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Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture
Heidegger: His Life and His Philosophy
Martin Heidegger was an ordinary Nazi and a loyal member of the provincial petty bourgeoisie. He was also a seminal thinker of the Continental tradition and one of the twentieth century's most important philosophers. How are we to make sense of this dual life? Should we factor Heidegger's domestic and political associations into our understanding of his thought, or should we treat his intellectual work independently of his abhorrent politics? How does any thinker reconcile the mundane with the ideal or the pursuit of philosophical inquiry with the demands of civic engagement?
In Heidegger, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin immerse themselves in the philosopher's correspondence with his wife Elfride to answer these questions as they relate to Heidegger and all thinkers vulnerable to the politics of their times. They focus on Heidegger's tormented relationship with his wife, with Hannah Arendt, and with numerous other women, bringing an unusual level of intimacy to his personal and intellectual worlds.
In Heidegger, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin immerse themselves in the philosopher's correspondence with his wife Elfride to answer these questions as they relate to Heidegger and all thinkers vulnerable to the politics of their times. They focus on Heidegger's tormented relationship with his wife, with Hannah Arendt, and with numerous other women, bringing an unusual level of intimacy to his personal and intellectual worlds.
- GenresPhilosophy
120 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2010
3 people are currently reading
90 people want to read
About the author
Alain Badiou
368 books1,019 followersAlain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.
Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 22, 2019
This book was more about his life rather than his philosophy. Nearly 40 pages that contain notes, bibliographical references and further readings which is ludicrous. The feud between Cassin and Badiou was boring and bathetic (bathos, yes) and charged with gender-oriented tension.
I really do not have much to say except...meh!
I really do not have much to say except...meh!
January 5, 2024
This tiny volume, really more like a pamphlet, made more waves in Europe for the political storm it made between the authors and its title subject’s estate than for its actual content. That is not to say, however, that it isn’t a worthwhile, quick read.
The main text, by Cassin and Badiou, is a unexceptional if perhaps necessary evaluation of Heidegger’s thought in relation to his involvement in National Socialism. The authors describe their stance as “radically moderate” which makes a lot of sense and seems to me very sensible. Heidegger was indeed a Nazi, although not a politically significant one besides the celebrity that his name brought to the movement. He was also an exceptionally talented and seminal philosopher.
Did his politics in any way influence his philosophy or vice versa? Perhaps, the authors conclude, but not to the point of making an irrefutable connection between the two. The political ugliness of Heidegger the human individual’s life does not in any way discredit the writer’s philosophical oeuvre or those of the generations of thinkers, including the two authors of this little book, who have been influenced by it.
My personal reaction to this “take” is that it seems so obviously true as to be trite. Cassin and Badiou have a right, however, to label their stance as “radically” moderate. For the trend continues amongst European and American intellectuals to insist on either a complete divorce or radical unity between the philosophy and its author’s political life. Heidegger’s defenders insist he was an entirely innocent dupe of the Nazi regime who at worst failed to refuse to join the Party under extreme pressure, and who perhaps even did all he could to minimize harm to his colleagues. His harshest detractors deride him as nothing less than a “Nazi philosopher” whose magnum opus “Being and Time” is an intellectualization of an essentially fascistic world view. In light of all this hullabaloo, Cassin and Badiou’s work is a welcome addition to the literature devoted to the “Heidegger debate”.
Having said that, the most rewarding thing about the book is not its main text, but the excellent and stimulating introduction by Kenneth Reinhard. For this reader, the first thing Reinhard’s essay accomplished was to provide a pithy introduction into the philosophical work of Barbara Cassin, to which I had not previously been exposed. Cassin takes her inspiration not from the Platonic tradition but through that of the “sophists” who Socrates/Plato so excoriated. This is a poetic and rhetorical fashion of philosophy that in no way demands ontology’s insistence on linguistic stability, in which a word must maintain the same meaning regardless of speaker/ listener/ user or context. Cassin’s work proposes instead a “logology” in which language acts on and creates in the world through performance.
