English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
From Heidegger to the question of Arendt's reception 0:32 ... by the Heideggerian history of being and its motif of the overcoming of metaphysics, which they, like for example Jean-Luc Marion at the beginning of the 1980s, wrote that Heidegger constituted the only modern way to think. I believe that today, few philosophers in France would still write that. So things have evolved. Now, having worked on Heidegger's texts, I wanted to work on the other question, which is nonetheless that of reception.
1:08 And it's in this spirit that I chose the major figure of Hannah Arendt, who, in the United States, in Germany, and finally on the planet, played perhaps the most considerable role. In France it would rather be Beaufret, in Germany Gadamer, but truly, Hannah Arendt, from the end of the 1940s, beginning of the 50s, made herself both the advocate and the propagator of the Heideggerian vision of modernity, of his interpretation of National Socialism.
1:49 And there, in 1954, in a great lecture before the American Political Science Association, she really introduced Heidegger into the field of political science. Obviously, apparently, Arendt's politics is something quite different. We cannot reduce it entirely to Heidegger, I'm not trying to do that. But there is a gesture, a movement, that are articulated to one another in some way.
2:25 Arendt, who very rarely says "I", will write in her posthumous book The Life of the Mind, that she wanted, for a long time, that she chose to place herself among those who undertook to dismantle philosophy with its categories. Obviously, the one we mainly think of is the Heideggerian "Zerstörung", the "Destruction", the "Abbau", who, in his Davos lectures facing Cassirer, explained that it was time to radically destroy spirit, logos, reason.
A hagiographic literature and Raymond Aron's critique 3:00 So, while working on this new book, I was really struck to see how little critical scholarship exists on Arendt. There is even less on Heidegger. There is nonetheless a critical tradition on Heidegger, which is relatively well established, even if the critical analysis needed to be deepened. On Arendt, the literature is massively hagiographic, with the exception, of course, first of all, of the great historians of the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, and many others.
3:43 They have always said that practically none of the analyses of the origins of totalitarianism, and even less of Eichmann, hold up historically. Among philosophers, I admit that, apart from the great work of Bill Fuchs in Entre chiens et loups, where you speak of what you call Hannah Arendt's philosophy anti-philosophy, there is not much scholarship, there is not much critical scholarship.
4:14 This is really something that astonishes us, that strikes us. And I believe it is indeed Arendt's manner of arguing. It is indeed her manner of writing and arguing. Now, there is nonetheless a quite interesting example in the French field, that of Raymond Aron. Because Raymond Aron, in 1954, in Critique, wrote an extremely harsh review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, courteous in form, but still, he says at the end, that ultimately, when one reads Mrs. Arendt, one ends up, he writes, seeing the world as the totalitarians present it.
4:54 That's not really a compliment. He adds: "The author's logical imagination is somewhat comparable to that of the ideologues she denounces." That's still a strong critique. And frankly, since '54, we haven't often found something of that caliber again. But, what is curious, is that it doesn't even take 10 years before Raymond Aron, in '61, in his collection "Liberté d'esprit", publishes the French translation of The Human Condition, which will then be reissued with a hagiographic preface by Paul Ricoeur, saying that it is the great book of political philosophy.
5:33 So, Raymond Aron, in fact, who had well understood the limits of the Arendtian analyses, also understood the key role that her concept of totalitarianism now plays in the Cold War, and he takes on something of this program, perhaps with an intellectual reservation, but ultimately, this reservation disappears. And two years after the publication, in this green collection, "Liberté de l'esprit", of an author who, in Between Past and Future, in the essay on freedom, says that freedom of thought does not exist, that it is not a concept.
6:12 That's quite curious. There are sometimes—and this too is astonishing—three or four authors who have noticed it, but when you read Arendt's writings very carefully, you periodically stumble upon unbelievable sentences. For example... Sorry to interrupt you, I'm from Avril, you need to speak a bit louder. All right. So I was saying that when we read Arendt's writings, periodically, we run up against sentences that truly stupefy us.
6:42 We were told, I was told when I was in school, that Arendt was a thinker of democracy. We were told, as we say, the modern thinker, and from the very first lines, here is an author who deplores that we have lost the sense of spiritual and political aristocracy—political aristocracy, well, because truly, this is the thought of a theorist of democracy. And truly, constantly, one cannot open a book by Arendt without suddenly stumbling on one of her sentences.
7:18 That's quite strange. I will cite a few of them. So, here is Aron who, two years apart, publishes The Human Condition and The Concept of the Political, accompanied by the Theory of the Partisan and a preface of rare complacency by Julien Freund. From there, one can say—without at all putting them on the same level.
7:48 Arendt is not Schmitt, obviously. Even though he shares certain postulates, but not all. But one can nonetheless say that these two works, these two names, will mark a form of capture of the field of political theory, more active today than ever, even beyond the relative eclipse of Heidegger today—a capture that has even managed to spread across a whole part of the left, such as, for example, what is called the New Left, just as we also speak of the New Right.
8:24 And in fact, the New Left often reads the same authors as the New Right. There too, they feed off each other, but there are nonetheless forms of transfer of reference, or of the "second left" in France, starting in the 1980s. And this is obviously to the detriment of critical thought—critical thought which I will mention here in its various dimensions. There is Kant's critical thought in his text on Enlightenment and Marx's critical thought, of course, in his critique of political economy.
Arendt's formation and the case of Benno von Wiese 9:00 So, to understand the foundations of Arendt's thought, and this is the purpose of the book's first analyses, one must go back to the 1920s, to her formation at Marburg, at Heidelberg, in the 1920s, under Heidegger. Then, at Heidelberg, her very important companionship with Benno von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau. Benno von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau nearly became Arendt's husband.
9:34 Hannah nearly came to be called Hannah von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau. Von Wiese is a specialist on Schiller who would rebuild German studies after the war, even though he was a member of the Nazi party, author of quite explicit texts on the Führer as inspiration for the German poet, etc., and on the Volkstum. Benno von Wiese was really extremely engaged between 1933 and 1945 in National Socialist culture and power in common.
10:14 And yet, if we open, for example, the great Gallimard edition, which has many qualities, from 2002, of The Origins of Totalitarianism, there is a long biography at the beginning, and the name von Wiese does not appear once. Only the late marriage to Günther Stern is mentioned, the one about whom she will say of Heidegger that she never loved him. So, the relationship with Wiese is important, I said, because in the 1950s, von Wiese began, with Arendt's support, a great American career in American universities before returning to structure German studies in Germany itself.
10:55 And Arendt tells him that above all he must not say what he says, namely that he became a Nazi because he was following the spirit of the times, the enthusiasm of the era. He must say that it was out of fear, out of terror, that at one point... So we see Arendt applying the interpretive model that she gives in the chapter added to The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1953, "Ideology and Terror".
11:26 Totalitarianism has fear as its mainspring, the idea that ultimately, one might, out of enthusiasm, out of fanaticism in the strongest sense, adhere to the National Socialist worldview, makes no sense to her. So her still unpublished correspondence with von Wiese is extremely interesting because we see that she played a role in the postwar rehabilitation not only of Heidegger, but also of other National Socialist figures, starting with her former friend.
Arendt among the authors of the conservative revolution 12:00 Now, here, if you will, I am somewhat in personal relations, let's say; on the level of thought, one must really go back to the last chapter of the dissertation on Augustine, with the articulation between two communities and the myth of a kind of community of salvation. There is really a very curious notion of Gemeinschaft. And then start from her articles on German political romanticism, which had been brought back into fashion by a book by Carl Schmitt, precisely.
12:37 In particular, Arendt publishes at the beginning of the 1930s a review of an edition, by a Nazi, of Adam Müller's work on the state, the Doctrine of the State. And she develops—she is fairly uncritical of this edition—she simply says that the Gemeinschaft, the community according to Adam Müller, is not quite that of the National Socialists, but that in essence one finds truly guiding theses, namely that man in himself does not exist, that everything is played out in the community of election, etc.
