It’s a fact: Martin Heidegger was a good silent citizen under the Nazi regime–a full, tenured academic toady, to be honest.  And there are some creepy rhetorical resemblances between his notion of Dasein and the Nazis’ blood-and-soil vocabulary.  Still, was he really a crypto-fascist?  DUNNO.  I like Heidegger.  Am I a bad brain?

Anyway, a heavyweight French academic, Emmanuel Faye, of the University of Rouen, has waded into the scrum, and he doesn’t like what he found.  Having studied a lot of unpublished Heidegger, Faye concludes that H’s thought—his bizarre, polyvocal, poetic thought—has a lot in common with totalitarian ideology.  I will probably never read Faye’s book, recently published in English translation by the Yale UP, and which is subtly titled Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, but I did check out this review from the Times (of London) Higher Education supplement.  It is troubling stuff.  But I still like Heidegger.

-TGR