Three days later they handed me two passes to travel to Madrid. We would travel, Martin, in an official airplane, an airplane of the Third Reich, a plane belonging to the powerful Hermann Goering himself. Would it be the one the Führer used, historicizing it, to visit the Duce? I don’t believe so. That artifact, as the Master would prophesize in the distant course on Logic [P. 71], would already rest in some distinguished museum, Museums, Martin, those crypts of history.

I gave the last of my conferences. I inquired into Heidegger’s turn, into the Heidegger after Being and Time, the history of being as forgetfulness, withdrawal. Dasein is no longer the “there” of Being. Now, forgetting it, it has been given over to the conquest of entities by means of technology. A fall that happens after Descartes and his centering of the subject, his imposition of that new subjectum: man. The man of technology who reaches his most accomplished and powerful expression in the Nietzschean will to power. They barely applauded me. None of this mattered to the French. They let it pass. They didn’t yet have the texts with which to confirm it. The Letter on Humanism (which they also did not understand) is from 1946. In 1943, when I offered my version of the turn, no one, in the auditorium, was ready to accept it, nor to pay attention to it. They were all shackled to Being and Time and to its existential ontology. The era of the philosophers of existence was beginning. And its monarch would be Sartre; Heidegger, his predecessor.

I gathered my notes. They all retired speaking of other themes; of intentionality, of being-towards-death, of authentic and inauthentic existence, of temporality, of throwness and, of course, of the nothing. A question that led to that so-French word, so loved by them, the French: néant. Here, I conjecture, they forgot Heidegger, and threw themselves in Sartre’s arms.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:14 AM