13:14 Theses that will reappear after 1945. Now, this article was not even republished in Germany, I had a great deal of trouble finding it; there exists only an American translation. So I tried to analyze elements of it in the book, and this may be a bit provocative, but in order to open the debate later, I would go so far as to say that these early texts by Arendt, if we look at them in their foundations, allow us, without exaggerating too much, to place Hannah Arendt among the authors of the German Conservative Revolution, with her way of reducing the political to a community of election reserved to a small number, with all the theses that follow from it, such as the appeal I mentioned earlier in The Human Condition to the restoration of an aristocracy both political and spiritual, or again this crusade in the essay On Revolution against what she calls the disaster of the French Revolution, where she takes up
14:24 really very precisely Burke's positions and rejects egalitarian democracy, which she says is the worst of regimes. Indeed, at the foundation of her thought, we find the same radical separation between the political and the social that is found in Schmitt's concept of the political. So, in Arendt and Heidegger, I wanted to help lay the foundations, after Richard Wolin, after Edith Fuchs, after the historians I mentioned, the foundations of a critical rereading of Arendt's work.
Work no longer humanizes: isonomy against democracy 15:03 And whereas the first book on Heidegger was a completely non-academic book because this field of study could not even show its face in the French university, for the second, I really did work with my students for six years at the University of Rouen. We went chapter by chapter through The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, we worked on Arendt's argumentation, we saw the extremely virtuosic and peremptory way in which Arendt always manages, at the beginning of her developments, to neutralize any possibility of critique.
15:44 It's extremely well done and it has clearly worked, since the critique of Arendt largely remains to be done. Another interesting point is a way of never placing herself in a frank position of rejecting an intellectual adversary. I'll take the example of Marx. In the 1950s, Arendt had a big project, she tried to get funding for a critical book on Marx that would follow up on The Origins and that would fit entirely into this Cold War logic.
16:18 In fact, this book on Marx, she did not write it, she gave it up. What will she do instead? She will, in a more roundabout but ultimately more effective way, attack one of the fundamentals of Marxian anthropology, namely the question of labor. So, with Arendt, labor no longer humanizes. The dividing line, she says, between man and animal runs through humanity, and ultimately, humanization takes place beyond labor, beyond the economic and the social.
16:52 It takes place in this co-optation of a few happy few who are within equality, but it is an equality of isonomy, the equality of those who are within acting in concert, Burke's expression—but acting for what? Certainly not to help free men from the exploitation of man by man, because, in any case, Arendt tells us—she is very explicit—she tells us, the employee, the worker, in any case, do not take part in political action.
17:27 Only those who have radically freed themselves from labor relations take part in political action. And in the economic world, there is this terrible sentence found in her text on the Hungarian revolution: in essence, the ancients were right to say that in the economic domain, what should reign was the domination of masters. So that's part of this—one thinks, did she really go that far? Yes, yes, this position really is there.
17:58 So, ultimately, the Arendtian concept of the political is an isonomic concept, not a democratic one. Now, of course, there is this appeal to the lost treasure of the revolutionary councils which will... It's a bit like Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan, a left-wing posterity of Arendtianism becomes possible through this very fact.
18:28 But, if we reread the book of one of the great leaders among the Conservative Revolutionaries, I'm thinking of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who published The Third Reich in 1923. Well, Moeller van den Bruck's bête noire were the liberals. And regarding the Marxist tradition, Moeller van den Bruck tries to recover something of the revolutionary potential of Marxism. And so he has some quite positive statements about workers' councils.
19:04 We are thus in this oxymoron of the Conservative Revolution, where the far right tries to capture something of the dynamic of the revolutionary left. And Arendt, if you will, is somewhat unclassifiable—I won't take up... Recently, Habermas invented an oxymoron regarding Benjamin that is quite strange. He says he is a "left-wing jungkonservativ".
19:34 A young conservative—when we know what that is in Germany, Forsthoff, Schmitt, etc.—that cannot be left-wing. So it doesn't work. But in Arendt's case, what is interesting is that she managed to capture, ultimately, a considerable spectrum of authors ranging indeed from the new or second left to the most conservative right. Chantal Delsol created a Hannah Arendt Institute. And then, in the middle, you even have liberals like Philippe Raynaud who have a vision that, in my opinion, entirely skates on the surface of the texts without seeing the aporias.
Councils without workers, slavery, and the "Negro Question" 20:12 But no other author has managed to this extent to capture almost the entirety of the political field—it is clearly an impressive but problematic success. Now, precisely, what is interesting is to see that Arendt praises the revolutionary councils, but frankly, it has become distinguished from the workers' councils. Now, we know that the demands, for example in Poland at one point, were both economic and political.
20:48 One cannot separate the dimensions from the dimensions. With Arendt, they must be separated because, we were told, in any case, workers could never run a factory, they must indeed be led. She is very explicit about this conception. So, ultimately, those who gain access to the bios politikos, to political action, are those who have walked on the backs of those who continue to shoulder vital needs through labor.
21:20 And above all, this situation must not be touched. The strength of the American Revolution was, ultimately, not to abolish slavery, and thus to be able to dispose of other humans who work in place of the landowners. And, in essence, one of the mistakes of the French Revolution was, for a time, before Napoleon reestablished it, to abolish slavery.
21:51 The French revolutionaries, unlike the American revolutionaries or founding fathers, were not themselves owners of slaves, let alone slave traders. Whereas Franklin, Washington, and others were all owners, even traders, of slaves. This is a fundamental difference underlined, among others, by Losurdo, when he evokes... Now, there is also this very important point. Arendt says that the oppressed have never succeeded in a revolution. Revolution cannot come from the oppressed.
22:24 And there is obviously a refutation, which is the Haitian Revolution, which is a successful revolution. This is what an American author, Kathryn Gines, showed well in her book on Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. "The Negro Question" is an expression of Arendt's in her letters to Mary McCarthy. And Kathryn Gines does not say that Arendt is racist. She does not want to make a judgment on the person. But she says that objectively, if one analyzes Arendt's positions on the issue of civil rights in American schools in the 1960s, objectively, she defends the same positions as white supremacists.
23:07 That is to say that, for Arendt, the demand of parents of students who wish their African-American children to sit on the same school benches as the WASPs, as American, Protestant children, etc., cannot be a political demand. It can only be, essentially, a demand of social, infrapolitical ambition. And it's curious because Arendt herself tells how, on the contrary, she had, thanks to her mother, from a very young age, an awareness of the political stakes of antisemitism at school.
23:43 Her mother told her: if a classmate makes an antisemitic remark, that's not very important. But if one of your teachers says anything at all, then it becomes political, then you react immediately, you demand to see the headmaster, etc. So, if you will, there is a bit of a double standard, certainly, in Arendt's analysis, and Kathryn Gines shows this very calmly through a completely non-polemical analysis in a book which, in the six years since it was published, has been neither reviewed nor published in France.
24:19 I have tried in vain to propose it to several publishers. Well, it will come, of course. So, you see, there are still many questions. Now, here, obviously, I may be sharpening the angles a bit, but that will be so we can discuss it together. So I will end my remarks on two points. The object of the book, the guiding orientation of the book on Arendt and Heidegger, is a twofold orientation. On the one hand, to critique the vision Arendt gives us of National Socialism.
Black Notebooks: from the end of philosophy to metapolitics 24:53 on the other hand, to reconsider in depth the conception of thinking that she propagates after Heidegger. And in the end, the two are curiously articulated with one another. The conception of Nazism, the conception of thinking, in Arendt as in Heidegger, the two are not dissociable. And that's a point that perhaps hasn't been sufficiently seen. Yet Arendt says so herself, again. It's clear.
25:24 But in her own way. So, in passing, let me note a point: as always, when you have the project of writing a book, you think you're going to write one book and then you write another. While I was writing the book on Arendt and doing this seminar with my students, the Black Notebooks came out, and Heidegger's Black Notebooks are not only texts containing statements of a more than virulent antisemitism, aiming at a dimension one could call quasi-genocidal.
26:03 There was talk of Selbstvernichtung, of self-extermination, in 1942, regarding European Judaism. That is something simply unbearable. There are also other very important things that are very illuminating for understanding what Heidegger meant very early on. In 1934, Heidegger says finis philosophiae, the end of philosophy. And he says that metaphysics must now give way to the metapolitics of the historical people.
