Would it not also be correct to paraphrase Heidegger as "The essence of politics is not anything political"?
 

January --It may indeed, but the nature of that negation ("not anything political") is different than that negation whose opposite is affirmation. The best textual reference for such a claim that I can think of off the top of my head would be Heidegger's translations of Sophocles' Antigone --one of which occurs in the Einführung in die Metaphysik lectures of 1935. There and elsewhere Heidegger speaks of Antigone as possessing the spiritual-historical capability for creating and founding that is at the heart of the essence of the political. But more to the point, Heidegger characterizes this capacity for true politics in Antigone by meditating on the paradoxical phrase of the play's second antistrophe, namely ὑψίπολις ἄπολις, or, to translate in rough and ready fashion, "what is both abundantly political and a-political," but perhaps better: un-heimlich, where the hyphen now makes the word say: something not only "uncanny", but something which, in estranging itself from the homeland, actually comes closer to the true identity of that home.
Anyhow, ope any of this is helpful!
 

EM was the very first book-length Heidegger I ever read, back in 1975. It was a struggle, and I do not remember the Antigone reference.

More recently I read Derrida's "Of Spirit" with comments on H's political addresses at the time of the rectorship. My take was that H attempted to make politics transparent to the historical abandonment of Being-itself-- something his philosophical peers should be able to recognize while his political critics could be calmed by seeing the prescribed vocabulary.

Do you have a recommendation for an examination of the political in H?
 

"Of Spirit" surely is a masterly effort in reading Heidegger and discerning the broad (even if supposedly margin-alized) lines of H's relation to what we call "politics". The EM you read in '75, if you were not reading the German, was Manheim's translation. Since then (as you probably know) Polt and Fried have supplied English speakers with a sorely needed new translation. And it is Fried has recently (actually 2000) turned out "Heidegger's Polemos: From Being to Politics". But to speak honestly, as many relevant texts as it marshals and as many good possibilities as it opens up, I find that study of Fried's to be somewaht disappointing. Alot is being put out on the subject now. I, however, will risk making an idiosyncratic recommendation: A very fine, succint account of Heidegger's political considerations can be found in Marc Froment-Meurice's often overlooked but excellent (even if very "french") book translated by Jan Plug as "That is to say: Heidegger's Poetics". The book contains two chapters on the Antigone translations and the Holderlin elucidations as they relate to Heidegger's politics.
 

Thanks. Found a very good used paperback at Amazon, so I have ordered it. "Enowning" languishes on my shelf. Glad to be familiar with its existence and periodically struggle with its contents. The new vocabulary is so distant from my everyday, however, at best it only alerts me to keep a hopeful eye out.