Reinhard’s description of Cassin’s project would lead me to link her work to that of the latter Heidegger of the “linguistic turn”. (Indeed, Cassin met Heidegger a few times late in his life at the retreats the philosopher hosted with his leftist-poet friend Rene Char. Cassin’s antidotes about these gatherings in the main text are quite interesting and enjoyable to read.) For the latter Heidegger, language was the shelter of being and humanity, language’s wielder, the shepard. Language therefore plays a more creative role in Cassin’s thought than in that of the late Heidegger. Language, for Cassin, would seem to play the role of Being’s mother more than its cradle. Nonetheless, both thinkers direct link between being and language, and the creative power of poetic language to rereveal or recreate being have undeniable resonances.
The majority of Reinhard’s essay is a comparison between the notions of Being in Heidegger (particularly, it seems to me, the Heidegger of “Being and Time”) and Badiou. Both thinkers, posits Reinhard, propose a distinction between knowledge and truth. For Heidegger, truth is the unconcealing of being and perhaps eventually Being. For some readers of “Being and Time” the truth of human being (“Dasein”) is revealed through Dasein’s relation to the objects that it knows how to use. For more existentially minded reader’s of Heidegger’s opus, it is Dasein that reveals the truth of the world through its use of objects as tools. In either reading, it is a reciprocal revealing of being between Dasein and world.
Heidegger contrasts his notion of truth with “knowledge” which is knowledge of a conceptual ideal as fatefully introduced into the history of thought by Plato. This form of idealized knowledge, even as early as “Being and Time” and even more pronouncedly after the Linguistic Turn, actually obfuscates truth/ Being.
Badiou, according to Reinhard, attempts to undo the connection made by Heidegger between being and truth. For Badiou being is not a static entity that can be revealed, or even interpreted. Rather, Badiou’s truth simply is the elaboration of consequences of the interruption of being by an “event” (a radical political, scientific, artistic or romantic production). Truth, then, is a procedure, not an uncovering. And human subjectivity is not revealed by the world or revealing of the world, but simply is the knowledge produced by its own evaluation of the procedure.
The main text, by Cassin and Badiou, is a unexceptional if perhaps necessary evaluation of Heidegger’s thought in relation to his involvement in National Socialism. The authors describe their stance as “radically moderate” which makes a lot of sense and seems to me very sensible. Heidegger was indeed a Nazi, although not a politically significant one besides the celebrity that his name brought to the movement. He was also an exceptionally talented and seminal philosopher.
Did his politics in any way influence his philosophy or vice versa? Perhaps, the authors conclude, but not to the point of making an irrefutable connection between the two. The political ugliness of Heidegger the human individual’s life does not in any way discredit the writer’s philosophical oeuvre or those of the generations of thinkers, including the two authors of this little book, who have been influenced by it.
My personal reaction to this “take” is that it seems so obviously true as to be trite. Cassin and Badiou have a right, however, to label their stance as “radically” moderate. For the trend continues amongst European and American intellectuals to insist on either a complete divorce or radical unity between the philosophy and its author’s political life. Heidegger’s defenders insist he was an entirely innocent dupe of the Nazi regime who at worst failed to refuse to join the Party under extreme pressure, and who perhaps even did all he could to minimize harm to his colleagues. His harshest detractors deride him as nothing less than a “Nazi philosopher” whose magnum opus “Being and Time” is an intellectualization of an essentially fascistic world view. In light of all this hullabaloo, Cassin and Badiou’s work is a welcome addition to the literature devoted to the “Heidegger debate”.
Having said that, the most rewarding thing about the book is not its main text, but the excellent and stimulating introduction by Kenneth Reinhard. For this reader, the first thing Reinhard’s essay accomplished was to provide a pithy introduction into the philosophical work of Barbara Cassin, to which I had not previously been exposed. Cassin takes her inspiration not from the Platonic tradition but through that of the “sophists” who Socrates/Plato so excoriated. This is a poetic and rhetorical fashion of philosophy that in no way demands ontology’s insistence on linguistic stability, in which a word must maintain the same meaning regardless of speaker/ listener/ user or context. Cassin’s work proposes instead a “logology” in which language acts on and creates in the world through performance.