26:40 So it's an explicit metapolitical project, what I finally called the metapolitics of extermination, the title of the second part. And so, basically, it's the theme of the end of philosophy that is generally dated from the last sentence of the Letter on Humanism of 1947. It is already there in Heidegger's files, explicit in the Black Notebooks of 1934. That is extremely important. In 1934, one could say — without publishing it, because he remains a university professor of philosophy, it's still a bit too harsh to say that philosophy is giving way to metapolitics, even under Nazism, one still has to keep one's chair, the prestige of one's chair — so hold a discourse that will capture the great authors, Hegel, then Nietzsche, etc., in order to...
27:33 we'll talk about that again. In 1947, obviously, the word metapolitics is a word taken up by the neo-Nazis, it's the word that Pierre Krebs, notably, will take up again in all the Kassel seminars — metapo — Heidegger will no longer utter it. And in its place, he utters the word thinking, that is, he says, well, philosophy has come to its end, the thinking that is coming is no longer philosophy, it is Denken. And in the 1951 course that Arendt attended, What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger explains to us that thinking is neither wisdom, nor knowledge, nor for the sake of practice.
28:15 What is it then? It is, he says in a particular session, it is an Andenken, it is over-remembrance. And over-remembrance, what is that? He states it clearly to his audience: Ladies and gentlemen, today, after my course, you must go see the traveling exhibition, currently in Freiburg, touring all of Germany, on the German army's prisoners of war in Russia. We must remember what took place, and that is what thinking is.
28:47 So, truly, the very definition of thinking in What Is Called Thinking? is a military-political definition tied to the fate of the Third Reich's army. Now, obviously, that is a heavy fate — Heidegger's two sons would end up in captivity. I understand very well that this would be a heavy concern, but one also notes that Heidegger never called on his audience to go see the other exhibitions that showed photos of the concentration camps, which could not show the extermination camps since there were no photos of those.
29:27 We see that this Andenken is extremely targeted, as Heidegger says in the Black Notebooks: today, he says, Germany is a gigantic concentration camp. Germany under the presence of the Allies and the Soviet Union. So there really is this reversal, this reversibility that the most hardened Nazis after '45 are accustomed to.
29:58 Heidegger assumes this language, and it's truly dismaying to see that in The Life of the Mind, Arendt places as an epigraph to her book these Heideggerian statements from that famous session on what thinking is not. So you see, obviously, Arendt did not know the Black Notebooks. Perhaps — would that have made them recoil? One hopes so, of course. So one cannot be too harsh in the criticism, but still...
Exonerating Heidegger and Schmitt: the Eichmann apparatus 30:29 She knew Heidegger well. Yes, she knew Heidegger, she knew... And... Above all, well, we'd need to talk about Sein und Zeit [Being and Time], §69, we'll do that in the discussion. She really played the key role in exonerating Heidegger and also exonerating Carl Schmitt. It should be recalled that in The Origins of Totalitarianism, there is that whole passage where Arendt says that the intellectuals of the Third Reich — and she cites Carl Schmitt, praising him — bore no responsibility in the Third Reich.
31:09 And, for example, even Jean-François Kervégan — one cannot say Kervégan is a Schmittian — but he wrote a somewhat embarrassed book, What to Do with Carl Schmitt, and on three occasions he cites Arendt's very laudatory sentence about Schmitt: still quite important in the field of Weimar federal law, one must go on reading him, etc. This is one of the real examples of this whitewashing, this relegitimizing of Heidegger, of Schmitt. As for Schmitt, just an aside — I'll remind our younger audience that he was brought back into fashion by Chantal Mouffe, the philosophical muse of Mélenchon, no less.
31:49 So precisely, regarding the Arendt-Schmitt relationship, Arendt's library books are now at Bard College, where her husband Blücher was, and those with significant marginalia are now online. So one can access them. And Arendt was reading The Concept of the Political in the edition that has never been reprinted, the 1933 edition published by the National Socialist Hanseatic publishers. This edition really shows exactly the profoundly racist and Nazi content of Schmitt's very concept of the political and of the enemy.
32:30 And in particular, there is a sentence where Schmitt says that the political is not a universum but a pluriversum, not unity but plurality. And Arendt underlines it, etc. That interests me because, you know, there are two or three Arendtian terms — natality, plurality, living-together — presented as the terms from which democracy must be rethought. Arendtian plurality is not pluralism.
33:02 when one sees this Schmittian pluriversum, or when one sees that, as an example of plurality in her 1954 lecture to American political scientists, Arendt says that plurality is found in Heidegger, because instead of speaking of man, he speaks of mortals, in the plural — so the example of plurality is Heidegger. This is a text that is never taken up again. Frankly, one can also wonder about natality; one has to look at what the Arendtian thesis is about what she calls the second birth — I'll come back to that too.
33:47 So what I wanted to indicate is that I thought I found in Arendt's writings — this is the subject of the fourth part of the book, Thinking, Thoughtlessness, Heidegger, Eichmann — it seems to me that Arendt set up a kind of vast apparatus that exonerates: on one side we have the executor, without motive, supposedly without thought — Arendt states precisely that Eichmann had no motive, so the problem of the book on Eichmann is not the banality of evil, it is the concept of thoughtlessness — the executor is without thought, even though in his interrogations Eichmann discusses fairly precisely the Kantian imperative, becomes aware of the fact that he no longer followed it when he followed the Führer's orders. He is not at all within the usual Nazi reduction of Kantianism to a Hitlerism, which is obviously untenable. Eichmann is really someone much less, certainly,
34:59 than a mere petty bureaucrat; he is someone who himself held an extremely hard and openly claimed position, a position he expresses at the end of his Argentine interviews with Sassen, where he speaks of the law of my blood, etc., and says that if he must die, he will leap joyfully into his grave, his only regret being that he did not kill eleven and a half million Jews. So frankly, Eichmann's motives are well known; they are as sordid as they are common among the hardest Nazis. This position does not hold up, but it does obviously give a functionalist dimension to the destruction of the Jews of Europe. And facing this thoughtless executor, in the great text, the great radio broadcast speech, 'Heidegger at 80,' which Arendt delivered on German radio and which was immediately published in the United States, in France, in Germany, in Merkur — this text in which Heidegger was not a secret king in the realm
36:09 of thinking — because it's an esoteric monarchy in thought, and oddly this bothers hardly anyone — the secret king in the realm of thinking, because that's exactly it, frankly the twentieth century spoke that way. And there's another text, for the Festschrift published by Klostermann: the realm, says Heidegger, is the one that taught us what Thinking — capital T — is; the paradigm of thinking is Martin Heidegger. And from there, obviously, Heidegger cannot be held responsible for anything in the Nazi destruction, since he is already, by virtue of his very thought, exempted from this very functionalist, very reductive interpretation of the Nazis — at most, like Plato with Dionysius, did he have, as every professional philosopher supposedly does, some affinities with tyrants; but tyranny and totalitarianism, as you know, in Arendt are two different things. So one accuses him only a little, which is nonetheless a relative compliment — to compare Heidegger to Plato,
37:19 the better to exonerate him. And truly this apparatus, which I called, somewhat ironically, bipolar, is very present in Heidegger and is confirmed by the fact that at the beginning of The Life of the Mind, Arendt says that she became interested in the activities of the mind at the time of the Eichmann trial — so she herself makes the connection between these two for herself. So, in the new edition, with a new preface, of Arendt and Heidegger, without changing the analysis at all but to place greater emphasis on this question of thinking — the original, somewhat longer, more complete title, Nazi Extermination and the Destruction of Thought, was there precisely to show this complex articulation between the Heideggerian vision and the Arendtian theses. I think that now
38:29 notably thanks to the major issue of the Revue d'histoire de la Shoah, co-edited once again by Edith Fuchs and Robert Lévy in 2017, which contains 8 articles around the theme of Heidegger and extermination, and also given that in that same year, in September 2017, Elisabeth Delplat organized — as there was this mission on genocides — a half-day event asking what we do with the corpus of Nazi authors such as Schmitt and Heidegger. She invited three philosophers, Jean-François Kervégan, Edith Fuchs, and myself. It was a bit heated in the discussion between Kervégan and myself, and it was very important that this took place, because the problem does indeed arise. I think that now the question of the relationship of Heideggerian thought to the Vernichtung, to which he even calls his students very early on, is now a publicly posed question, so
