 279, 281 populism, 272 pre-Socratics, 202, 204, 210, 221 – 22, 224 – 25, 227, 236, 239 the promised land, 206, 260 prophets: prophecy, 162, 213, 216, 253, 257, 261 psychoanalysis, 184 purity, 79 rabbinic: literature, 222; rabbinics, 229, 238; schools, 224; thought, thinking, 222 – 23, 236; tradition, 281 – 82; world, 281 rabbinism, 211 – 12 race, 277 – 78; racial doctrines, 57 – 58, 70, 249; racism, 208 rectorate (Heidegger’s), 47, 205, 249, 276 – 77, 279, 284 redemption, 166 responsibility, 66, 89, 97 Ricchi, Raphael Immanuel ben Abraham, 189 Riezler, Kurt, 124 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 59

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 122 – 23 rootlessness. See uprootedness Rorty, Richard, 141, 146 Rosenberg, Alfred, 249, 252 Rosenzweig, Franz, 80, 83, 90, 103, 135, 167, 247, 254 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 5 – 6, 81, 145, 149 – 50 Saruq, Israel, 180, 182 – 84 Schelling, 185 – 86 Schleicher, Kurt von, 42 Schmitt, Carl, 79, 148, 222, 224, 226 – 27, 229, 237, 240 – 41, 249 – 51; Schmittean logic of exception, 234 Scholem, Gershom, 10, 50 – 51, 136, 170, 181 – 82, 248, 254 – 55, 262 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 76 the Second World War, 45 – 47, 76 secularization, 155 – 58, 160 – 62, 168, 212 Shammai, house of, 230 – 33, 235 Shila, R., of Kefar Thamratha, 231 – 33, 235 Shoah, 80, 83 – 84, 90, 96, 102, 119, 137, 147 – 48, 207 Simmel, Georg, 124–25 Sinai (Mount), 258 – 60, 263 Sloterdijk, Peter, 50 Smith, F. Joseph, 138 Socrates, 55, 221, 225; Socratic irony, 228 Spengler, Oswald, 249 Spinoza, Baruch, 33 Stirner, Max, 159 Strauss, Leo, 247 Sufism, 188 Talmud, 9, 65, 93, 97, 101, 221 – 25, 285; Babylonian, 221, 224, 227 – 29, 235, 238; Palestinian (Yerushalmi), 221, 224, 226, 229, 238; Talmudic refutation, 237; Talmudic thinking, 236 Taminiaux, Jacques, 150

308

Tanach, 206 Targum, 282 Taubes, Jacob, 138 – 39, 240 technology, technicity, 21, 139–140, 143, 203 – 4, 209, 245, 261; critique of, 207; modern technology (Gestell), 56, 60, 146, 203 – 4. See also machination temporality, 18, 22 – 24 territorialization, reterritorialization, deterritorialization, 227 – 28, 235 – 38, 242 Teshuva, 285 tetragrammaton, 183 theocracy, 211 theology, Christian, 155 – 58; dialectical, 157; Jewish, 246; late-ancient, 222; political, 9 – 10, 191, 222, 224, 245 – 49, 254, 258 – 59, 263 theopoetics, 179, 185, 190, 206 theopolitics, 210 – 11 theosophy, 184 throwness (Geworfenheit), thrown (geworfen), 95, 165 Tiantai School (of Chinese Buddhism), 188 Tomio, Tezuka, 177 Torah, 85, 98, 180 – 85, 252, 258, 280, 284

Index

Trakl, Georg, 127, 129 the turn (Kehre), 49, 279 Uexküll, Jakob von, 116 – 17, 119 Umwelt, 115 – 18 Unheimlich, 256 uprootedness (Entwurzelung), uprooted, uprooting, 58, 62, 81, 84, 128, 208 – 9, 261 – 62 Vézin, Francois, 135 – 38, 143, 145, 148 Wagner, Richard, 38, 122 Western philosophy, 202 will to will, 202 – 5 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 125 – 26 worldlessness (Weltlosigkeit), 8, 26, 77, 113 – 14, 119, 275; See also groundlessness Yeshiva, 281, 284 – 85 YHWH, 195, 212, 246 – 47, 258 – 59 Yogācāra school, 187 Zaddik, 217 Zion, 257 – 60, 263 Zionism, Zionist, 9, 201, 212, 214, 216, 247 – 48, 257; liberal, 247 – 48; theology of, 260 Zohar, 180 – 82, 184 – 85, 189, 258

