There is a bridge in Freiburg, in the city outskirts. What are the outskirts of the city? Are they near the city or far? Freiburg remains a small city. Anything close to it is in it. Anything far belongs to another city, or the outskirts of another city, bigger, more important. In any case, the bridge wasn’t near the center. One had to walk more than half an hour to reach it. It was very pretty. A palpitating, deep, river crossed underneath. Truthfully, it could only be like that: rivers exist to cross underneath bridges, not over them. Something that happens for a simple reason: bridges (that pretty metaphor for what should be the human condition) are built over rivers, with the generous intent of crossing them and reaching the other shore.


I had with me the Luger.

I had it in the inside pocket of my overcoat.

I took it out.

I looked at it one last time.

And I threw it in the river.

It made a solemn noise. I dare say, a historic noise.

The river took it.


Now I walk back to the city. The sky is gray and heavy. How green Freiburg is still! At least in along the path I follow. Some sidewalks are made from a dark brick that appears to have been placed in distant times. A man passes on a bicycle. He greets me. I smile and nod my head. Where is the horror that was once here? I don’t see it, but I won’t forget it for that reason.

I near a church. It’s small, humble. So humble that perhaps some good god really lives in it. It has high gates, painted green, that meet in a sharp vertex, like an arrow indicating the sky, and powerfully saying: there’s the secret. They are solid wood and ancient too. But they are somewhat swollen, and some small drops, like a light perspiration, like a caress, run down them. They smell, strongly, of humidity. Tomorrow it will rain in Freiburg.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:35 AM 0 comments

3

In May of 1976 – in the middle of the most lawless period of the Argentinian massacre – Martin Heidegger died. In his last period he had approached Zen. The majority of the Argentinian killers (especially their shock troops, which they called work groups) were anti-Semitic, Nazis, admirers of the Führer and believed they were following Germany’s glorious fight against Bolshevism.


In June of 1976 I went to present a lecture in Montevideo.

There I was called by a pair of friends. They had blown my department. A work group had gone to get me, and didn’t find me.

They destroyed everything.


I returned to Germany.

I returned to Freiburg.

My friends in Argentina (overcoming their fear, risking themselves) sent me my things they had saved. I knew Pablo Epstein had taken part. Perhaps this little triumph over fear might make him better. Would he know how much I wanted him?


In Freiburg they received me as a survivor. They knew everything that was going on in Argentina. They greeted me, also, as a brother. A brother that life preserved like a miracle, pulling him from death’s door, from thanatic rationality, from a cruelty at times lucid and bureaucratic but fed by the passion of hatred, by perversion. Torture is metaphysical, because its end is killing the soul.


They named me adjunct professor of the philosophy of history.

I remember the first word from the first class I held. How could I forget? I said:

My name is Martin Müller. I am the son of Professor Dieter Müller, who read this material in dark times.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:32 AM 0 comments

Argentina (much as Werner Rolfe wanted it) had its Fourth Reich. But it wasn’t led by Eichmann. Neither the omnipresent colonel of the people, who died six or seven months after returning to the country, unable to arrange anything, victim of contradictions, contradictions that he, from his exile, from the myth of his distance, from his fascination as forbidden object, thought he could manage and no sooner had he stepped on the chaotic territory of the nation, no sooner had he historicized himself, then history ate him up, as the next simple step of making him one more contradiction. His heart only lasted a short while and left behind a damned inheritance, that played roughly against his memory.

Leading the Fourth Reich were the usual liberal and democratic military men, the old rancher oligarchy, the new financial oligarchy, business groups, the great capitalists, and the United States. They believed, the slaughterers of the wretched great country of the South, that they were fighting the first battle of the Third World War. Henry Kissinger came by. He authorized them. A vice-admiral, I believe, told him that they would need to kill in the next three or four months or, better, disappear (this was the name of Argentinian murder), more than twenty thousand people. Mr. Kissinger gave his approval, but he had a pious gesture, perhaps linked to faith, to the Redeemer, to the crèche, to beautiful Christmas, or I don’t know what, really, shit, but he suggested: “Do it before Christmas”.

The Argentinian Reich was as rational as the German. They ended up installing 340 concentration camps. They used torture as the only form of intelligence. Intelligence was to rip the necessary information at the necessary time out of the tortured. They established rigorous relations between volts and kilos of weight. So many volts if the prisoner weighs seventy kilos. More and they would kill him. Less they wouldn’t extract the confession. Medical staff controlled this. The discarded, those from whom there was nothing else to extract, were injected with Pentothal, lifted into airplanes and thrown alive into the Rio de la Plata. When the assassins returned, solicitous clergy told them that what they had done was done in the name of God, protected by his Grace. That in the fight against evil, they told them, everything required was blessed.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:30 AM 0 comments

I returned to Argentina in 1969. The country burned. In the city of Cordoba a popular rebellion lit everyone’s revolutionary heart. Everyone, additionally, was waiting for the colonel of the people. His enemies, hating him, forbidding him, had taken him to the highest reaches of myth. The masses, the poor were with him. The working class too. Middle class youths fought in urban and rural militias, they did basic the jobs in the barrios and even in the factories, and they were taking the universities. In this history (tragic history, untellable and undecipherable, that ran madly towards the abyss) were involved Pablo Epstein and Hugo Hernandez. I could not see them much. Vertigo was eating them.

This, despite its density, is not the story I must tell in this account.


What’s more: the country’s violent climate threw me, once again, without intercession, in the flesh, into fear. I’d grown up in Freiburg. Between 1934 and 1943 I had lived my infancy, my first decisive years under the Third Reich. I could, from afar, smell the catastrophe. And this, the catastrophe, was the only thing I smelled in Argentina. The other scents, the ones I often loved, had scampered.


I was always, since becoming a teacher, with the best.

This was enough to put me on the lists of some beings they called subversives. One of the principal butchers of the dictatorship, years later, would say: “We don’t kill people, we kill subversives”.