Destruction in thought: existentials and affective attunement 39:39 rather than return to it, since it now exists within the field of discussions and debates — it's a very heavy question — I wanted, in this new edition, to place the emphasis on what I called destruction within thought. Destruction within thought, in several respects; I'll give two examples, one drawn from Heidegger, one from Arendt. Destruction within thought, because the gesture of Heidegger — really confirmed by the Black Notebooks, but which begins in Being and Time — is to replace philosophical categories with existentials, and the first of the existentials — so, of all these modalities of the existent, of Dasein — the first is not understanding or the intellect, it is, in German, Befindlichkeit, affective tonality — but there's a play on words, because in Befindlichkeit there's also 'finding oneself there' — so it's the tonality, the 'there' of Sein, the 'there' of being, the space of this being that one no longer wants to call man; one will perhaps call it,
40:49 in the plural, the mortals — but that's certainly not what will open onto democratic pluralism. So, in this gesture, if you will, one turns radically away from that modern philosophical thought which, in Descartes with the mens humana, in Kant with the understanding, the Verstand, took its bearings from the human exercise of thinking. That's no longer the case here, and the first existential, I'm telling you, is affective tonality. So, from there, you have a whole set of Heideggerians who understood this well; one can give two examples in passing. There's that of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, little known in France, but a professor at Stanford of German origin who published a work called 1926 — in 1926: Living on the Edge of Time — Gumbrecht tries to capture what he calls the mood of the year '26. The mood of the year '26 is mainly three things; I'll give just two so as not to be too long,
41:59 paragraph 74 of Being and Time, where Heidegger calls the community of the people to unite in a common destiny, to pursue the struggle, to choose its hero — and then Marcel Cerdan etc., the boxing matches — so this mood of the era, that's what matters; it's no longer the articulation of a thought, it's a tonality one is caught up in because one belongs to 1926. And there's a recent book, done by someone entirely within Gumbrecht's orbit — a much less brilliant book, because Gumbrecht has a certain brilliance — it's Eilenberger's book, Time of the Magicians, which was a bestseller in Germany but did not meet with much success in France. Eilenberger wanted to rehabilitate Heidegger by instrumentalizing three German Jewish philosophers — Cassirer — or Austrian — Wittgenstein — and Benjamin. Heidegger compares Davos to a boxing match — well, it's roughly
43:09 at that level. And I would say, to finish this point before returning to Arendt, that for my part I would dispense with asking the Heideggerians what the mood of our own era is. Now, obviously, there are articles, for example, by Agamben on the pandemic, which are truly — Agamben always has the merit of touching sensitive points, but he has such a conspiratorial view of the matter that I replied in Le Monde to one of his articles. What matters is truly being able to analyze in depth how this Weltanschauung, this National Socialist worldview, was formed, how it was structured, and how and why its most famous representatives, Heidegger, Schmitt, were able, after '45, to go on being read, published, taught, sometimes presented as the only way to think. How was that possible? Now, Jacob Taubes, who liked to go visit Schmitt at
44:19 Plettenberg — Jacob Taubes has this line, where he says: someday someone will have to tell us what National Socialism was, to have attracted minds such as Heidegger or Schmitt — a terrible sentence, because what is he trying to tell us? Should we rehabilitate National Socialism since it produced the author of The Concept of the Political and the author of Being and Time? It seems to me one must take the sentence the other way around and ask instead what Heidegger and Schmitt really were, that they let themselves be captured and worked over to this extent so as to legitimize this worldview. And one of the most lucid, in this regard, appears to be Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer resigned from his post as professor at the University of Hamburg two days before the entry into force of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which revoked all non-Aryan German civil servants unless their son had been — not born, sorry, died — in 1914-18.
45:30 There will be one or two exceptions that will be eliminated a few months later — Heidegger. Cassirer perfectly understood where Hitler's coming to power on January 30, 1933 was leading, and he says so in his letter to the rector of the University of Hamburg: I think the regime will last about 10 years, but the disaster it will cause will continue to leave its mark for the next 100 or 150 years. So we are within those marks; they must not be erased, they must, on the contrary, be explored, and we must try to trace, obviously, other paths. Thank you. So now let's move to the debate. I just wanted — not to launch any debate, but just to ask a small question about what you insisted on — destruction within thought: is there, still, in the description you give of it,
Lukács and the destruction of reason 46:40 which is quite distinct — an allusion to Lukács's work on the destruction of reason? Lukács indeed found the right title for this issue, and it's a title that literally takes up what Heidegger set as his own program at Davos, obviously in order to critique it. Now, there's something else that's really interesting in Lukács's great opus: it's that, before Edith Fuchs, he managed to work both on major authors like Heidegger, etc.,
47:15 but also, almost within the same chapters, to speak of Klages, of Rosenberg, of Krieck — well, he studies, of course, Alfred Baeumler; he studies the whole spectrum of National Socialist authors, from the great philosophers down to the major ideologues. So that's very important. That said, in his chapter on Heidegger, it seems to me he doesn't quite go far enough, because regarding Being and Time, you cannot imagine what he could still tell us about the way Arendt, and up to now many others, have promoted this destruction of reason and thought. He died too soon to discover the full extent of the damage, poor Lukács. That said, I worked in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay, the archives of the French occupation authorities, in Freiburg and in Tübingen, in the French occupation zone.
48:25 Yes, in the French occupation zone — and by the way, it's rather dismaying, because in Tübingen, the person in charge of the matter was named Cheval; in Freiburg it was Jacques Lacant, with a T. Jacques Lacant did a fair amount of work — the whole Heidegger file is really interesting, he really tried to dig into things. But in Tübingen it was a disaster, because it was the only university where students were never asked about their past, and so all the Nazi leaders of the student corporations came to enroll at Tübingen, which became a laundering site for student corporations after '46. There is indeed a certain responsibility in the French zone. But what interested me was that in the Heidegger file there is a good deal of talk about a short text by Lukács, Heidegger Redivivus, which he had written at that time and which was indeed one of the pioneering texts of the critique of Heidegger after '46 — all the more so since I'll now pass the floor right away to our friends
49:35 in the audience. Perhaps it should be recalled, for those who don't know, and in any case for the viewers of our videos, that today this logic — which served, first and foremost, the Cold War, it must be said, it was after all the pseudo-philosophical articulation of Cold War anticommunism, of anti-socialism, and everything that goes with it — is enjoying a fresh revival. It had somewhat died down after the publication of your first books, including in our own academic circles, and including in our supposedly radical left circles — which shows just how deep, how entrenched, this destruction of reason has been, and how it still bears fruit long afterward. Two points where it's striking, in counterpoint to what Emmanuel Faye just clarified: there are two things. First, the way Hannah Arendt — let me grab the bull, or rather the cow, by the horns, if I may — says that there cannot
Against the notion of totalitarianism: the part that takes itself for the whole 50:46 be any intellectuality worthy of the name that is Nazi — thinker after thinker cannot be National Socialist. And secondly, the necessarily totalizing, and hence totalitarian, character of the opposite of destruction — a construction. You began with that — the metaphor of the volcano, of telluric forces — and that philosophy worthy of the name must force itself, precisely, to set aside the parts, as against the whole — a few dross bits — you have no dross, precisely to see the overall force which, in an old mode — it used to be called the whole — it's as if, you see, it all converged toward something. Now what strikes me is the appalling continuity of counter-revolutionary thought, from Burke, whom you named, so from the very moment of the French Revolution, practically down to today, precisely through the stages described by Lukács in The Destruction of Reason, from Schelling to Derrida,
51:57 passing through Nietzsche of course, and without wishing to indulge in cheap Nietzscheanism — but here I'll be much more precise — when I see this abject notion of totalitarianism managing to whitewash Nazi thought to the point that Hitler is no longer alone — that was his whole point — so that Hitler is no longer alone in his tomb: 'Hey, I'm with Stalin, that's nice, better company already' — how did that come to be possible?