About the Contributors

Babette Babich teaches philosophy at Fordham University in NYC and at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She writes on science, aesthetics, and the analytic-continental divide in philosophy in addition to ancient Greek bronzes and technology. Author and editor of sixteen books, as well as New Nietzsche Studies, her The Hallelujah Effect: Music, Performance Practice, and Technology appeared in paperback in 2016. Most recently she published Un politique brisé. Le souci d’autrui, l’humanisme, et les juifs chez Heidegger (2016). Micha Brumlik is professor emeritus at the Institut für Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/M., and since 2013 has been a senior advisor at the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg. From 2000 to 2005 he was the director of the Fritz-Bauer-Institut Frankfurt/M, Studien- und Dokumentationszentrum zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust. He served as a municipal representative of the GRÜNEN in Frankfurt am Main in 1989 to 2001. He is currently the coeditor of BABYLON—Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart and Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, as well as author and columnist in the newspaper “taz”: Gott und die Welt. Joseph Cohen is lecturer of contemporary philosophy at University College Dublin (Ireland) and researcher in philosophy at the Karl Jaspers Centre, Universität Heidelberg (Germany). He has held numerous visiting positions in European universities since 2007, and has taught regularly at the Staatliche Hochscule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe (Germany) from 2006 to 2015. He has authored Le spectre juif de Hegel (2005), Le sacrifice de Hegel (2007), Alternances de la métaphysique. Essais sur E. Levinas (2009), and co-authored The Husserl Dictionary with D. Moran (2012). In collaboration 309

310

About the Contributors

with R. Zagury-Orly, at La Règle du Jeu, he coedited Heidegger et « les juifs » (2015), as well as Heidegger. Qu’appelle-t-on le lieu? (2008), Derrida. L’événement déconstruction (2012), and Judéités—questions pour Jacques Derrida (2003). In collaboration with G. Bensussan, he also coedited Heidegger—le danger et la promesse (2006). Donatella di Cesare is a professor at the Sapienza University in Rome. She studied in Germany (Tübingen, Heidelberg) and was a Humboldt-Stipendiatin with Hans-Georg Gadamer. She was a visiting professor at many universities, such as the Albert Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg (2005) and a distinguished visiting professor of arts and humanities at the Penn State University (USA) in 2007. Her interests include philosophical hermeneutics, political philosophy, philosophy of language, and Jewish philosophy. She also writes for the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera. Her recent publications include Heidegger & Sons (2015), Heidegger, die Juden, die Shoah (2015), Gadamer A Philosophical Portrait (2013), and Utopia of Understanding. Between Babel and Auschwitz (2012). Sergey Dolgopolski is the Gordon and Gretchen Gross chair of Jewish thought at the newly created department of Jewish Thought, State University of New York, at Buffalo. He holds a Joint PhD in Jewish Studies from UC Berkeley and Graduate Theological Union, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences from the Russian Academy of Sciences. His general area of interest is the variety of ways in which philosophy and literature interact, creating new philosophical concepts and new literary forms. He specializes in the Talmud as body of text and thought seen from poetic, rhetoric, and philosophical perspectives, with a particular interest in mutual hermeneutics of philosophical, rhetorical, and Talmudic traditions, and with an emphasis on mutually shaping engagements of poetic, Talmudic, and philosophical thinking. He has authored a monograph, Rhetoric of the Talmud in the View of Post-Structuralism (1998). Two of his other books include What Is Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (2009), and The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (2012). Michael Fagenblat is Senior Lecturer at the Open University of Israel. He is the author of A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (2010), the editor of Negative Theology as Jewish Modernity (2017), and has written on the theme of this conference in “The Thing That Scares Me Most: Heidegger and the Return to Zion,” JCRT 14.1 (2014) and “Heidegger” and the Jews, in Farin and Malpas, eds., Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (2017). Gregory Fried received his BA from Harvard College and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He is presently Professor and Chair at the