Reinhard’s description of Cassin’s project would lead me to link her work to that of the latter Heidegger of the “linguistic turn”. (Indeed, Cassin met Heidegger a few times late in his life at the retreats the philosopher hosted with his leftist-poet friend Rene Char. Cassin’s antidotes about these gatherings in the main text are quite interesting and enjoyable to read.) For the latter Heidegger, language was the shelter of being and humanity, language’s wielder, the shepard. Language therefore plays a more creative role in Cassin’s thought than in that of the late Heidegger. Language, for Cassin, would seem to play the role of Being’s mother more than its cradle. Nonetheless, both thinkers direct link between being and language, and the creative power of poetic language to rereveal or recreate being have undeniable resonances.
The majority of Reinhard’s essay is a comparison between the notions of Being in Heidegger (particularly, it seems to me, the Heidegger of “Being and Time”) and Badiou. Both thinkers, posits Reinhard, propose a distinction between knowledge and truth. For Heidegger, truth is the unconcealing of being and perhaps eventually Being. For some readers of “Being and Time” the truth of human being (“Dasein”) is revealed through Dasein’s relation to the objects that it knows how to use. For more existentially minded reader’s of Heidegger’s opus, it is Dasein that reveals the truth of the world through its use of objects as tools. In either reading, it is a reciprocal revealing of being between Dasein and world.
Heidegger contrasts his notion of truth with “knowledge” which is knowledge of a conceptual ideal as fatefully introduced into the history of thought by Plato. This form of idealized knowledge, even as early as “Being and Time” and even more pronouncedly after the Linguistic Turn, actually obfuscates truth/ Being.
Badiou, according to Reinhard, attempts to undo the connection made by Heidegger between being and truth. For Badiou being is not a static entity that can be revealed, or even interpreted. Rather, Badiou’s truth simply is the elaboration of consequences of the interruption of being by an “event” (a radical political, scientific, artistic or romantic production). Truth, then, is a procedure, not an uncovering. And human subjectivity is not revealed by the world or revealing of the world, but simply is the knowledge produced by its own evaluation of the procedure.
April 19, 2024
No dicen nada nuevo que no se haya dicho ya sobre Heidegger y el nazismo aunque si aporta alguna perspectiva interesante de su relación con Elfriede así como de los paralelismos con la de Beauvoir y Sartre.
Acertado afirmar que si bien Heidegger era un nazi, solo fue un ejemplo más del nazismo provinciano pequeño burgués
Acertado afirmar que si bien Heidegger era un nazi, solo fue un ejemplo más del nazismo provinciano pequeño burgués
May 16, 2021
Os nazistas e (homens) medíocres também amam...
"Jamais nada assim me aconteceu. Foi no caminho da volta, durante a tempestade, que me apareceste mais bela ainda, e maior. É durante noites inteiras que eu gostaria que caminhássemos juntos".
"Por favor, Hannah, dá-me um sinal de vida, rabisca mais algumas palavras para mim. Não posso te deixar ser apenas uma estrela fugidia".
Dando nota alta para subir o algoritmo. Só pode ser culpa dos anglófonos uma média tão baixa assim. O livro é meio revista de fofoca feminina, mas é interessante e recomendo sim.
"Jamais nada assim me aconteceu. Foi no caminho da volta, durante a tempestade, que me apareceste mais bela ainda, e maior. É durante noites inteiras que eu gostaria que caminhássemos juntos".
"Por favor, Hannah, dá-me um sinal de vida, rabisca mais algumas palavras para mim. Não posso te deixar ser apenas uma estrela fugidia".
Dando nota alta para subir o algoritmo. Só pode ser culpa dos anglófonos uma média tão baixa assim. O livro é meio revista de fofoca feminina, mas é interessante e recomendo sim.
September 16, 2022
This is a weird little book.