Hugo Hernandez exiled himself in 1975. Pablo Epstein, three months before the coup d'état, he contracted (contracted?) cancer. He needed to flee, but his doctors forbid it. He went mad, almost. And this almost is worse than madness. Whoever goes mad escapes; gone. He who almost goes mad leaves a part of himself in reality. That part lets him know of the existence of the horror; desiring to find it. Know evil. Have fear. Depend on other’s information. They know nothing, because no one knows. It is only known that, night after night, hundreds of people disappear. Some can be included in the logic the terror follows. They are subversives. But soon one knows the truth, the only truth: everyone is subversive. Or no one knows what makes one a subversive.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:28 AM 0 comments

But the pistol was where it still is: on the desk; enough digression about it. I grab it and bury it angrily in the pocket of my overcoat. I go towards the table with the local wine. He didn’t want to have any with me. He didn’t want to share it. Alright, I’ll have some alone.

I looked for a cup in in the cupboard and filled it almost to overflowing. I laughed. Was it a morning of excesses for me? Yes and no. It was a morning when everything could happen and – perhaps – everything had happened. I took the cup in one or two draughts, no more. I felt dazed. It was a thinking wine, serious; a wine that threw one with violence and the immediacy of a Bacchic exaltation. I filled another cup.

And what if – let’s suppose – I took him the photo?

Here’s the other point.

I emptied, the second cup, half way, or more, or less, about.

Consider Heidegger and the photo of the naked man going to the gas chamber.

This possibility required even more courage than the first, the one with the Luger: to lock oneself in a study for days, weeks, and look at the photo, to record it, under fire, in the soul. To be that man, dream with him, imagine his life, and rebuild it, a thousand different ways. Because that life – by not being nothing – could be reconstructed as that of a German and Aryan social democrat, or as that of a communist, or as that of a homosexual, or as that of a Gypsy, or as – of course – that of a Jew. Each reconstruction would take the Master months. And every one of the days of all those months he would suffer through the ignominious death of that man, because if he invented a vocation for him, let’s say: chess player, he must know that the chess player had been annihilated in his possibility of being such and of continuing to be such. Just like all the others. If he invented him a son: that son had lost a father. If he invented him a wife: she had remained alone, widowed, forsaken. If he invented him a father: that father cried until the end the death of his son. Whatever minimal vital event he gave the man in the photo condemned him to see, there, in that photo, in that moment, the moment that uprooted him.
It was, for him, for Heidegger, an infinite torture.

But he had not taken the photo. The naked man was now on Heidegger desk, going, from there, to the gas chamber.

I emptied the cup and it fell from my hand. It shattered loudly into infinite pieces that scattered across the room.

Then someone opened a door.

It wasn’t the door Heidegger had gone out through.

It was the other one, the door into the Master’s study.

A loud, angry voice, crossed with indignation. With rash, excessive indignation, it said:

What are you waiting for to leave?

It was Elfriede Heidegger.

An old woman, possessed by such an intense vitality, that, I dare assert, I believed impossible, or fictitious; only literary, so to speak.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:26 AM 0 comments

I can’t say there was a single expression on Heidegger’s face. Not even a wince. Perhaps, very subtly, a dis-tension, some form of relief. He knew, as I knew, that everything was over. He pushed back his chair, dragging it noisily, and stood up. He did not look at me. The god of philosophy did not deign to rest his eyes on me. He sighed, I believe, although barely, either annoyed, or tired. He turned, offering me his back, and walked heavily to the door. I thought, honestly thought, that there he would pause, look at me, and say something. Didn’t I merit a sentence? Didn’t Dieter Müller merit one? He didn’t do it. He didn’t stop. He didn’t say anything. He only put his hand on the latch, grasped it firmly, turned it, opened the door, a heavy door, rustic (in it beat the same soul as in the German soil, with a univocal peasant purity), and went out.

It’s worth pausing here. How did he close the door, violently? Did he slam it, could one say, firmly? That is, without violence, without slamming, but assured of his decision, weakly? As if missing the conviction to leave? As if he wanted to leave it open to return? No way. That door, Heidegger closed it, and in a way so as to close it forever.


Solitary, there, in that unique instant, unthinkable and unrepeatable, I was alone in Martin Heidegger’s room. I walked – to say it as he deserves to have it said – so as to wander without allowing a single nook, a single hidden angle to miss my attention. Nothing stood out. Nothing took your breath away. Nothing was exaggerated. It was the room of a rural philosopher, of a man who had made agrarian the first and last of his refuges.

What did I come to look for here?

What did I expect from him?

Or more so: what did I want?

These questions already have their answers. I won’t formulate them again.

And if – let’s suppose – he stopped before leaving turned and said: your father sacrificed himself in vain?

And if – let’s suppose – he said: you are insolent?

And what if – let’s suppose – he was carrying the Luger?

There’s a point to this.

It would have been distinct. There were two modes. One: He left the room with the Luger; I remained alone, here, just as now. In ten or fifteen minutes I hear a shot. Heidegger had killed himself. Two: He left the room with the Luger; I waited one, two hours and I left. Heidegger, disturbed in his soul, meditated his decision. The time for that decision could not be measured, much less supposed. I might take months, years. But Heidegger had, in his power, my father’s Luger, demanding from him. I want to say – precisely: I had accepted taking it. He had accepted its constant demand, its perennial temptation, its discomforting nature becoming more uncomfortable, increasing with each passing year. Without giving him the mercy of forgiveness, given that he would put the pistol in such a visible place that he would be condemned to view it every day and every day ask (himself): Why is it there? Whose gun is it? Ah, yes: it’s Dieter Müller’s. That imbecile who shot himself for what others had done. That imbecile that every day, every blessed or godforsaken day I see that pistol, questions me, in totality, through it. From the absolute act he constructed through it.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:22 AM 0 comments

2

Days later I said goodbye to the university authorities. Perhaps generously, but sincerely, they again spoke of my father; of his silences, of what perplexed him, of his doubts, probably huge and painful. Of an assuredness (because the certainty wasn’t in him) he projected with a hand extended towards dialogue, the need to converse with others, to change ideas: he never thought he had the truth. And when the other happened, on the contrary, the belief he had, he never thought it was his, properly, but instead of others or another, as he was only a disciple that, by applying himself as such, could teach. He never knew that his passion (authentic, pure) for Heidegger had made of him one of the most impeccable and true expositors. He never knew that his lectures in France were appreciatively commented. And that many confessed learning there, for the first time, seriously, a text like Being and Time.

