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breadth and suggestiveness than many other contributions.) And it
is likewise a question, one more question, whether such an approach
truly closes the door to the new barbarity or whether "thought" too
has been lastingly compromised, cured of its desire for foundations
or never so in need of them. It is a question which can be asked of
most disciplines in our day.
For one of Heidegger's most forceful critics,
T.
W. Adorno,
that compromise is synonymous with the name "Auschwitz" - a
name which Heidegger never pronounced. It is hardly an item for
the newspapers that through the entire postwar period Heidegger
kept a deliberate, awful silence in regard to the death camps. Yet
there is no "fact" in the archives that is as troubling and patent.
Scholars have learned of a single counterexample, published in Ger–
many in 1984, apparently unknown in France until Lacoue-La–
barthe (and not Farias) recently brought it to public attention. In an
unpublished lecture of 1948, Heidegger alluded to the death camps
in a catalogue of examples of the hegemony of technique in our day:
"Agriculture has become an automated food industry," the same in
essence as "the fabrication of corpses in the gas chambers, the
blockade and starvation of whole regions, the hydrogen bomb,"
summarily, in that order. Whatever the justice of the grouping and
the argument behind it, the reticence of these words confirms the
rule of silence. And what is appalling about them cannot, even in
Heidegger's terms, be only technological.
To the irony of his
knowing
long in advance, and with the ex–
pression he gave to that understanding in the works of the 1930s,
1940s, and afterward, there is an answering and unbearable irony in
his never giving voice to the unspeakable horror of the camps.
Called upon a number of times to address the subject, Heidegger
obstinately refused - as if speech would in itself have comprised
some kind of retraction or avowal, or as if words like Auschwitz and
Dachau were not part of
his
German language. Perhaps they had
never been; perhaps, too, such purity has nothing salutary about it.
In any case, his refusal is embedded in his times which he viewed as
the postmodernity (the "midst") of nihilism.
Much of the present debate is aimed at sounding out a silence
which is, finally, more the man's than the work's. The results, not
surprisingly, are meager; each view reduces to a single theme. Apart
from those who ascribe it to outright anti-Semitism (which he seems
more courageously than most to have refused), it has been taken by
some critics to imply that he never truly renounced his engagement