There's a lot of sophistry but also a lot of pithy little insights. The ideas themselves are someone trite, but the poetics and the way the book is organized (I like the little sections where the authors disagree) are pretty clever.
There's a lot of sophistry but also a lot of pithy little insights. The ideas themselves are someone trite, but the poetics and the way the book is organized (I like the little sections where the authors disagree) are pretty clever.
July 10, 2023
Very mixed bag - apologist tendencies which masquerade/take the form of references to Spinoza’s ‘repentance is not a virtue’ and passages concerning how only ‘inquisitors force the dead to speak’. Suffice to say, I didn’t find this argument wholly convincing, even whilst reading this little tome during this, admittedly exaggerated, cultural period of denunciation, disavowal, ‘cancellation’ (ew).
Does the possibility of Heidegger’s style and thought suffering a form of disintegration, instigated by an overt address of his Nazism, ordinary and petty-bourgeois though it may have been (his and his wife’s antisemitism was however certainly despicable and by no means merely implicit in their words and actions, they just simply couldn’t stand those Jewish fellas), by opening up to the prospect of full-blown disavowal - does this possibility, the sullying of his project, justify his silence? The significant silence that runs the gauntlet across his incredible corpus of work? Can Badiou and Cassin really be satisfied in their characterisation of such a thing as an address and a renunciation as merely some kind of ‘cheap trick’? Is assuming responsibility for one’s political involvement in a heinous ideology just some parlour trick trotted out to placate a baying mob of anemic scholars? Surely there must, simply must, be something more here, must we construe the possibility of Heidegger renouncing his Nazism as just some gesture, some stylistic flourish, another cultural item to be neatly tucked away under some paltry aesthetic criteria? “Good work on trying to uncover the forgetting of Being, Martin - but next term you must not ruin your overturning of metaphysics and overall philosophical project by kowtowing to the rabble over a really rather pedestrian Nazism. See me after class!!”
Good food for thought, even if I feel as if Badiou and Cassin let Heidegger off of the hook a little too easily. I believe that there is some justification for the fractal perspective proposed by Cassin, which suggests that we can impose 'separate categories' onto Heidegger's private correspondence and his published works which interpenetrate one another but cannot claim intellectual primacy - a man who was a great philosopher and a Nazi.
But Heidegger did have political aspirations, his withdrawal (his disillusionment with the Nazi project during and preceding the war years) wasn’t as significant as the work makes out, especially after one considers his infamous Der Spiegel interview, with the tasteless allusions to extermination camps within it standing as a testament to this fact. Leading up to the war he wanted to be the spiritual vanguard of Hitlerite fascism, even if he thought the brownshirts and fascist masses were uncultured, bone-headed thugs - he wanted to seriously revamp and reorganise the education system in line with the Fuhrer’s destiny, the spiritual master of Germany’s fate. Arendt’s criterion of leniency, that philosophers always have irresponsible ideas, that they seem to have a penchant for the tyrannical, that they tend to stray toward the political even if Politics privileges the interplay of opinion over Truth (contradictory to philosophy and their entire vocation, at least Platonic philosophy as geared against the art of sophistry), is inadequate when it comes to Heidegger and his political engagements.
But then again we must ask ourselves a series of questions - Shall we defang the philosophers? Give our potential philosopher kings with a political bent a prophylactic? Castrate or neuter them? Is the political too detrimental to the Logos, does it allow them to too easily dabble in pro-genocidal doxa? Can’t their little heads withstand that much concrete reality? Or does dangerous thought, and although a emancipatory project does glimmer forth through his words (look into Caputo's Demythologising Heidegger) Heidegger’s thought is certainly dangerous, open new vistas? Shall we just let them get on with it? And let them fuck who they want? Why not? Interesting little book.