That esteem, now, extended to his son, who, happy and, why not, proud, received it. They asked me to return. That university was the place for me and even my home. That I, don’t forget, they said convinced, almost passionately “you were born here, Professor Müller”. Someone surprisingly said:

The smells, the winds and even the smell of the water and wood of Freiburg, were the first certitudes given you by nature and life.


He was professor of literature, already old, with a cane, bags under his eyes, opaque eyes, very sad life, not doubt a companion of my father. We gave each other a long hug.


I took a train to Berlin.

I looked, through the entire trip, through the window.
Country houses. Peasants. Little towns. Workers. Bankers. Women, white and blonde, or robust, with very black hair and clear eyes. Factories.

Germany.


What are you going to do?

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:20 AM 0 comments

Master Heidegger, examine carefully this photograph. This is the last image of a human being my father saw. Look at that man. Yes, come on, don’t delay. Take the photo. It ennobles you to want to do it. Don’t look at it from a distance. Don’t look at it with disgust. Hold it like this. In your right hand, which I now notice, shakes. What do you see? What is that? Is it a Jew? Is it a Gypsy? Is it a German Social Democrat? Is it a Pole? Is it a Russian? It’s garbage, Professor. Garbage. They’ve turned him into garbage. Give me that photo. You’ve had a good look. Now you now, partly, why I came. I came to show you that photo. My father, in the letter he left me, described that man with admirable and painful precision, occasionally cruel; but cruel, let’s be clear, towards himself. My father, in that letter, the one he wrote to me painfully, says to that man: You are trash and will die with the garbage. I ask your forgiveness. Before you I am guilty. I am what they have made of you. I am that garbage you are, or worse. Because I am an accomplice, that believed himself innocent, that chose not to know, ignoring what in my name, in our name, in the name of Germany, was being done to you. I shall die, then, with you, as garbage and in the garbage, without redemption.


We’ve finished, Master Heidegger. The Luger was never there to threaten you. After looking at that photo (the one we’ve together, you and I, just seen) my father took the Luger. It had belonged to his father. With it, that honest German patriot from the First World War had killed a Lieutenant who refused to enter French territory. With it my father made the last decision of his life. Dieter Müller, Professor Heidegger, that minor philosopher, when he learned of the monstrosity of the Reich’s crimes, chose a single photograph from the thousands they showed him. He took it to his room, and looked at his victim for a long time. He decided that one, a single poor naked creature, was enough. He grabbed the Luger and blew off his head.

Now, then, while, slowly, I push the Luger towards you and leave it, resting, before you, waiting for your final decision or for your frozen, absolute disdain, I put to you the question I came here to ask.

What are you going to do?

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:18 AM 0 comments

Let’s speak of evil. Everything leads us to this uncomfortable, ineffable concept. The beast is within us. Let’s not lose time. Let’s leave aside all theological elucidation. Or politics: Hobbes, Master, man is the wolf of man, but there’s something worse than evil. And it has just been said by the little Argentinian poet: insolent evil. I’ll tell you what I understand by it.


Don’t you want to rest? Are you following me or are you already tired. Look, here we have the good local wine of the region. What if we had a drink? What if we got drunk enough to face what is coming? Yes, I know. I’ve moved away from the Luger, but you won’t do anything. Watch me, I walk freely around the room. Can you reach, given the ambulatory cause, the Luger? Don’t try it. I’ll reach it first, from wherever I am, even if I hide under that chair. I’m younger. And I know, more than you, what I want. Besides, a man of your genius would have already figured out the truth, at this point, unconcealable: I’m not here to kill you, or to hurt you. Why, then, would you so something like that to me? You have nothing to fear, nothing to defend yourself from; only from one thing, only from an image, but no, not yet. I insist: shall we have a glass of this good and noble German wine? You won’t even answer that? Such an innocent question also merits your ontological silence?

Let’s continue.


Let us speak of evil. Or not, of something more specific: of insolent evil. When is evil insolent? When it is humiliating, or offensive; when it seeks to break man, to break subjectivity, to eliminate all possible identity. The end of all violence is in offending the person. Offend it until it is converted to a thing; into a hated thing, worthless, in the garbage. A man is a man when he has a center and that center is his identity. That identity is all that a man has done to be who he is. It is his most valuable thing he has because it’s his most genuine work: himself. The insolence of evil attacks that self-evaluating flank. As long as we believe we are worth something we won’t allow ourselves to be murdered like animals. As long as we believe we are worth something still, rebellion will appear as our most genuine, saving possibility. But no: Evil seeks to destroy all that makes of a man . . . a man. From here on, regard his insolence. Destroy. Break. Humiliate. Torture. Show them in their absolute nakedness. Show them, man, women, children, as scraps. Stripped of their clothes, scrawny, terrified, they can only cause pity or the infamous but devastating laughter of the executioners. It ennobles you if you want to do it. Don’t look at it from far away. Don’t look at it with disgust. Hold it like this.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:15 AM 0 comments

Do you know what Sartre claims? Do you know where to find the humanism of the colonized? “To shoot down a European”, he says, “is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man”. What a deadly impulse in so few words. Is it like that? So powerful, so invincible is that wish, the death wish. What can Eros do confronted by it? You know what I’m talking of. You have read Freud.


I don’t have more to tell you. I feel without strength. Now Marcuse has already written you an irrefutable letter that you, incorrectly, thought you’d refuted. Now Paul Celan visited your hut. This one, we are in now. In which you had the courtesy of receiving me. Professor Heidegger, could you have done something more before Paul Celan? He was a great poet, a victim of Auschwitz, an exquisite mind. Why did you not embrace him? You could have said to him, let’s see, something so simple. You could have said: “Dear Celan, I don’t know what they did to you in Auschwitz, whatever it was, it must have been horrible, and for that, for that what they did to you I ask your forgiveness”. Oh, I feel like an idiot telling you this! You must laugh at me. Only the nearness of the Luger keeps you from launching the chuckle struggling to get out. In the end, Master: so many want you; those that ask you nothing! Your disciple, and occasional great love, Hannah Arendt, philosopher, Jew, genius, did she darken your days with reproaches and insidious questions? No, she guarded her assets. She keep you from selling the original manuscript to Being and Time at a certain time, short of course, of stretched resources. She has always visited you. All her theories are based on yours. She’s an intrepid anti-Marxist. She has even invented that theory of the two totalitarianisms: Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. She criticizes the war in Vietnam; how not to? But that diabolical dualism that darkened the 20th century (that of the totalitarian states) is precisely what North American businessmen need to win the cold war. And they’re almost there.