52:31 Let me first take a purely logical stance: if the whole really were in power, well, that would be excellent news, we should rejoice — a totality, that means you, Edith, Emmanuel, Dominique, me, each and every one of us, is in power. I don't see how it's dangerous for the totality to be in power. What is truly frightening in what we've been taught, since Hannah Arendt, to call totalitarian is that a part is in power and takes itself for the whole — whether it's the single party, the single race, the single line of thought — that's what's terrifying, that the part dominates us. Whereas Hannah Arendt wants us to believe that the danger is the whole, the wicked totality, against poor Antigone resisting that Stalinist Creon. So, firstly — but the falsification lies above all in the fact that the anti-totalitarians say totalitarianism is not only in Stalin, it's already in Lenin, and besides, it's already in Marx, and besides
53:42 it's already in Hegel — well, Hegel does say the true is the whole, there you have it, signed, sealed. And besides it's already in Descartes — make man the master and possessor of nature, say that today and today's ecologists will lynch you. And besides it's already in Plato — totalitarianism — you find there the entire program of Popper, of the whole Cold War, of anticommunism, incidentally. But there are indeed thinkers rehabilitated by Heidegger — those who find favor in all this are those who come before Plato, because once you get to Plato, that's the first written system that reaches us, all of philosophy gets liquidated for the moment. No, no — before Plato there are the Presocratics, we have three lines from one, two words from another, a page from an Aristotle summarizing a predecessor — well, that means a few fragments, a few mumblings, to which one can, like with Nostradamus, make them say whatever one wants. Move along, nothing to see in this thinking — move along, nothing to see. Nacht und Nebel, that's the name of an SS division — Night and Fog — that's what I wanted to say. Dominique Pagani — I think that in Arendt,
A totalitarianism without concept that criminalizes logic 54:52 actually, totalitarianism isn't a concept, it's a kind of slogan. She tried to construct it later, adding a text she had first written in German in homage to Jaspers, which was added into the second edition, and from the standpoint of political philosophy it's dismaying, because what gets criminalized is logic — she writes, 'the tyranny of the logical system begins with the submission of the logical mind, and destroys in man the faculty of thought' — so, if you're logical, you cease to think; and she speaks of logic as if it were a dictator. Well, that's rather a level of reflection that's a bit — I mean, logic is the very foundation of humanism. And so I think Raymond Aron had quite judiciously seen the flaw in that, but he let it slide, because he had too pressing an agenda, and he had a sponsor, namely the CIA, so the Cold War had to be kept going. Since this is the second time Aron has been cited —
56:03 that you cite — we note that Raymond Aron, who never declared himself to be on the left, who always affirmed he was a man of the right during the Cold War — that, he was always very clear about — a humanist man of the right is, to my mind, more on the left than some left-winger claiming Foucault, who said man is a recent invention and, happily, one destined to disappear. Aron got along very well with Foucault, but that's exactly what I'm saying — man and thought, it's the same references as Hannah Arendt, it's Nietzsche, but a watered-down Nietzsche, because the real Nietzsche — the one who goes to plant a kiss, if you'll excuse the expression, on the mistreated horse in Turin, who weeps and admits that Wagner's Parsifal, despite everything bad he had said about it, ultimately embodies the highest values, those of Christianity, in a letter to Peter Gast — as if that ever mattered, of course, to the postmodernists. So, here's a question that just occurred to me — maybe it would be better, instead of speaking of an introduction of National Socialism into philosophy, to speak more precisely of an introduction of National Socialism onto the field of philosophy, because in the end,
57:13 human thought as such isn't touched by the National Socialist worldview, it always remains outside, it always stays off the field — and in fact that's a bluff, none too precise; we're being made to believe that Heidegger is a philosopher, but in the end he's only a philosopher because he has recognition within the philosophical field, not within philosophy itself — and as a result, it's something that remains limited to the psychological — a manipulation of man's psyche, but not really of thought. And then, I note this because I think one shouldn't allow oneself naiveties — Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, that's not just the book 1926, it wasn't just a book, there were seminars in Germany, and how he wrote up the synthesis of those seminars in American — that means something. And in that book he gives a panorama of the culture of the '20s, and he arranges things so that the reader perceives that the only sociologist who understood the '20s was Hitler, and at the end
58:24 there are still additions from a certain Van Welding and a Binding — so it's a book that is toxic and dangerous from one end to the other. And as for the University of Tübingen, it isn't the University of Tübingen itself, it's a figure named Otto Friedrich Bollnow, one of the leading students who, from 1934 onward, introduced Heidegger's philosophy, or vision — a fellow student of Arendt's — a fellow student of Arendt's, a bit younger I think, or he came later because he went through another Nazi teacher — but he's the one who, from 1934, trained schoolteachers; he's one of the great pedagogues still recognized today, untouchable, impossible to touch, and he's really someone very, very, very dangerous too, because he's the one who trained teachers as early as 1934 in a new direction — so that's still, still relevant today, isn't it, his school. His school is still functioning, it functions a bit like all schools,
59:34 with discussion circles, with hikes, with gardening, in a Germany supposedly denazified long ago — there you go. And he also worked with Paul Ricoeur, so all of that adds up — ah yes, that's not exactly a surprise. Thank you for these important clarifications. Just on the title of my book, I placed a lot of emphasis on Heidegger's use of language at the time in that book, showing how Heidegger took up key philosophical terms — Arbeit, Freiheit, Wahrheit, work, freedom, truth — and made something entirely different of them, something one finds exactly in the LTI, in the Language of the Third Reich. But these distinctions between philosophy and philosophical fields — you summed it up perfectly, I agree with you — it's just that it would be a bit long for a book title. On the substance, of course, regarding Gumbrecht, one should also recall that in 2010, invited by a medievalist, he came to give two lectures at the Collège de France, rehabilitating Heidegger and claiming that my work had obscured the question. That said,
Fear, Heideggerian Marxism, and intellectual legitimation 1:00:46 it's a veiled — as an Aïd, Heidegger would say... well, there you go, you've unveiled it. Actually, Hannah Arendt draws a distinction between totalitarianism and merely authoritarian states, on the basis that the totalitarian state relies on fear, on the masses, but above all on fear — that's the foundation that distinguishes them — whereas an even more authoritarian state still relies on law. Do you think this Arendtian distinction might find some kind of root in Heidegger's existentials, in the idea that it is the presence of fear in society that might explain totalitarianism? — No, but exactly, yes, Angst, the mainspring of fear — indeed, that is something tied to the reading of Heidegger, certainly. I had shown in my book that Arendt takes up the very same vocabulary as he does, because Heidegger's sleight of hand — which unfortunately worked on some people — is that, even though in the Letter on Humanism he tells us that Sartre remained too metaphysical,
1:01:57 and that, basically — this is obviously strategic, I don't think he believed a word of it — Marx's conception of history is much stronger and more modern, but on condition of replacing Entfremdung with Heimatlosigkeit, replacing alienation with the absence of soil and homeland — ah, well, no less than that! And unfortunately that did produce a posterity, Heideggerian Marxism — there was Alfred Schmidt in Germany, who criticized me, by the way, and I answered him in the notes to my book; there was Axelos and others in France; there was that absolute oxymoron in France, there have been many, and there still are some, for that matter, even sometimes from the pen of Althusser — there are statements, sometimes slightly corrected — and above all, yes, I was about to say, yes, so it's not — we don't have great guidance either, as you know, when it comes to comrade Althusser, any more than with Adorno — indeed, Adorno, personally, I would defend him, as with everything — yes, on that score, yes, well, he still...
1:03:07 Adorno also contributed a great deal to the destruction of reason—those few pages by Bourdieu on Heidegger are not, for me, what I prefer in the great artist, because what he produced does him justice, yes. But the problem, still, for Adorno is the way he's translated, because I know his first book has something extremely problematic about it—it's with Horkheimer—but it's still about the Aufklärung, not about reason; he never said that reason was realities, that's a translation error, but perhaps that's not the exact quotation word for word. His whole totally anti-rationalist body of work, his conception of dialectics, is quite staggering, well—that's not today's topic, we'd have to discuss it, it's a very complex subject. We've already made a severe critique of the Frankfurt School on the point of intellectuals as an elite, as an aristocracy, as you put it very well—that's also a term still subject to... this aristocracy which alone could hold power with a king, but anyway—and how does this aristocracy, this German intelligentsia, work?
1:04:17 the one contemporary with the Third Reich—let me recall this: someone who says "yeah, the Jews, the faggots, the communists, all that, we need to wipe them out," that's not specifically Nazi or German—you'd find that at two in the morning in any dive bar in the region, families and all, and besides, it's not very dangerous, I just want to say it's not very dangerous, because most people would say, "okay, Arthur, go to bed," he's someone marginal. When it's taken up by 70% of the population in elections, that's because there were green lights from the intelligentsia precisely, because there was a Mr. Heidegger, an honorable man, who legitimized Hitler's options. When I learned from Mr. Faye, in his first book, Introduction to Philosophy, that Hitler spoke of the enemy—the enemy in the military, strategic, ideological, almost, I would say, metaphysical sense, if that weren't an incongruity here—the enemy is the Asiatic. That's indeed what he says, isn't it?