Does the possibility of Heidegger’s style and thought suffering a form of disintegration, instigated by an overt address of his Nazism, ordinary and petty-bourgeois though it may have been (his and his wife’s antisemitism was however certainly despicable and by no means merely implicit in their words and actions, they just simply couldn’t stand those Jewish fellas), by opening up to the prospect of full-blown disavowal - does this possibility, the sullying of his project, justify his silence? The significant silence that runs the gauntlet across his incredible corpus of work? Can Badiou and Cassin really be satisfied in their characterisation of such a thing as an address and a renunciation as merely some kind of ‘cheap trick’? Is assuming responsibility for one’s political involvement in a heinous ideology just some parlour trick trotted out to placate a baying mob of anemic scholars? Surely there must, simply must, be something more here, must we construe the possibility of Heidegger renouncing his Nazism as just some gesture, some stylistic flourish, another cultural item to be neatly tucked away under some paltry aesthetic criteria? “Good work on trying to uncover the forgetting of Being, Martin - but next term you must not ruin your overturning of metaphysics and overall philosophical project by kowtowing to the rabble over a really rather pedestrian Nazism. See me after class!!”
Good food for thought, even if I feel as if Badiou and Cassin let Heidegger off of the hook a little too easily. I believe that there is some justification for the fractal perspective proposed by Cassin, which suggests that we can impose 'separate categories' onto Heidegger's private correspondence and his published works which interpenetrate one another but cannot claim intellectual primacy - a man who was a great philosopher and a Nazi.
But Heidegger did have political aspirations, his withdrawal (his disillusionment with the Nazi project during and preceding the war years) wasn’t as significant as the work makes out, especially after one considers his infamous Der Spiegel interview, with the tasteless allusions to extermination camps within it standing as a testament to this fact. Leading up to the war he wanted to be the spiritual vanguard of Hitlerite fascism, even if he thought the brownshirts and fascist masses were uncultured, bone-headed thugs - he wanted to seriously revamp and reorganise the education system in line with the Fuhrer’s destiny, the spiritual master of Germany’s fate. Arendt’s criterion of leniency, that philosophers always have irresponsible ideas, that they seem to have a penchant for the tyrannical, that they tend to stray toward the political even if Politics privileges the interplay of opinion over Truth (contradictory to philosophy and their entire vocation, at least Platonic philosophy as geared against the art of sophistry), is inadequate when it comes to Heidegger and his political engagements.
But then again we must ask ourselves a series of questions - Shall we defang the philosophers? Give our potential philosopher kings with a political bent a prophylactic? Castrate or neuter them? Is the political too detrimental to the Logos, does it allow them to too easily dabble in pro-genocidal doxa? Can’t their little heads withstand that much concrete reality? Or does dangerous thought, and although a emancipatory project does glimmer forth through his words (look into Caputo's Demythologising Heidegger) Heidegger’s thought is certainly dangerous, open new vistas? Shall we just let them get on with it? And let them fuck who they want? Why not? Interesting little book.
March 6, 2020
“La cuestión histórica nunca es la del perdón o el arrepentimiento, sino la de saber qué se está decidido a falsear después de haber obrado mal. ”
Una pregunta latente entre todos los círculos allegado al saber filosófico e histórico,siempre ha estado amarrada a la interrogante, interrogante tan punzante que se cae una división abismal entre los sequitos y los adversarios de Martin Heidegger: Heidegger era nazi. ¿Lo fue su filosofía? Ha sido muchos del desgaste del tintero para arrojar luz a esta interrogantes, siendo un hombre del saber, cómo se produce esta discrepancia, filosofia vs nazismo, saber vs barbarie, conducta vs atrocidades, sin importar las cartillas íntimas del pensador alemán a su esposa, pudo haber contaminado su antisemitismo a toda su filosofía.
“Nietzsche tiene quizá razón al afirmar que una filosofía es la biografía de su autor, pero con la condición de dar a la palabra “biografía» un sentido tal que sea simétricamente falso que la biografía de un autor pueda ser su filosofía.”