About the Contributors 311

philosophy department at Suffolk University, and he has taught at the University of Chicago, Boston University, and California State University Los Angeles. His research has focused on defending the classical Enlightenment tradition against some of its most serious critics, most particularly Martin Heidegger. He is the author of Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics. With Richard Polt, he is also the translator of three of Heidegger’s works, Introduction to Metaphysics, Being and Truth, and Nature, History, State. Together with his father, Charles Fried, he is the author of Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror (2010), an exploration of moral, legal, and political questions in the post-9/11 world. Fried is also director of The Mirror of Race Project (mirrorofrace.org), an online, interdisciplinary project exploring the meaning of race in America’s history. Eveline Goodman-Thau, Rabbi, Dr. phil. habil. Dr. h.c., professor for Jewish and European philosophy. She is the founder and director of the HermannCohen-Academy for Religion, Science, and Art, and the Hebraic Graduate School of Europe. She has had numerous international guest professorships in Heidelberg, Kassel, Oldenburg, Berlin, Halle, Harvard, Vienna, and currently teaches at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg. Her publications include Aufstand der Wasser. Jüdische Hermeneutik zwischen Tradition und Moderne (2002), Erbe und Erneuerung. Kulturphilosophie aus den Quellen des Judentums (2004), and Das jüdische Erbe Europas. Krise der Kultur im Spannungsfeld von Tradition, Geschichte und Identität (2005). Yemima Hadad is a doctoral candidate and a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the school of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam. Her research project, written under the guidance of Professor Admiel Kosman, explores the contribution of Hasidism in Martin Buber’s theo-political theory. The project demonstrates the significance of Hasidism in explaining the political tenets of Buber’s thought. Her MA thesis, which she completed at Tel Aviv University, dealt with the meanings of the concept of nothingness in Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics. Her fields of interest include nihilism, religiosity, and secularism in Jewish and continental philosophy. Daniel Herskowitz, beginning his undergraduate studies at the age of sixteen, received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and history from the Open University of Israel and a master’s degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University. He is currently completing his doctorate dissertation on Jewish Receptions of Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in the University of Oxford as a Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe Doctoral Fellow. He has published a number of articles in international peer-reviewed journals; among them are Modern Theology, Journal of Religion, New German Critique, and Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy.

312

About the Contributors

Elad Lapidot is a researcher and lecturer for philosophy and Talmud at the Freie Universität, the Universität der Künste, the Humboldt University, and the Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin. His research concerns the conjunction between contemporary philosophy and rabbinic thought. He has been translating to Hebrew works of Levinas, Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. His publications include Etre sans mot dire: La logiqe de “Sein und Zeit” (2010), Translating Philosophy (2012), and Fragwürdige Sprache. Zur Phänomenologie der Heiligen Zunge (2013). Dieter Thomä is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Gall (Switzerland). He is the author of Die Zeit des Selbst und die Zeit danach. Zur Kritik der Textgeschichte Martin Heideggers 1910–1976, and the editor of the Heidegger Handbuch (2003, 2nd ed. 2013). His latest books are Der Einfall des Lebens. Theorie als geheime Biographie (2015) and Puer robustus. Eine Philosophie des Störenfrieds (2016). Peter Trawny studied philosophy, musicology, and history of art in Bochum, Freiburg, Basel, and Wuppertal. He taught at universities in Shanghai, Vienna, and Stockholm. Today he teaches at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, where he also is the director of the Martin-Heidegger-Institut. He is an editor of several volumes of the Martin-Heidegger- Gesamtausgabe (GA 35, 69, 73, 86, 90, 94–97). His latest publications include Medium and Revolution (2011), Written in Water. Philosophical Essays on Intimacy (2013), Fugue of Errancy. Heidegger’s An-archy (2014), and the Myth of a Jewish World-Conspiracy, Klostermann, third edition, which has been translated into six languages. His last published book is Technology. Capital. Medium. The Universal and the Freedom (2015). His fields of specialization include political philosophy and aesthetics. Elliot Wolfson, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies, and a Distinguished Professor of Religion at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications, including Through the Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (1994), which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Category of Historical Studies, and the National Jewish Book Award for Excellence in Scholarship; Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetic Imagination (2005), which won the National Jewish Book Award for Excellence in Scholarship; Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (2006); Venturing Beyond—Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (2006); Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (2009); A Dream Interpreted within a Dream:



About the Contributors 313

Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011), which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Category of Constructive Thinking; and Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (2014). He is also the author of two collections of poems: Pathwings: Poetic-Philosophic Reflections on the Hermeneutics of Time and Language (2004), and Footdreams and Treetales: 92 Poems (2007). Elliot R. Wolfson: Poetic Thinking appeared as part of the series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers (2015). The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism and the Jewish Other, and Heidegger and the Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis, will appear in 2018. Raphael Zagury-Orly is a researcher at the Asia and Europe in a Global Context Institute at the Universität Heidelberg (Germany) and guest professor of philosophy at the Università degli studi di Roma—Sapienza. Since 2004 he has been also a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Jerusalem), where, from 2010 to 2014, he directed the MFA program. He has held a visiting professorship at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung—Karlsruhe in 2014 to 2015. He has authored Questionner encore (2010) and, in collaboration with Joseph Cohen, coedited Judéités—­questions pour Jacques Derrida (2003), as well as Heidegger. Qu’appelle-t-on le lieu? (2008), Derrida. L’événement déconstruction (2012), and Heidegger et “les juifs” La Règle du Jeu (2015).