1:05:19 he is speaking of the great war, of Europe against the Asiatic—the enemy is the Asiatic, and at that time Asia is beginning—I'm exaggerating only slightly, but I'm sure we understand each other. But there's above all this incredible sentence from the seminar—what I call the Hitlerian seminar of winter '33, which I made known—where he says that the nature of our German space, the Slavs will certainly have another perception of it, and as for the Semitic nomads, they will probably have no perception of it at all. So there's an ontologization there—Semitic nomads of space—aiming at a kind of gradation: there's the German, there's the Slavs, there's the Semitic nomads. I wanted to say a word again about total state and authoritarian state, because it touches on a very important chapter that is completely unknown—I don't want to be too specialized, but I'll say a word: it's Hannah Arendt's relationship to Eric Voegelin. Eric Voegelin, this Austrian philosopher
Voegelin, the total state, and the myth of totalitarian twins 1:06:29 who publishes two works on race in Germany in 1933, and a book called The Authoritarian State in Vienna in 1936. In 1938 he publishes Political Religions, at the moment of the Anschluss—one month after the Anschluss—and it's only two or three months later that he leaves Vienna to go into exile, exile in the United States, and it's at that moment that he becomes anti-Nazi, which he really was not, explicitly, before that, far from it. And in his 1936 book on the authoritarian state, Voegelin has a whole chapter on the total state according to Carl Schmitt, and he's really just trying to adapt Schmitt's total state to the particular reality of Austria—but you can really see there's a symbiosis between the two. Now Voegelin is an author of whom Arendt, even though she sometimes had different positions and there were discussions between them, always spoke very highly. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she praises Race and State, the 1933 book which opens with praise
1:07:39 of Rosenberg, and which is really an obviously racist book that takes up the positions of raciologists like Klaus or Hildebrandt. In France it was translated by Vrin as an antiracist book—that's the most gigantic error or falsification I've ever encountered on my path. And in '61—so Voegelin, if you will, is an ultra-conservative who ends his career half at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where the young Bush was recycled, and half at the University of Munich, invited by Theodor Maunz, who writes—he goes on in '43 to write a text on Wesen und Gestalt, that is, the essay in which he praised the SS—but Voegelin managed to pass as an anti-Nazi author, which he only became from '38 on. And as a result Arendt allies herself with him, to the point of co-editing the great Festschrift for Voegelin's sixtieth birthday in '60-'61, in which volume she publishes Armin Mohler—Arendt published
1:08:50 Armin Mohler, who is nonetheless the mentor of the New Right in Europe. So it's really important to see this, because these are things that are little known and that make me say that when Enzo Traverso says that Arendt situates herself in the camp of left-wing antitotalitarianism, I think he hasn't really studied the question—it doesn't hold, it can't hold. Arendt herself says clearly, "I was never on the left," she claims this quite openly. So the very articulation, the distinction between totalitarian state and authoritarian state, is very treacherous. But what's most staggering, from the point of view of the rigor of the concepts, is—that's why I say that totalitarianism in Arendt is not a concept—that the creator of the total state is, in '32, Carl Schmitt; the one who writes after him, in '33, a book on the total state is Forsthoff, this Schmittian jurist; this term "total state" is the Nazified reprise of a term coming from Mussolini, from Italian fascism—"our fierce totalitarian will," Mussolini said. So if we want to do the history of the concept, as Emilio Gentile
1:10:01 did it, as Jean-Pierre Faye did it, we obviously have to work through this filiation. What does Arendt say? Fascism is not totalitarian. But as you know, the two totalitarianisms will become—the ally of yesterday will have become the enemy of today—so the Soviet Union and Nazism. We should perhaps briefly come back to this, because I'll pass the floor to you—what you just said, the myth of the totalitarian twins, all these things, that's almost what's taught in our schools today. That is to say, I can tell you, I see it at the bookshop, many cases of kids who now have a rather confused vision of history in general, including of the period we're just discussing, not so long ago in contemporary history, and who are convinced that the Second World War was the Soviets allied with the Germans against us, allied with the Americans—that's the cause, no—but I'm not joking, that's what they understand from what they confusedly find again in their textbooks and what is drummed into them
1:11:12 and we're not going to go through this whole history, obviously the German-Soviet pact is invoked but in a very confused way, because it's still too complicated to try to explain what happens and the consequences at that point, including with regard to the French Communist Party. So this theme shows well—well, I'm asking for your opinion on this—that the project, and it's not at all by chance, of Arendt and everything we've discussed, is going to be promoted with Brzezinski, no less, and a few others from the American apparatus, to produce Cold War ideology in the service of an American imperialism, very clearly Anglo-Saxon, and more generally the American general—and that's their theoretical, ideological corpus, and it's the absolute basis of their propaganda. So the point is: we're going to exonerate both Heidegger and Hitler and Nazism, by showing that it was—that it was the other face of the same Janus. And so, in the end, that also gives us, in the direct line of
1:12:23 the banality of evil, all of that—at bottom it was banal, and one must understand well that you had, facing you, something at least as terrifying—that's the point of my question—which in reality is absolutely not argued in Hannah Arendt, in the sense that it has strictly nothing to do—Kershaw, Moshe Lewin and others devoted a book to this—the way in which, in France at any rate, and of course in the United States too, we completely assimilate, from an ideological point of view, the fundamentals, whether sociological, historical or otherwise, of Hitlerian Nazism to Soviet Stalinism, whereas any historian, not even to speak of philosophers, is able to perceive an absolute and total heterogeneity. So the total confusion in this idea of totalitarianism is nonetheless the essential intellectual project of Arendt's work, and in a sense, if we want to be very concrete, we can take for example the question of the secret services, that is to say that even in Arendt there are a few elements—
Gehlen and the Cold War preface of The Origins 1:13:33 I'm not going to play devil's advocate, but there are a few elements that do have some relevance when she works on the reciprocal role of the secret services in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany, but what she doesn't say is that the heads of—that's it—of counter-espionage, General Gehlen and General Gehlen's network, were obviously recovered and recycled by the United States at the time of the war. So if we want to do the work on the secret services, we have to do it completely—and this is not at all about our own family, it's not me—but General Gehlen has a brother who is Arnold Gehlen the philosopher, Arnold Gehlen, who writes in 1933 a philosophy of National Socialism which remains unpublished to this day, which he wrote, and Gehlen in 1940 publishes a book, Man, in which he explains—there's this theory of man who needs compensation, who is a deficient being, who needs strong institutions
1:14:43 in order to rebalance himself and be relieved of the need to think, and it's very explicit in 1940 in his book—there are references to Rosenberg—and these strong institutions are the Führerstaat. The problem is that in 1950 he republishes his book, removing all these texts, and next January this book is supposed to appear at Gallimard—I foresee that it will rather be... You saw the example. If we come back to Arendt and the Cold War, I'd like to read you a short text which really is a Cold War document—it's the preface to the American edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, right at the moment when there's about to be the Korean War—well, the Korean War rather is going to create a partition—and this preface was not included in the 2002 Gallimard edition, it was published only by an Arendt specialist in the Magazine Littéraire—there's a Gallimard tradition—but here's what Hannah Arendt writes: "Two world wars in the space of one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty
1:15:53 for the defeated, and no respite for the victor: we consequently expect a third world war between the two remaining great powers." This time of world war that has passed, and that has passed when all hope had vanished—we no longer hope for the ultimate restoration of the old order of things, with all the traditions attached to it, nor for the recomposition of the masses of five continents thrown into the chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions, as well as by the gradual destruction of everything that had until then been spared. We are witnessing the amplification of the same phenomena: the loss of homeland—that's it—on an unprecedented scale, uprooting—that's it—to an unprecedented degree. And she continues: human dignity requires a new guarantee, which can be found in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, implemented and controlled by territorial entities of new conception. It's very curious—
1:17:03 that is to say, she has a plan that closely resembles a book that had just appeared just before, which was The Nomos of the Earth by Carl Schmitt. We have here a Cold War geopolitics, very confounding, absolutely confounding, and that's a point that's really troubling—there is something nonetheless that holds together, but it's stage-managed—yes, because it's not republished in the editions—and then, certainly, that's a welcome contribution, we'll put these excerpts on the UEE website so everyone can appreciate them, I translated them in my book, they are in the book, in your works—Hannah Arendt's book on totalitarianism appeared at just the right moment in Germany, because on the one hand there had been silence about the crimes of National Socialism—I remember well, I am German and I was educated in that time—and there was silence, we knew very well that in the civil service and in newspaper publications etc. there were so many former Nazis
1:18:13 perhaps conformists, perhaps active ones, etc., but about that there was silence. It was only in the 1960s, in the late sixties, that people really began to speak about the crimes of National Socialism—there was the great Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, and it was a great effort by the authorities to set it up, to conduct this trial.
