The Banality of Heidegger

The Banality of Heidegger

<strong>Heidegger and Nazism: ever since the philosopher's public involvement in state politics in 1933, his name has necessarily been a part of this unsavory couple</strong>. After the publication in 2014 of the private <em>Black Notebooks</em>, it is now unambiguously part of another: <strong>Heidegger and anti-Semitism</strong>. <br><br>What do we learn from analyzing the anti-Semitism of these private writings, together with its sources and grounds, not only for Heidegger's thought, but for the history of the West in which this thought is embedded? <strong>Jean-Luc Nancy poses these questions with the depth and rigor we would expect from</strong> <strong>him</strong>. In doing so, he does not go lightly on Heidegger, in whom he finds a philosophical and "historial" anti-Semitism, outlining a clash of "peoples" that must at all costs arrive at "another beginning." If Heidegger's uncritical acceptance of prejudices and long-debunked myths about "world Jewry" shares in the "banality" evoked by Hannah Arendt, this does nothing to lessen the charge. <strong>Nancy's purpose, however, is not simply to condemn Heidegger, but rather to invite us to think something to which the thinker of being remained blind</strong>: anti-Semitism as a self-hatred haunting the history of the West-and of Christianity in its drive toward an auto-foundation that would leave behind its origins in Judaism.<br>