By Adam Knowles
This talk, based on
Adam Knowles’ forthcoming book
Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence, will show how Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks (published in 2013) are central to reassessing his immense influence on 20th-century intellectual history.
By identifying Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks and his deep-seated anti-Semitism as key elements in his personal and philosophical trajectory,
Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence challenges the self-serving myth about the tenuousness of his involvement with Nazism that Heidegger promoted in the post-World War II era. Countering that widely accepted mythology,
Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities documents his enthusiastic immersion in the ethno-nationalist (
völkisch) literature of the Weimar era and shows how his politics, as expressed in his philosophical works, reveal profound affinities to the right-wing, anti-Semitic movements that spawned National Socialism. Understanding Heidegger’s politics, therefore, is not merely a matter of measuring Heidegger’s proximity to National Socialism (which itself came in many forms), but it is also matter of documenting Heidegger’s links to the broad range of ethno-nationalist and anti-Semitic movements in the 1920s and beyond. The
Black Notebooks help reveal Heidegger’s commitment to the politics of these movements and provide a framework for rethinking longstanding assumptions about the purported division between Heidegger’s philosophy and political activities.
The Heidegger case raises a larger set of questions about how the humanities respond to totalitarian regimes. Heidegger, like many professors in the humanities across Germany in the early 1930s, eagerly embraced the regime and contributed to the rise of National Socialism both as a philosopher and university administrator. Far from being a mere biographical curiosity or historical matter worthy of merely historical concern, the
Black Notebooks provide the impetus for a rethinking of Heidegger’s place in the history of Western philosophy.
Why has the discipline of philosophy invested such great effort into rehabilitating Heidegger? How did Heidegger benefit from an ethically dubious notion of greatness which other complicit figures, the middle-brow professoriate, did not benefit from? Does the purportedly banal anti-Semitism of the
Black Notebooks diminish this greatness, or must classic works such as
Being and Time be rethought?
Can one still read and teach Heidegger? What can Heidegger’s case teach us about the rise of ethno-nationalist regimes?
© Adam Knowles
Adam Knowles is Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University (USA) and Visiting Faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He is translating Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks, 1942-1948 for Indiana University Press.
Links for further information:
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