enowning
Saturday, December 07, 2013
 
This just in. French ready release of L'affaire part trois, but it is only expected to grow to a category 4 scandale.

Nothing in English yet. But I'm sure the usual circus of professional haters are busy preparing their condemnations to whip up diatribes. So far as I can tell the host this time around is Peter Trawny.

Le nouvel Observateur: "Cahiers noirs" : vers une nouvelle affaire Heidegger.
Le Monde: Heidegger, la preuve du nazisme par le « Cahier noir »?

Perhaps someone can post a better English rendering than the machine translations in ready reserve. I've got chores this morning.

[Update Dec. 7]
Paroles des Jours: Several articles.

[Update Dec. 9]
Brain Magazine: Heidegger a bien été antisémite.
Radio France: Du bon usage de Martin Heidegger [podcast]

 
Comments:
You may want to check out these letters addressing the issue of antisemitism in the Cahiers Noirs, by someone who has read if not all then at least part of the notebooks: http://parolesdesjours.free.fr/heideggerensorcele.pdf
 
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what's going on. Apparently Heidegger kept a secret diary called the "black notebooks", that reveals his most intimate thoughts; more private than the Beiträge. They contain nasty anti-Semitic assertions, yet Heidegger and family planned to publish these notebooks after the Gesamtausgabe. They haven't actually been published yet, and different people have heard bits and pieces.

I liked this bit from Stéphane Zagdanski: "Faye style imbeciles will parade, Tawny like apostates of thought proliferate, galvanized journalists will enjoy long print runs...the full essence of the Spectacle". I have trouble imagining Guy Debord incongruously explaining cette nouvelle affaire.
 
Well from what i understand by reading the two articles you posted and Zagdanski's letter, Heidegger wrote extensive private notes in these "Cahiers Noirs". In the order of publication he himself set these were supposed to be published after all the rest, but the executors have decided to go ahead and publish the German edition next spring. Tawny is the editor of the project which will amount to 4 volumes. Apparently mixed in with his rejection of Nazism, psychoanalysis, Judaism, Christianity and anti-semitism; are mixed in a dozen or so comments expressing typical Jewish stereotypes of the era. Nevertheless, it appears that we'll once again see a tsunami of accusations and denunciations. At least this time we'll have Heidegger's own private thoughts to judge ourselves, rather than those "Faye-style imbeciles".
Thanks for the links and all your excellent posts!
 
Thanks for the link to the Radio France program "Du Bon Usage de Heidegger." - I agree with the presenter that one has to go through Heidegger, problematic as he is morally and politically, to appreciate the world we live in today. Despite the controversies and spilt ink, many of us carry on reading him.

 
And here you go, a lengthy article in English which opens with the notebooks but quickly devolves into a summary rehashing the usual: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/derbyshire/heidegger-in-france-nazism-and-philosophy/#.Uqt4jica7ec
 
Thanks. My daily what's new summaries from google and bing, missed that one.
 
How's your German? Here's Faye on the black notebooks
 
I do not think that Faye is an "imbecile", despite some very provocative polemical remarks, necessary in my view just to get his message heard in France. Gérard Guest has released videos of several seminars where he expresses absolute surprise (!) at the existence of several passages in the Black Notebooks that cannot just be ignored or explained away, but that must be acknowledged and explained. Fédier with his blind adhesion has set the bar of imbeclilc apologetics so high that even Faye with his outlandish remarks on Heidegger"s place in our libraries (totally detachable from his historical and conceptual arguments) is far from even approaching it.
 
I try to comment on this debate from a neutral perspective here: http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/heidegger-transcendental-nazi-or-contingent-nazi/
 
We don't hear much about Fédier in English, but Faye book was translated, and there Faye does not come across as a disinterested scholar after the facts, but instead as someone who deliberately translated, paraphrased, and cited passages out of context, in such a way as to make Heidegger more supportive of the regime, than the same passages are when you read the seminars Faye cites, now that the seminars are available to all.

 
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