Besides, all of France comes to your succor, Master! Perhaps you’ll need me to explain some of this to you. You live here, in the Black Forest, somewhat at a remove. Listen, Professor Heidegger: you glory is being reborn and will perdure. They have forgiven your Nazism. Your disciple, Jean Beaufret (after all: you dedicated the Letter on Humanism to him!) has made sublime the art of evading proofs. If you were a Nazi, it is hard to prove it. You had some uncomfortable moments. That issue of Les Temps Modernes, Marcuse’s letters, that text by Habermas on the new edition of your Introduction to Metaphysics, in 1953, where he reproaches you for not having suppressed the passage where you speak of the greatness and truth of National Socialism. You, Heidegger, suppress something by Heidegger. There’s the text, gentlemen, just as I said it in 1935. Or do you think I am a coward who erases today what he said yesterday? I am with you. I congratulate you. Why would a man strike something in which he still believes? For that reason, I don’t ask you for words. Or I won’t ask you for them at the definitive moment.

No one, in 1968, remembers your Nazism. Even Sartre, in the Critique, says: “The Heidegger question is too complex for me to address here”, and no more. It’s over. You ascend to the stars, Stronger than in the forties and fifties. They don’t consider you, today, a philosopher of existence. Marxism is falling, Master. And it is necessary to kill or, to put it more tersely, replace Marx. Who if not Heidegger? Who if not Heidegger and Nietzsche? Here is a new figure in the history of the Spirit. French intellectuals will make you into the solid foundation of a non-Marxist left. The times are benevolent for you. Once again France, as always, is at Germany’s feet, and now, more than ever, at Heidegger’s feet. I’ll name names: Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida. I stop here. With three or four of your texts I could explain the assumptions of all of them. I’ll start with Being and Time, of course. Then on to What is Metaphysics? Then with your enormous and brilliant book on Nietzsche. Then the Letter on Humanism, and I’ll end with Identity and Difference. There’s also that difficult work on the event. The one you worked on towards the end of the thirties. Deleuze burns his eyes deciphering it, and from there to Nietzsche and from there to Spinoza. Two things are common to all: they forgot history, the class struggle, humanism, and the subject. They spat a thousand times on Sartre; whom they barely name. And they spit, whenever they have the chance, on Marx. They have sheltered – as you taught them – in the domicile of Being, language. And from there I don’t expect them to leave for a long while. In the meantime, the Soviet Union falls and North American universities receive them like heroes. One of them, brilliant, took the concept of Destruktion from Being and Time and transformed it into deconstruction. He’s called Derrida and his first texts are a triumph, Professor. Above all, allow me to insist, it is in the North American cloisters where this triumph occurs. What is happening, Master? One of the pincers falls. And the other, through your French commentators (all, of course, very creative and talented) receives you with outstretched arms. Very simple: they replaced Marx with Heidegger. You become, in this manner in the most important philosopher of the 20th century. You are transformed, Master Heidegger, into one of the hieroglyphics, one of the labyrinths, to use this, I would say, Borgean word, most fascinating and terrifying in this century, bloodiest, with the most cadavers produced, on a mass scale, through technology, in the history of humanity. Might one reason for this be (and I know I say an uncomfortable phrase that I should perhaps silence) that the most important of its thinkers was a brilliant and active philosophical-political nexus for National Socialism. Quite something that 20th century, wasn’t it? You know what he said about it, the thin bard, with the huge nose and wretched mortality that I got excited about comparing with you. With you master, nothing less! Picture it, the little lean Discépolo said that the 20th century . . . Let me think. So much philosophy makes me forget a tango that is a treatise on existential metaphysics! Yes! It said: “That man was and will be filth I already know, in 510 and in 2000 too, but in the 20th century it’s such a downpour of insolent evil that no one can deny it”. Insolent evil Professor Heidegger! What a poet, what a concept! What if we talked, to finish this, of Evil, and what if we talked, even worse, of insolent evil. Are you bothered starting from Discépolo? Not I. I told you: I’m Argentinian.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:11 AM 0 comments

I don’t want to tire you. I don’t want to overwhelm you. And, I promise you, I will avoid all judgment. I did not come to put you in a philosophical Nuremburg. My journey towards you is a journey towards my father. It is him I want to know. He left me a chaotic, overwhelming letter. I had to gather too many papers fallen in his study. I had to order that chaos. I think he wrote and threw on the floor each page, which he would never see again. It took me weeks to order that text. I have been reading it for years.

I rewrote entire paragraphs. I corrected sloppiness. I tried to make him transparent, but with great care. I never proposed to improve him. The truth that beat in the letter was his, it belonged to him. When I say that I tried to intensify the transparency of the text, I did it for myself, to understand him better, to learn from him.


