This particular winter is, more than any other recent season in France, especially rich in cultural events, conferences and shows that ensure Paris a secure place in the pantheon of global contemporary intellectual history.
Letter from Paris
by Nina Zivancevic
This particular winter is, more than any other recent season in France, especially rich in cultural events, conferences and shows that ensure Paris a secure place in the pantheon of global contemporary intellectual history. Radio France Culture has organized a series of lectures and conferences on "The Thought of Martin Heidegger Today in France," an ever delicate subject which was re-examined by such influential contemporary thinkers as Kostas Axelos (himself a friend of Heidegger’s), Jean-Pierre Faye (a longtime adversary of the Master), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (an independent, dissident Heideggerian), Peter Sloterdijk, Georges Steiner, Gianni Vattimo, and Michel Deguy. The conference at the National Library, which lasted the whole day of November 23, had focused on the political and the philosophical implications of the famous "Heidegger Rectoral Address" in 1933 that gives us a glimpse of Heidegger the controversial thinker, but also Heidegger the man, that is to say, the two incompatible facets of Heidegger which often confuse the reader faced with his complex and often controversial texts. During the individual discussions that went on that afternoon, some of the most interesting European thinkers tried to examine the fact that Heidegger’s often austere and difficult thought came to be considered as the most important in the history of the twentieth century philosophy, while he himself had been heavily compromised with the Nazi movement (the famous Bewegung) in Germany at the same time. One of the most incontrovertibly scathing revelations came from Arno Munster, a German philosopher and a former student of Habermas now living in France. In his latest book, Munster has disclosed and commented documents recently published in Germany in volume XVI of Heidegger’s Complete Works in which some twenty or more letters and lectures bear witness to the philosopher’s implicit ideological commitment to the doctrine of "racial hygiene" championed by the infamous Professor Fischer (who was apparently a loyal friend of Heidegger’s until the end of the war) and celebrated by Nazi ideology and the totalitarian regime which literally(!) applied it. Even conceptually more provocative were Peter Sloterdijk’s contribution which underlined the fact that Heidegger has "always shown a reactionary attitude towards the essential issue of our era: the invention of the frivolous and the consumer society where democracy is only an avatar." To highlight the existential pathos of Heidegger’s often emotionally (and, as Jurgen Habermas may say, ideologically) charged philosophical vocabulary, notably that of his Being and Time,
