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of 1933, in spite of explicit statements to the contrary . To others, his
only "thought" was for the destiny of the Germans, and that could
not mean the German Jews. Even some of Heidegger's staunchest
defenders are
ill
at ease here, and their rebuttals again take the form
of a negation: he was not a Nazi, though he should have renounced
it (again). But a more mollifying and potentially dangerous fringe of
his defenders has found in his silence the "merit" of exculpating the
German identity and of placing the Holocaust in perspective . Such a
position makes it possible to measure Heidegger against the decade.
Where they refuse the singularity of mass extermination on the
grounds that it has become a "dogmatic" fixation (the word is
Beaufret's, from a letter expressing sympathy for the French revi–
sionist position) and seek to fit it into the perspective of a war,
Heidegger's thought is one of the best suited to warn of the emptiness
and dangers of such historicism .
Sartre's famous statement that Marxism is "the insuperable
horizon of our time" has aged badly .
If
the description was right ,
then we have witnessed more than a sunset, something like a fractur–
ing of the horizon. Fragments of it remain. The mobilization of in–
tellectuals
en masse
to pronounce on the Heidegger affair owes more
to a sense of intellectual duty than to a Heideggerian injunction to
thought. Celine, for example, has greater notoriety in France, but
his political errors could never have prompted the entire class of in–
tellectuals to take up their pens. The lashing out , on all sides,
against the media's role in the present debate no doubt forms part of
that duty, but it is also a sign of torment. Almost every
j'accuse
pro–
nounced in this debate has ended up being a self-accusation as well ,
performed on the public stage. For this debate has to do with more
than the past. It suggests that because a war was won and infamy
revealed does not mean that we have gone beyond the impasse (in
thinking, in society) which precipitated the crisis . In the same way,
it is fairly certain that if Heidegger, in the words of one defender ,
had fully "removed the earth from around the roots of Nazism," he
would not be the prize of the intellectual contest which he is today .
That is why an excellent piece of bravura and
gaya scienza
from the
sociologist Jean Baudrillard is, finally , not to the point. Our prob–
lem, he says, is that we no longer have the strength to forget. One
feels that this debate
will
be forgotten, but no one knows yet with
what result.