Believe me; I didn’t come here to disrespect you nor to cloud this beautiful morning with a theme that, I know, has darkened your life, in spite of your pride, in spite of your stubbornness, or perhaps because of them. I’ve forgotten some of my ironies. They express the Argentinian I’ve decided to be. Why? For the smells. For the city. Because I’ve never got lost in it, nor could I. It’s mine, it’s a part of me, I am part of it. I know, by only looking at the sky or the clouds in the morning, or the stars and moon at night, if it will rain or not the next day. I have friends. I have students. I have, above all, two young disciples that devour philosophy books, even the hardest, with a worthy passion. Worthy of what, Master? Let’s use a colon and state it: worthy of Germans. There is, in them, much German. One is named Pablo Epstein, the other Hugo Hernández. Above all they read Hegel and Marx. A Sartre, I believe, they already read in maternity ward. Now they’re on the French. Always the French, Master. With Althusser. With Foucault. They say they are not interested in reading you. I tell them they’ve never stopped reading you; that they read you from their first Sartre. And they read you in the structuralists that flower in these times. I have given them classes on a long, at times dry and difficult book: the Critique of Dialectical Reason, by the French hack, as my father called him. You will never read that book. Really, already all the new French geniuses have stopped reading it, or they’ve ignored it, or they intend to destroying it. Sartre, in 1961, wrote his Letter on Humanism. He wrote it in someone else’s book. He wrote it as a prologue for the book by a young Algerian, a Negro from the colonies who studied at the Sorbonne and wrote his violent book in the language of the colonizer. Have you heard of Franz Fanon? Have you heard of the prologue Sartre wrote for him? It’s a master work. Brief, brutal, brilliant. That genial writer (you know it: Nausea is the height of philosophical literature) no longer speaks from Europe. He speaks, now, to Europeans. “We were the subject of history, now we are its object”. What a violent change in point of view, isn’t it, Master? Listen. And, above all, don’t be amazed by my memory. How not to know all and every one of the words from a text one has read hundreds of times? The Master Sartre continues to say so to Europeans: “You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new continents’, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the threat of a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.” Did you know this text, Master, maybe? Maybe, I also annoy you. But listen to this sentence. Look at me, please. Look at me and listen: “The European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters”. Hear me, by God! What I tell you now comes from me. Dieter Müller said it too. Let’s look at the question. Or not, not “the question”; these aren’t questions. Let’s look at the horror, the totality of the horror, not through our eyes, but through the eyes of the victims. That’s the point of view, Master. There ethics acquires its substance. Our victims know us through their wounds and their chains: that makes their testimony irrefutable. They only have to show us what we have done to them to recognize what we have done to ourselves. So that we know, now, at the end of the journey, what we really are. Being has unveiled itself, Professor. That is what Being has done with us. This is what we have done with Being. We haven’t forgotten Being. Neither has Being withdrawn nor does it have where to dwell, for its own protection. We are, always, the “there” of being. But it is our victims that look at us. And Being, from that unique point of view, is guilty. We are, Being and us that incarnated it, killers.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 5:06 AM 0 comments

In Freiburg, territory in which not everyone forgets, the memory of minor player Dieter Müller is dearer, more respected than that of the eminent Martin Heidegger, who was Rektor, in 1933, and that still, in 1935, spoke of the truth and greatness of National Socialism. Further, from what I can gather, many remember my father’s obedience as an exercise in tameness, absolutely devoid of creativity. I’ve been told that he monotonously recited his lessons, as if bored, and, undoubtedly, distant, very far from any partisan passion. Perhaps it’s been idealized, from wishing to forgive him, to go on liking the very dear Dieter Müller. I say this because he, Dieter, judged himself more severely and there is no one better than him to judge the passion or apathy of his classes. We shouldn’t, at this point, lighten my father’s responsibility, as that would make his death another mistake, pointless; an excess of the good from Dieter, who never understood anything very well. No, I deny myself. If Dieter Müller judged himself so harshly it is because his classes were not (or weren’t always) apathetic, boring. There was, I know, passion in them. And there had been in those luminous moments when he could impede the crude aspirations of the Rosenberg Office with the ontological plans of Master Heidegger, whom Dieter admired and understood as few others did. Because my father, Professor Heidegger, that minor philosopher, was one of your best students and one of best and most rigorous expositors of your thought. One reaches those heights, your logos, in Freiburg, he made his way between the obstacles of partisan bureaucracy and he lit up with the ontological passion of communitarian Dasein. You had convinced him since he was very young. Since the Rektorat Speech and even since the final paragraphs of Being and Time, Dieter Müller was a National Socialist just like Heidegger. Tame, fearful (Who wouldn’t be in the middle of the Third Reich?) he taught the Viking Catechism of the Rosenberg Office. But, whenever he could, he inserted amongst that clumsiness his Master’s ontology. There, without a doubt, he lit up. And there, his students, much as Jürgen Habermas says of yours, professor, they transformed into officers. Don’t get up. Erase that violent shine from your eyes. I won’t mention Habermas again.

There is a point that good old Jürgen grants you. You see, if I insist with him it is to tell you something, at least, he’s conceded to you. He confesses or admits that interpreters after the event, of your compromise with National Socialism – some are so decided to condemn you – cannot know if in a situation similar to yours they wouldn’t have fallen for the same. Gosh, Master! What more can you ask from Habermas? He’s a German that knows deeply what the Third Reich was and what terror is. Who can know how they would have reacted before the terror of Germany in 1933? But Jürgen knows what he is saying and why he is saying it. He’s not demanding your bravery, heroism during the years of death. I saw him a couple years ago. He told me, and he said so with anger, with pain but without pity, “What annoys me”, he said.

What really annoys me, emphasized Habermas, is that will of iron, that stubbornness of Heidegger’s, that obstinate, Olympic sized pride; that stubbornness that offends us all, that decision to not confess, after the end of the Nazi regime, after the explicit, absolute knowledge of the atrocities, not even with a single phrase, to his enormous mistake, so pregnant with political consequences.

We were in Paris. I lived in that city (that you all so enjoyed and punished) between 1962 and 1964. There, on a café table, an autumn afternoon, warm, so terse it allowed us to swallow and speak in truth, and watch the Parisians move about with their carefree pride, with that pride that finds its highest point when they judge the French one talks, as if we should, all, be impeccable in the art of the language that purrs. There, Habermas concluded:

Listen, young Müller (Habermas too would call me young Müller), what’s annoying is the repression of his own guilt.

What a concept, Professor Heidegger! Is your silence the repression of your own guilt?

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 5:01 AM 1 comments

Excuse me for comparing you to a popular poet.

Popular or not, he was a great poet.

And you, perhaps as few in this century, know the divine condition of the poetic word. I have read your lecture on Hölderlin. The one you gave in Rome, in the Rome of the Duce. In 1936. The one you gave the day you ran into Karl Löwith and didn’t concede him, that brilliant and Jewish disciple, the compassion of removing your armband with the swastika.

I have read it more than once, master Heidegger. It is unique, it borders on the sublime.