The German and American reception of Arendt 1:20:33 and all these same topics, the same attitude. May I take the liberty of asking you a question, since you're ideal witnesses for this? What is the state today of this kind of debate, particularly around Arendt in Germany? Yes, we speak now—there was a period, now, when we did what's called Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit. It was Adorno who coined this phrase well, etc. He was treated very hostilely by other people.
1:21:07 But now there are many things one can see, there's a lot of research, a lot of publications—that's true. But everyone knows there's an extreme right, as in other countries too, which is reviving the old speech... in all the other countries, for example, and even, which is doing a lot with this group and a lot with that group. And... thank you, Günther Mensching, for these truly important clarifications, which recall indeed the German reception of Arendt, which is considerable.
1:21:47 Arendt is an absolute icon today. Right now there's still a huge exhibition by the Historical Museum of Berlin, directed by Raphael Gross, from which they've drawn a book that's a Spiegel bestseller. And yet Gross is a very astute historian, who must know perfectly well the museum's affairs. It must still be recalled that Arendt, in Eichmann, and this isn't said enough, had the infamy to say that Heydrich, the principal promoter of the Final Solution along with Himmler and Eichmann, and more important than Eichmann, was half-Jewish.
1:22:27 And so, you know, he's wounded by heroic Czech resistance fighters, and takes a week to die, and is said to have repented of the harm he had done to his father. Now, this story of this gossip that Heydrich was half-Jewish is a rumor that Göring spread, simply because Heydrich, being the head of the SD, had files in his safes on each of his friends—they had to find something on him—but it has no genealogical or historical basis whatsoever.
1:23:00 For current generations, Heydrich is the famous HHhH. So I'll let you explain what that corresponds to. He's a "protector"—the coarse words. But I don't understand. I confess that... Eichmann in Jerusalem is a book that doesn't hold up, that is extremely criticized, but this fact alone should show the unacceptable side of this vision. Now, another thing I wanted to point out, if you were talking about the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland—the philosopher who wrote the Manifesto of the Alternative für Deutschland, Marc Jongen, was trained at the University of Karlsruhe, under the direction of Sloterdijk.
1:23:43 So Sloterdijk has distanced himself since, when he saw how far Marc Jongen took on his role. But then Marc Jongen managed to succeed, because he's a bit of a stage animal. I've seen German TV panels where Jongen is sitting next to a social democrat who tells him, "you're a völkisch." And Jongen says, "no, no, I'm for the value of the German people." But well, that's entirely... So he has both the authority of having been an academic and the fact that he's also in the Bundestag.
1:24:21 He was elected to the Bundestag. And well, Jongen was invited to Bard College, that is, to the stronghold of American Arendtism, to come debate with the students. So there was, at that point, an outcry from the American left, which protested. But it's troubling all the same. It's Roger Berkowitz, the Arendtian at Bard College, where all of Arendt's books, etc., are held—the Arendt collection. Part of the Arendt collection, the most important part, still remains in Washington, at the Library of Congress.
1:24:55 There was this debate. And on the back of that, I was invited to come debate, right after, with Roger Berkowitz, in Saint Petersburg. And the title was, "How far can debate go?" So I of course refused, because I felt it was pointless to go show up against Marc Jongen—I think it was a trap. Because, you see, the problem is that someone who is with the AfD in the Bundestag, who has access to every TV panel, who has every possibility of expressing his thought, inviting him into an academic setting to speak to students is an extremely serious political decision.
1:25:35 And so you have Arendtians—well, Arendtians, I don't want to burden them with this, but Arendtians today who are really opening Pandora's box. It's quite troubling, I find. And so, faced with the legitimate indignation of these American left-wing academics, I wanted to tell them nonetheless: you're right, I'm as indignant as you are, but you should have already, beforehand, because they were saying, "how can one associate Arendt's name with that of Marc Jongen?"
1:26:08 And that of Marc Jongen—I told him, yes, but he should have already, beforehand, asked, "how can one associate Arendt's name with that of Armin Mohler," whom she edited. I mean, there's a whole side of Arendt's activity. A bit, since she took charge of it herself. There you go. So the questions must be raised within the Arendtian corpus itself. That's what I mean. Just to add something, I'm very grateful for Mr. Mensching's intervention. And just to add, I come from the Heidegger region, and over there everyone still knew who Jünger was, who Heidegger was, etc.
1:26:43 But we set an example with Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt was really present in popular consciousness—when I was young, now 18-20 years old, Hannah Arendt was a critic of National Socialism. And we had the view that what was dangerous in National Socialism was not the "national" but the "socialist" element. Absolutely. There you go. Well summarized. I only understood that very recently. Right. For decades I thought that what was dangerous was the socialist element.
1:27:13 But it's not the national community, it's something else entirely. And Hannah Arendt, in any case, was an icon, and that's what protected me from her, because already in the sixties she was admired, everyone had their critique of Arendt in their pocket, and that disgusted me, so I never read anything at all by Arendt, thankfully. Oh, no, me, just—it was a... Just that you wanted to mention the name Cavaillès. I imagine many young people don't necessarily know him. The great Cavaillès. The great Cavaillès, exactly.
Cavaillès and Arendt's agenda 1:27:43 Because Cavaillès, as you surely know, had a scholarship to stay and work in Germany. So he didn't—because you spoke about the reception in France of Nazism and Hitlerism—well, he didn't write, strictly speaking, a public text, but he wrote to his sister, there are three letters, three letters from that period—so the exact date of the letter that talks about Hitler. And at the moment when he read Mein Kampf, he's one of the rare philosophers, as far as I know, French philosophers, who read Mein Kampf in German.
1:28:23 Philosophers or not, moreover—I was in the process of doing a bit of research on this. I saw it at that very moment, and above all, before 1933 of course, because we know that Mein Kampf was published—well, in 1933, I believe it's 1927, the second publication—and I believe it's around 1932, actually, that Cavaillès, having had the time to properly digest it, writes to his sister that... So he speaks of the mediocrity—well, he speaks of this book, this "brick," as he calls it, of over 600 pages, but in Germany, he says, everything ultimately comes down to philosophy, and Nazism is the destruction of philosophy, he says.
1:29:07 He says it in so many words. There you go. I wanted to mention him nonetheless because he's one of the rare people to have seen the destruction of thought, the destruction of philosophy, right from the start. I know almost nothing about Cavaillès myself. Thank you for this tribute to Jean Cavaillès, the great epistemologist. I'm not sure that's quite right. Was Arendt and Heidegger—Arendt in particular—aware of the influence she had over what would become a whole new generation of left-wing thinkers?
1:29:51 And does she think, logically speaking, about writing her philosophy in a way that would insert its irrationalist, anti-humanist and anti-universalist premises and cores, with a left-wing style, to make them go down more easily? You often use Heidegger's phrase that the highest act of philosophy or politics is to lead one's adversary to self-destruction. Is there a conscious activity in the philosophical construction, injecting these premises in order to destroy the left?
1:30:31 All these ideas also came to me from reading Stéphanie Roza's book. There is, for example, an interesting letter from the very young Agamben to Arendt, which I believe dates from 1971, which one can read. Agamben had read Arendt's text on Macht und Gewalt, "Power and Violence," "On Violence."
1:31:03 And really his thinking beyond that is one example. Otherwise, on the question of Arendt's agenda, I can say two things. The first is that she wrote an article on Friedrich von Gentz, who had introduced into Germany Burke's counter-revolutionary thought. She's very interested in Gentz, who was a great friend of Rahel Varnhagen, this German Jewish woman about whom Arendt wrote a biography.
