Arendt, Heidegger, Eichmann, and Thinking after the Black Notebooks

Abstract

Preview: /Review: Emmanuel Faye, Arendt et Heidegger: Extermination nazie et destruction de la pensée, (Albin Michel, 2016), 560 pages./ The appearance of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1932-38) in 2014 has posed profound questions to philosophers and political theorists. For a long time, in ways that the Black Notebooks have definitively undermined, Heidegger’s National Socialism was widely considered as limited to 1933-34. His larger thought, at least after a proposed turning or kehre in the mid-1930s, was presented as insulated from, or even critical of, Nazism and antisemitism. The work of Emmanuel Faye (led by Martin Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy), has been at the forefront of scholarship which has taken seriously the many questions raised by the ongoing publication of Heidegger’s Nazi-era materials, since the 1990s. On one hand, can great philosophy be implicated in forms of openly ethnonationalist, even exterminist political move- ments, or does it necessarily involve normative commitments which abhor anything like Nazism? On the other hand, how should we understand a political movement like National Socialism, including its ideological dimensions, such that it could appeal to a thinker of the magnitude of the one-time Fuhrer-Rektor of Freiburg University? Finally, what does publication of Heidegger’s Nazi texts and positions, culminating in the Black Notebooks, say about its limitations, political dimensions, and the postwar reception history of Heidegger in the liberal nations.