Couldn’t you, you too, be inextricable?


Once again: 1951. I decide to seek Heidegger, get to you. I want to tell him something. Tell him how my father died. My first idea is – although apparently it is not – practical. I don’t ask myself if I’ll travel towards you by ship, airplane or in a canoe. Crossing the Atlantic, anyone can do that. Afterwards, arriving in Germany and traveling to Freiburg are not impossible feats. The impossible is to reach you. That’s my practical question. I don’t delay in solving it. I will be a great philosopher, or, if it is enough, an important philosopher; enough, so as to reach one of your seminars.

It wouldn’t be hard for me. I grew up in the spiritual climate of your philosophy. As a child my father took me to some of your lectures. I am the son of a philosopher. I am German. The son, furthermore, of a philosopher who was on the faculty at Freiburg and who is remembered for his caution, his soberness, and for an early withdrawal from Nazi Germany, negating or, at least, fed up with it. Let’s see a simple, yet powerful, aspect of the question: the party monthly dues. My father, by leaving, in 1943, stopped paying them. You – and how much I reproach you this, Master – paid them until the end.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:59 AM 0 comments

However, let’s return here to our Cervantes, “in reality he liked symmetries”. Much as the somber author of Being and Time found the dawn and the hope in a new historical happening, our thin and sad bard, our man who only knew how to find refuge in shady places, destructive with alcohol, found the dawn in a smiling, populist, military demagogue, that wanted, contrariwise, the poor, and came to use them, I don’t know, who handed out access with more generosity than anyone in that southern country, who intertwined himself with a passionate woman, with an obscure history, with an actress, with a resentful and ambitious woman who dedicated her life to avenge herself on the rich and to protect the poor until cancer caught up with her and delivered her over to the myth of those that die young. The bard was the frayed and popular philosopher of the colonel of the people. They handed him the radio and he spoke over it overflowing with infinite ingenuity. He believes, Professor Heidegger, he believed and wanted to believe. He believed so much, that later, too late, he realized that only he alone spoke on the radio. No one answered him. No one could answer him, because the colonel was authoritarian. On his people spoke and no one else. When, with the fall of the colonel, the others spoke, what a spectacle, Professor Heidegger, the festival of vengeance, the macabre dance of hatred. They forbade the name of the colonel and made his wife’s cadaver disappear. Discépolo they left alone. He died in 1951, barely after his enlightening chats. But, isn’t it noticeable? The poet believed and when he believed he didn’t imagine a single question. Enthusiastic, vital like never before, he made himself the chatterbox of a regime that persecuted dissidents. The dissidents – who were ferocious – killed him: they sent him threatening letters, with his records broken in pieces, insulting him, and they even spat on him in the street. He believed and believed wrongly. He came out of the shadows, out of anxiety, out of alcohol and being towards death. He put himself in front of a microphone, which someone handed him, and he spoke of social triumphs, public housing, new homes for workers, paid vacations, of the beautiful music of a good meal. But the man that handed him the microphone was a wretch, the Secretary of the Press and Media, the little Goebbels of the regime. And every truth that wretch enshrined turned to poison. That poison killed the poet of our great tangos.

You too were mistaken when you believed you’d seen the light, when a faith was born in you, when you sheltered your terrors under a great historical movement. Do you know the alleged absolute of error? Action. You and Discépolo – in 1927 – didn’t act; you weren’t militants for any cause, except for anxiety, about death, or about nothing. When you believed seeing the light, you dressed your lives in mourning forever. Discépolo died. You chose silence. Isn’t silence a form of death? Doesn’t your silence create an opening, Master, and immense territory from which your words will be forever absent?

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:57 AM 0 comments

It was 1951 and in my country (I continue owing you an explanation: which leads me to anticipate the word country with the possessive my when I speak of Argentina) there were elections. I’ll reach for again – and I don’t think for the last time – to Borges. He wrote: “In reality he liked symmetries”. The symmetry I will show you may be intolerable to you. It’s made between you and a tango poet. Yes, Master, tango, the masterly work my country has produced and, I suspect, will never surpass. Two years before the appearance of Being and Time, in 1925, a thin bard, sickly, with a big nose and an ingenuity and bottomless desperation writes a tango that he calls: Qué vachaché [Whatcha gonna do]. Don’t look at me like that: the first two words I don’t say in the language of Goethe and Hölderlin and you almost blow a valve. I propose you savor the expression: Qué vachaché. It is not Castilian, perhaps not Argentinian either. It is lunfardo. It’s the brawling and whoring language of the lower classes. Our national bard resorts to it, because to those classes, above all to them and the middle classes, he wants to express himself. It is a case – the phrase, no? – of a resigned gesture. It means: what is one to do? What should we do about it? It means, above all: nothing more can be done nor does it make sense to try. Discépolo, that’s the name of the desperate, existential poet, I’m talking about, had very few things. And hope was what was in shortest supply for him. The tango is from 1925. And it was, in Argentina, a period so disturbed, so extravagant and without direction like it was here, in Germany, under the Weimar Republic. In a few years, a local Führer would seize power. Discépolo didn’t believe in that Führer and continued with his unreturnable letters. Listen to this one: “Esta noche me emborracho bien, me mamo bien mamao. . .pa no pensar” [Tonight I’m really getting drunk, I’ll suckled until I’m well suckled. . .to not think]. You like my Castilian. I speak it cleanly. No external accent taints my speech. If I chose German, I speak like a German, as you speak it. If I chose Castilian, I speak like an Argentinian. Like Borges speaks. I know that to a great language teacher like you (someone who has said that there, in language, dwells Being) will be interested in this exotic scene I’m handing you: the voice of a tango poet. To speak plainly, Master: Discépolo was the Heidegger of 1927, that of Being and Time, that somber text, thrown to the possibilities of the possible, death, the expressionist text, that text about anxiety, about nothing, the text bred by the lack of horizons of that republic, that so frightened you, that of Weimar, the weak, the impotent, incapable of braking the biggest fear of good German bourgeoisie, Bolshevism. Discépolo has nothing to do with that. He wasn’t a communist, but wasn’t afraid of it. He lived surrounded by social writers, by feverish readers of Russian novelists. To whom, those novelists, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and even Gorki, he owed so much. But life overwhelmed him. Regard the climate of brutal nihilism found in the phrase I’ve just quoted to you. I’ll say it in German. I’ll explain it. It is a poem, of course. A man, leaving a cabaret, sees the woman that, ten years earlier, was his madness, his great love. She, now, has deteriorated because . . . Why, Master, why might that be? By existence. He sees her old, worn out. He sees, in her image, not only the passage of time; also death. That woman, the one he loved, soon will die, in the poverty and cruelty of a definitive evil. To see her is to see one’s self. Also for him, time has passed, and passed badly, ruining him. How damaged he is by the encounter. How painful is it to see die what one loved. How painful it is to die, to die alone, because what one loved is no more. He pauses: his thoughts poison him. He decides to get drunk. Get well drunk, without limits. Why? To not think, Master; to elude our trade, philosophy. Because philosophy, thinking, is, at times, so intolerable, that it kills.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:53 AM 0 comments