Simpatizar por el nazismo y clamar por Hitler, ha puesto al mundo académico de la filosofía patas arribas, pues el autor de libro Ser y tiempo, sus más grandes simpatizantes vieron este paso como un mero error pasajero, pues por lo visto en una entrevista para Der Spiegel lo dejo marcado. Una nazista circunstancial y a media, o como él mismo escribió: “Hay grandeza en el errar” y “el extravío es el regalo oculto de la verdad”
“Heidegger queda descalificado como filósofo y debe ser retirado de las bibliotecas, donde podría corromper a la juventud, y por el lado de los heideggerianos devotos, la convicción de que, porque es un filósofo muy grande, es imposible que Heidegger haya sido verdaderamente nazi. ”
Las cosas se ponen peores muchos mas para el legado del Heidegger, cuando en unas publicaciones en Alemania desde 2013 con las entradas de los Cuadernos negros, donde mas alla de ser nazista, se percibe como antisemita, que esa así como en algunas anotaciones parece salpicar los pensamientos miselanceso de estos cuadernos y así lo ven estudioso como Peter Trawny, Donatella di Cesare y Nicolas Gonzalez Valera.
Pero en lo que respecta al libro que estamos tratando de Heidegger. El nazismo, las mujeres, la filosofía de Alain Badiou y Barbara Cassin, creo que para un iniciado en la investigación, o siente cierto interés por el tema, creo que este libro le podría servir, pues los temas están muy aéreo, falta cierta profundidad analitica de esta ambivalencia humana, un filosofo que se siente entre dos rios, entre el mal y el bien.
“Estamos aquí en la linde dialéctica, que puede calificarse de existencial, entre la grandeza de pensamiento y la pequeñez de convicción, entre la capacidad creadora de dimensiones universales y la particularidad corta de miras de un profesor de provincias.”
Una pregunta latente entre todos los círculos allegado al saber filosófico e histórico,siempre ha estado amarrada a la interrogante, interrogante tan punzante que se cae una división abismal entre los sequitos y los adversarios de Martin Heidegger: Heidegger era nazi. ¿Lo fue su filosofía? Ha sido muchos del desgaste del tintero para arrojar luz a esta interrogantes, siendo un hombre del saber, cómo se produce esta discrepancia, filosofia vs nazismo, saber vs barbarie, conducta vs atrocidades, sin importar las cartillas íntimas del pensador alemán a su esposa, pudo haber contaminado su antisemitismo a toda su filosofía.
“Nietzsche tiene quizá razón al afirmar que una filosofía es la biografía de su autor, pero con la condición de dar a la palabra “biografía» un sentido tal que sea simétricamente falso que la biografía de un autor pueda ser su filosofía.”
Simpatizar por el nazismo y clamar por Hitler, ha puesto al mundo académico de la filosofía patas arribas, pues el autor de libro Ser y tiempo, sus más grandes simpatizantes vieron este paso como un mero error pasajero, pues por lo visto en una entrevista para Der Spiegel lo dejo marcado. Una nazista circunstancial y a media, o como él mismo escribió: “Hay grandeza en el errar” y “el extravío es el regalo oculto de la verdad”
“Heidegger queda descalificado como filósofo y debe ser retirado de las bibliotecas, donde podría corromper a la juventud, y por el lado de los heideggerianos devotos, la convicción de que, porque es un filósofo muy grande, es imposible que Heidegger haya sido verdaderamente nazi. ”
Las cosas se ponen peores muchos mas para el legado del Heidegger, cuando en unas publicaciones en Alemania desde 2013 con las entradas de los Cuadernos negros, donde mas alla de ser nazista, se percibe como antisemita, que esa así como en algunas anotaciones parece salpicar los pensamientos miselanceso de estos cuadernos y así lo ven estudioso como Peter Trawny, Donatella di Cesare y Nicolas Gonzalez Valera.
Pero en lo que respecta al libro que estamos tratando de Heidegger. El nazismo, las mujeres, la filosofía de Alain Badiou y Barbara Cassin, creo que para un iniciado en la investigación, o siente cierto interés por el tema, creo que este libro le podría servir, pues los temas están muy aéreo, falta cierta profundidad analitica de esta ambivalencia humana, un filosofo que se siente entre dos rios, entre el mal y el bien.
