Heidegger and the triumph of reason at Gallimard

Today's Feuilleton in the Frankfurter Rundschau contains an article concerning the recent decision by the French publishing house Gallimard to cease publication of a collection of articles yet again attempting to defend Heidegger's association with the Nazi Party as a mere faux-pas.

The story is this. A year ago Emmanuel Faye published a study, Heidegger - l'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, detailing that the connections between the Heideggerean philosophical system and the infamous Rektoratsrede of 1933 penetrate to the very core of Heidegger's thought. [A translated Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Faye is available here.] At this point, François Fédier, the series editor of the edition of Heidegger's works at Gallimard, proposed an edited volume, to be entitled "Heidegger - Grounds Rather Than Unreason," defending Heidegger against Faye's attack. After the galleys were already finished, however, company chief Antoine Gallimard decided to put the project on hold; the book will not be published by Gallimard.

The story is stranger still. Heidegger's popularity in France has much to do with the work of his French translator, Jean Beaufret, who died in 1982. There have been suspicions about Beaufret's political views at least since 1978, when he expressed public solidarity for Robert Faurisson, a student of Beaufret's and a noted Holocaust denier. Fédier, however, is also a student of Beaufret's -- and one whose own translations of Heidegger demonstrate, as the FR argues, a tendency to soften the effect of Heidegger's record of statements in support of Nazi policies. This seems to suggest that Gallimard's decision not to publish the Fédier's volume is not one of simple censorship, but one that is well within the bounds of reasonableness.

Comments

[josé manuel martins]

Censorship is always censorship. It lays claim to know better than the reader. It represents a fearful judgement about either the reader's being unable to avoid manipulation, or rather... being very much able to avoid it. In philosophical censorship, it is the reader that is being censored - and the judge that is being judged. That is why Noam Chomsky prefaced the book by Faurisson, not because being himself a dangerous heideggerian nazi.