Let’s return to the greatest living writer of my country. The first sentence in Foucault’s book is: “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges”. He lies. His book arose from reading you, from copying you and – through you – Nietzsche. But if I return to this, I’ll get off the path again. We already have the name of the great Argentinian writer. Foucault has offered it to us on a silver and gold and jeweled tray of universal consecration. Professor Heidegger, for an Argentinian author, when a stellar French philosopher confesses to having written, for him, a book, is to reach glory without way stations. From now on let Borges be Borges, let him be our universal writer. Of you – as with so much else – he knows little and, I would say, less than nothing. But, genial teacher of contrivance, what he doesn’t know he invents, and what he can’t invent he annihilates with some irony, an art he is no less genial at than he is in that other, that of contrivance. Of you, I insist, he knows nothing. But he has said: “The only thing Heidegger has done is to invent an incomprehensible dialect of German”. See! He’s made you smile; him, not I; his ingenuity, not mine.

Now the adjective, our Cervantes has an unbound passion for adjectives and adverbs. He uses and abuses them. On one page he writes: “Interminable prairie”. On the other he writes: “Inexhaustible prairie”; all forgivable. Who does have their defects, or who doesn’t pay a price for their obsessions. That obsession to add adjectives leads him to deliver himself many, but there was one – of those he uses most frequently – that I want to quote to you. Listen, Master: inextricable. Often times I ask myself why our Cervantes abuses this adjective. Because he is an Argentinean and Argentina is that: it is inextricable. That is to say, tangled, ambiguous, troubling, muddied and, finally, irresoluble. And so today, Professor Heidegger, on this clear, fresh morning, you have before you an Argentinian. What does that mean? He who speaks to you is an irresoluble Dasein.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:49 AM 0 comments

You lighting your pipe calms me. If you light it, it is because you have decided to listen to me. I have, I now know, time. The time it’ll take you to smoke that pipe. As you see, gestures speak. The signifiers hurt. Acts can scream. But let’s speak plainly: the most powerful signifier in this room, between you and I, is that Luger. And who has it ready to hand is I, not you. I knew very well where to put it, where it would be security to me, and a temptation to you. Is it, for you, a temptation? Does anyone imagine Master Heidegger throwing himself on a Lugar and drilling the arrogant, insolent son of one of his old disciples? I assume, on the other hand, something: more than a temptation to attack, the possibility that the Lugar gives you is that of defense. If I decide to grab it, you by chance arrive before. Only that would push you to action. Defending yourself from me. You don’t yet know if I’m crazy. We’ve worked together for months. You know all the aspects of my thought, except for my internal chaos. If it triumphs, I’ll grab the Luger. Or I’ll try. In that case you must deliver yourself to action. To find out if you’ll arrive first.

Let’s not be dramatic: none of that will be necessary. I don’t want to kill you. I want to keep you there, where you are now, sitting, listening to me, smoking you pipe. Let’s be clear: I was wrong conceding to you that the duration of your pipe guaranteed the duration of our encounter. The Luger guarantees it. It decides and it’s mine. Ergo, professor: I decide, because I – even if I don’t want to – can kill you. You – despite desiring my massive destruction – don’t have the material forces to bring it about. Thing being what they are, I propose that this – everything that’ll happen now between you and I – be a dialogue. If it not: if it’s only a monologue, and mine, it will be because of your silence. This Luger is not there to keep you from talking. Its purpose is another. We will, together, unveil it.

I decided to reach you three years after the death of my father. It was November 1951. There were elections that year in my country. Well done, Master, finally a gesture, an expression. Did you notice? You arched your eyebrows. You’ll have thought: elections in Germany in 1951? No, in Argentina. My country is Argentina. I arrived there at the age of ten. We are now in 1968. I’ve been living in that distant land for 24 years; distant to you, not to the Argentinians. For them, you’ll see, not only is it the center of the West, just as Germany was for you in 1935. They don’t even raise the possibility that it is not the center. Whether that of the West, East, of Greenland or Antarctica, it is the center of the world. They are the champions of staring at your own navels. They have a navel, and that great navel is the world. There, in that irrefutable center, they live, unique, misunderstood and ununderstood; neither Indians, nor blacks, nor half castes; nor Spanish, nor Italian, nor Jews nor German. In summary, they are neither Americans nor Europeans; indecipherable, unknowable, a conspiracy of hieroglyphics and dementia, perpetual adversaries of the clear and distinct. There is an adjective used by one of your greatest living writers. Surely you’ll know, the writer, not the adjective. He’s just been taken a definitive celebrity, a new genius of French culture, which devotes itself, as you and I know, to producing stars. In 1966 appeared the unavoidable text from Foucault: The Order of Things. In the context of this conversation, and for me, can I ask you if you’ve read it, or at least, you were aware of its existence? All the philosophical community is reading it. It brings a novelty: the death of man. It found some inspiration in Nietzsche, but above all (just as, improperly, all the so called French structuralist left does) from you. Foucault read with great care your Letter on Humanism, where, there yes, you, who had been doing it for some time, kill man by killing his most essential product: humanism. Wow! I didn’t come to talk with you about this. I don’t have time for detours.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:46 AM 0 comments