“Estamos aquí en la linde dialéctica, que puede calificarse de existencial, entre la grandeza de pensamiento y la pequeñez de convicción, entre la capacidad creadora de dimensiones universales y la particularidad corta de miras de un profesor de provincias.”
February 11, 2022
La ya redundante e inconclusa discusión si se puede separar la persona de su obra, su afinidades políticas de sus escritos.
En respuesta a este interrogante se ponen a reflexionar en torno a un figura bastante desagradable en tanto persona, como fue Heidegger, mujeriego, misógino, antisemita.
Siento que el libro da mil vueltas y encuentra argumentos solo porque el aire es gratis.
De lo peor que leí el último tiempo.
En respuesta a este interrogante se ponen a reflexionar en torno a un figura bastante desagradable en tanto persona, como fue Heidegger, mujeriego, misógino, antisemita.
Siento que el libro da mil vueltas y encuentra argumentos solo porque el aire es gratis.
De lo peor que leí el último tiempo.
January 6, 2019
Very disappointing read on Heidegger. I was looking for more of a backstory on his female relationships and his extensive involvement with the Nazi party.
July 16, 2022
This is a tiny, fascinating book.
July 26, 2025
Tratava-se inicialmente dum prefácio ao livro de cartas entre Heidegger e Elfride, mas, por ter sido tirado de circulação e processado pela família, Badiou e Cassin decidiram estender e publicar como um livro à parte, o que foi um ato bravo. A edição estadunidense colocou como subtítulo do livro: "sua vida e sua filosofia", mas não é sobre isso que se é discutido ali, é muito antes uma análise acerca dos relacionamentos de Heidegger em seus vários momentos da vida, e como eles puderam influenciar em sua "obra". Várias conclusões são estúpidas, evidentemente, mas o livro traz uma abordagem realmente interessante, o que é digno de nota.
December 15, 2016
Slight, but interesting if you're into any of these three philosophers. (Or Hannah Arendt.) I like the structure of the book, mostly co-written by Badiou and Cassin but with italicized splits here and there where they each weigh in on some issue they could not bring themselves to agreement upon.
It helps, I suppose, that I'm in their camp: yes, Heidegger was a Nazi, and yes, he remains an important philosopher. Neither one excuses or eliminates the other. This book, which began as a (later rejected) introduction for a book of letters between Heidegger and his wife, Elfride, also spends quite a bit of time on Heidegger's other women, usually much younger and less privileged, naturally. (Shudder.) Elfride apparently knew about his many infidelities, and it's all softened by the fact that apparently at least one of MH's children was not, you know, his child. So maybe they had some sort of arrangement, though it strains credulity a bit to believe it was any sort of egalitarian freedom granted to one another. Frankly, it all fits in with my longstanding belief that he was just generally a rotter. (And that's even setting aside the whole not-at-all-negligible "I'm a Nazi" thing he had going.)
I guess if you still thought Heidegger was some sort of paragon, maybe this is a necessary book. But, I mean, come on. All you need to do is read the wikipedia page to figure out he's a jerk.
It helps, I suppose, that I'm in their camp: yes, Heidegger was a Nazi, and yes, he remains an important philosopher. Neither one excuses or eliminates the other. This book, which began as a (later rejected) introduction for a book of letters between Heidegger and his wife, Elfride, also spends quite a bit of time on Heidegger's other women, usually much younger and less privileged, naturally. (Shudder.) Elfride apparently knew about his many infidelities, and it's all softened by the fact that apparently at least one of MH's children was not, you know, his child. So maybe they had some sort of arrangement, though it strains credulity a bit to believe it was any sort of egalitarian freedom granted to one another. Frankly, it all fits in with my longstanding belief that he was just generally a rotter. (And that's even setting aside the whole not-at-all-negligible "I'm a Nazi" thing he had going.)
I guess if you still thought Heidegger was some sort of paragon, maybe this is a necessary book. But, I mean, come on. All you need to do is read the wikipedia page to figure out he's a jerk.
November 13, 2016
Short little text with some fairly illuminating commentary on Heidegger.
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