1:31:34 Gentz, she says, thought like a conservative, but had a personal existence that was that of a liberal in the current sense, someone modern, who lived with free morals and open thinking, etc. And Arendt is a bit like that. That is to say, those who take charge of the agenda among conservatives, those who take charge of the agenda, are Voegelin, Leo Strauss, etc.
1:32:04 But one also has to be able, indeed, to gain entry into what are called certain American Democratic circles. And Arendt's friends in New York are not Republicans or conservatives, they're rather Democrats, etc. But within that circle, indeed, she introduces a mode of thought that progressively erases references to something like a thought of liberation, of exploitation, since for her that's not a political object, it's not a political question.
1:32:40 And in that sense, she does indeed play that role. That role, that is to say your question can turn into a statement. There is indeed an opportunistic concession, one might say, to circumstances. There really is a kind of agenda. Because she knows that's what's expected of her. Yes, that's what I mean. The meteoric career she has, from Berkeley to Princeton, passing through Chicago, to the New School for Social Research, within a few years—that's remarkable.
1:33:11 It was practically the first time in universities—that's remarkable. One must see the ideas as vehicles. So is the agenda an opportunistic agenda before being... No, there is an agenda, but she puts to opportunistic use what you just... well, if I understood correctly. But we can be more precise about things, if you like. Arendt does have the aura of having been... to say, she didn't have it easy in France, in difficult conditions. She was interned by the Vichy government at Gurs, where, had she not left, she would have been sent to Auschwitz.
1:33:47 All this is something we mustn't forget. So she has the halo of this persecution which she really experienced. She spent a week in prison under the Gestapo. She's a woman of uncommon courage and energy, that's certain. But at the same time, it's very interesting to note that we've just republished Lisa Fittko's diary, because Lisa Fittko really put herself, along with her husband, in that situation, in the service of others. She saved more than 100 people. Well, Arendt saved herself—that's dearly bought, good for her, of course.
1:34:20 But one has to look at what she did afterward. So she has the aura of this undeniable path of persecution, which is not to the glory of Vichy and the French State of that time, that's certain. The other thing is that she has the aura of having been, moreover, a doctor from Heidelberg. And so what is she asked, what do the American journals ask of her, at the end of the—in the mid—forties, in '46, etc.? To take a position on existentialism.
1:34:50 And she's going to write very sneering, very critical articles about it, treating Camus, really, dismissively, etc. And she's going to glorify Jaspers and Heidegger. So she plays that role. That is to say, the references, including in political philosophy, are not French existentialism—that's clearly what's turning toward Marxism. At first it's Jaspers she values in an early article, and then it's clearly Heidegger. So she plays that role.
1:35:22 That's a dog. Yes. That's very much it—people would still say to you at that time, every anticommunist is a dog. Yes, that is to say, one must understand well—I think that's the point of your question, Loïc, I'll speak under your correction—the left-socialist coloring, from an American, North American point of view, and that the tonality, at the very least, that her discourse takes on is a matter of circumstance, but is not connected to an agenda which, itself, has a completely different aim, in fact.
1:35:57 I think we can say that. And at the same time, you see, there was one thing that surprised me at one point, which is that Arendt is very hostile to the McCarthy campaign. So one says to oneself, ah, well, she doesn't go too far after all. But there has been an enormous amount of scholarship on the Cold War, and it has really been shown that on the intellectual agenda of the CIA, McCarthy was a nuisance. It was absolutely excessive, there was a general operation, there was rivalry and disagreement among the various American currents.
1:36:29 Were people like — yes, within the somewhat more intelligent part of the CIA, since it was more international in scope, the point was to gain a foothold in Europe, above all in France and Italy. The stakes were France and Italy. So McCarthy was counterproductive, just as Heidegger, at a certain point, was in the eyes of Nazi origin. No, because I've often read, when people tell me that Arendt — objectively, we know that Arendt used to publish in journals funded by a major agency.
1:37:07 She was invited, like her friend Mary McCarthy, also to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, etc. All of that is well known. At the same time, she ironizes about it, but she always keeps her caustic wit. We're in the United States, at that time — and you have to remember, this is the period we're talking about, the period of Hannah Arendt's agenda, Hannah Arendt's — where we have Brzezinski, who very actively steps up to the plate and becomes the true ideologue of the American state apparatus.
1:37:40 But he is, so to speak, a left-liberal, he's a Democrat, he will be Carter's Secretary of State, Brzezinski, not from the Republican party. One has to be aware of that — the boundaries between left and right, etc., which have already become extremely blurred here, I mean that in the United States, and all the more so at that time, they are still held to much more firmly. I'll remind you that you had the French Doctors, who were around Reagan as advisers — Reagan, the American far right — and Bush Junior, there were the French Doctors, two-thirds of whom were Trotskyists.
The disagreement over Adorno and the conclusion on aristocracy 1:38:15 Yes, that maybe brings us to another part of the debate. If there are no other questions, I'll invite you to conclude, my dear Emmanuel Faye. But you see, Dominique, the one point on which we're really not quite in agreement is on Adorno. He truly had courage, when you see the critical courage he showed in Germany. But it's not at all on that level that we're hostile to Adorno. You understand that, don't you? Yes, yes, yes. On Adorno, I don't know if you saw our evening with Bernard Bourgeois.
1:38:52 Yes, I know. Well, I think we argued quite clearly about our extremely severe objections, but from a philosophical point of view, it has nothing to do with the problem we're dealing with... Yes, it's a different sense. It's a different sense. It's a different aspect of Adorno. I think one has to do justice to Adorno's courage. And he's not the only one, moreover, in the Frankfurt School, to have had a conduct — politically speaking and otherwise — beyond all criticism on these questions and during that period.
1:39:23 It's not at all on that level that we're attacking Adorno. Adorno — but it's not at all the same level of contradiction, as we say, that one observes with Arendt. Yes, it's a rich and complex body of thought with many important insights, because it wasn't a given that within the Frankfurt School one would go that far. For example, Horkheimer's last assistant, Alfred Schmidt, was a Hegelian Marxist. Yes, yes, yes. That's not openly brought into this.
1:39:53 And there are still some. Even Axel Honneth, who is, God knows, a quality philosopher, ends up being fairly indulgent toward Heidegger. But this indulgence toward Heidegger tends to be in the spirit of the times. You mentioned earlier that regarding Being and Time, we were in fact rather in the spirit of the times. That was somewhat the point at the beginning of your presentation. That's what it makes me think of. We have a spirit of the times which is, at any rate in the circles of our intellectual elites, and particularly those who proclaim themselves rather left-wing, progressive, etc.
1:40:32 We nevertheless have a Heideggerian breath that has been revived. I think you've noticed it. And so indeed, to come back to Adorno, from that point of view he is absolutely unassailable, irreproachable. That is the very last thing anyone would ever hold against him personally. And I don't think it is any more the intention, either of Bernard Bourgeois or of those who made a severe critique of the Frankfurt School that day, to attack Adorno on that subject.
1:41:03 That's the problem. We may still disagree about what we hold against Adorno, but in any case there's no difference on that point. There, on that particular criticism, we don't make it. To be clear, we don't at all equate Adorno's position with that of Hannah Arendt, far from it. I would even say it's almost the opposite. One could encourage young people — I think it would be good to do what you know, encourage young people to ask themselves, following your books for example, why in France in particular the reception of Heidegger was so favorable, to the point that the entire Parisian and French philosophical school, from Sartre to Derrida, one could trace an arc among the living, standing in Heidegger's shadow.
1:41:51 I don't know if you have wars — I don't know if you have wars. Why in France, and it's so well known that there's the famous passage from Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters, where he quite explicitly mocks the Parisian intellectuals over their coquettish fussing about Heidegger. Yes, just a short word to conclude: in The Human Condition, Arendt writes that only the aristoi, the aristocrats, the best, are truly human.
1:42:26 I think that, well, one must bear this kind of statement in mind when returning to Arendt, so as not to turn her too quickly into an icon of our democracies. Or else it means that our democracies are really doing very badly. Alas, I'm afraid both are true. There we are, so thank you, thank you all. Thank you.