1

Finally Ahab confronts Moby Dick. Don’t be offended: I know you are not a whale. You are to me: I have been looking for you for years. Trying to be where I am now; sitting, in front of you, with your celebrated, rustic table between us. Aren’t you a whale? Aren’t you Moby Dick? If you were, you shouldn’t be offended. Do you know what Moby Dick is? Do you care to know? It’s a brilliant doorstop of a book by a writer from that country, the one you hate: the one of commercialism, the one that’s completely forgotten Being and transformed the world into business. But that novel, believe me, is a peak of thinking. I’ll dare go further: Moby Dick, that ineffable white whale, well might express one of the modalities of Being. Or, while restrict ourselves to Being itself. I know how to think, Master. I can deduce what’s loose in my premises, of any that I might establish. If you were my Moby Dick, if I have spent years seeking you, questioning myself with your questions, obsessed enough to penetrate into the most secret folds. If I have spent years meditating on the question I will pose to you when – like now – I can. If all my life was fed on the desire to nail that harpoon, that question, in you. If you are the origins of my acts, the sense of my questions, the final objective of all my searches, you are, to me, Moby Dick. You, Master Heidegger, are, to me, the Being. All your philosophy is based on the art of questioning. The question of Being, the question modern man has forgotten, the question Descartes wiped out on making man the subjectum, the question that techno capitalism, thrown into conquering and manipulating beings, has hidden, hiding, in turn, the Earth, that question is philosophy’s project. I’m not here to ask myself about Being. I regret disillusioning you. And, perhaps worse, I regret bothering you, seriously bothering you. My goal, Master, is not the question of Being. Being is there, at hand, in sight. The Being is you. My opportunity is unique and won’t be wasted. My purpose, no doubt insolent, is to ask the Being. Not to question him. I would never dare. I come before you in an open state. I only bring two things. That Luger pistol I’ve placed on your work table. That pistol that you’ve looked at strangely, or with annoyance. Not with a hint of fear. And the question. I am the Dasein that incurs the absolute heresy of not asking about Being, but instead of interrogating you, of laying on you a single, unique question. The following, Professor Heidegger:

What do you think you will do?

I suppose your answer, in case you deign to speak to me (so far an unlikely event), would be:

About what, young Müller? Your question includes two verbs that are, I would say, excessive: thinking and doing. Do you know, I ask myself, what you are asking? Do you know, young Müller?

You say to me young Müller. I hear that, I like it. I am, for sure, young Müller. I am, for sure, the son of old Müller, whom you so warmly remember.

I remember your father, of course, you told me leaving a class, an effective professor.

And then you said something that, if you hadn’t said it, you wouldn’t be who you are:

But a minor philosopher.

You did not say mediocre, and I thanked you. In the end, for you, even Husserl and Jaspers were minor philosophers, above all Jaspers.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:42 AM 0 comments

From him I ask forgiveness. From that human scrap that walks towards the gas chamber. From that dead man that goes to die. From that being with enormous eyes that see nothing. From that poor blind man, from that victim, I ask forgiveness. I know some things I did, or didn’t do, that I said or didn’t say, that I knew but chose to ignore, I know that certain ideas I cowardly flung, without questioning them, without considering the results, without asking myself their purpose, took you to this place, where you are now, alone, naked, a few steps from death premeditated with ferocious rationality, alone, with no possible identity, given that I don’t know nor is it possible to know, if you are a Jew, Polish, gypsy, enemy of the Reich or a thin, dirty injured dog, eaten by plague fleas. Naked among uniformed men, there you are. To them, the uniform gives them identity, power. Your nakedness is anonymous. Your identity doesn’t exist. You are trash and will die with the garbage. I ask your forgiveness. Before you I am guilty. I am what they have made of you. I am that garbage you are, or worse. Because I am an accomplice, who believed himself innocent, who chose not to know, ignoring what in my name, in our name, in the name of Germany, was being done to you. I shall die, then, with you, as garbage and in the garbage, without redemption.


Nothing else, Martin.

I have nothing to add.

Still, I will allow myself something: ask your forgiveness.

My son, forgive me.

Perhaps the severity with which I’ve decided to judge and punish my action will help you to do so.

Dieter Müller, your father.
Buenos Aires, November, 1948.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 1:00 AM 0 comments

The showers.

The photograph I have before me shows a man taken towards them. They don’t drag, nor push him. He goes, towards death, alone and naked. His virile member is visible; a white dot between excessive pubes, disproportionate from the bad quality of the print, which accentuates blacks and grays; especially blacks. He is a man so thin, so thin that, technically, he isn’t one any longer. He is a thing. Werner Rolfe is wrong. They didn’t kill Jews, or gypsies, or enemies of the Reich. It is impossible to make out the condition of the man in the photograph. He eyes were huge. Something that leads to a mistake, to the belief that he looks with terror. No, he no longer looked. The dilation of those eyes – produced by hunger and suffering – was a form of blindness. His cheeks were also enormous, rising from his skeletal face. I recall (brutally, disinterested) a sentence of Gabriel Marcel: “Every day we look more like the cadaver we will be”. That man, walking now towards the gas shower, was already the cadaver we would be.


Rolfe was not wrong: they didn’t kill people, they killed things. They killed the dead. Before, much before, putting them in the gas showers, they had broken them as people. They had submitted them to the essential task of the camp: remove their identity, kill subjectivity, and kill them as subjects.

That man, with the enormous eyes, looks at me, because he has seen the camera. He’s seen the executioner who dedicated himself to recording this new deed of our country, and looked at him. I know he saw nothing. I know he could no longer see.

But to me, now, he sees me.

He looks at me.

I don’t have a single answer to give him.

I know we aren’t the only monsters in this world. I know the Bolsheviks kill millions in their frozen camps. I know the Americans made themselves butchers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as efficient as us in our camps. I know that Mussolini, towards the end of the thirties gave us Jews by the thousands. I know the French were pliant to the point of complicity. I know Churchill was hyena in Dresden. I know, then, that no one can judge us. The desert grows, it will cover the earth and nothing will make sense.

I have no one to ask forgiveness from.

But I need to do it.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 2:58 AM 0 comments