Generation Existential: Heidegger's Philosophy in France, 1927-1961

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Printed in the United States of America Library of Congrt'ss Cat.aloging·i11-Publication Data Kleinberg, Ethan, 1967Generation existential : Heidegger's philosophy in France, 1927-1961/ Ethan Kleinberg. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13· 978-0-8014-4391-6 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-7382-1 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 2. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976-Influence. 3. Philosophy, French-20th century. 4. Philosophy, Modern-20th century. 5. Existentialism.

I. Title.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

List of Abbreviations

IX

On the Way to France .

3

Introduction

1.

Emmanuel Levinas: de l'etre.

19

The First Reading 2. 3.

Ale_xandre Kojeve and the He~el Seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Halites Etudes

49

The Dissemination ofKojeve's Heideggerian Interpretation of Hegel

84 111

4. Jean-Paul Sartre

The Second Reading 5. Jean Beaufret, the First Heidegger Affair, and the "Letter on Humanism"

157

The Third Reading 6.

Maurice Blanchot: The V\~riting of Disaster

7.

Emmanuel Levinas:

. a l'autre

209 245

Conclusion

280

Index

289

v

Acknowledgments

This book investigates the initial reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France. In it I demonstrate the ways that a select group of intellectuals engaged and incorporated Heidegger's philosophy into their own work and how this process of translation and transfer disseminated Heidegger's philosophy throughout France. I owe a debt of gratitude to all the teachers, advisers, friends, and colleagues whose guidance and counsel helped me along the way. The comments and suggestions I received showed a deep and abiding knowledge of the material. Any shortcomings in this book are entirely the result of my choices, whereas any advances are the result of the patient guidance and sound advice I received over the years. I would especially like to thank Robert Wohl and Samuel Weber, who have guided me through this project since its inception. Robert Wohl's comments were extremely influential in determining the structure and scope of the present work. I would also like to thank David Myers, Saul Friedlander, Peter Lowenberg, Peter Baldwin, David Sabean, Hubert Dreyfus, and the late Jacques Derrida. I owe Martin Jay and Richard Vann an enormous debt of gratitude for taking the time to read this manuscript and provide me with extensive comments, suggestions, and encouragement. I also thank Nathaniel Green and Paul Schwaber for their editorial suggestions and express my gratitude to the anonymous referees who read this work with care and precision. Samuel Moyn and I have been exchanging e-mails about Emmanuel Levimis, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger for almost ten years and I want to thank him for this potentially infinite conversation. I have learned a great deal from his keen mind and lucid analysis. Peter Gordon offered his time and expertise in reading and commenting on this work and his insights proved to be invaluable. I can only hope that some of his mellifluous prose rubbed off. Thank you, Peter. Eugene Sheppard has been my comrade in intellectual history since our days as graduate students at UClA. He has helped me think through many of the issues in this book and has served as a sounding board, a critic, and an all-around mensch throughout the writing of this book. Thank you, Eugene. I would also like to thank my fellow participants from the UC Humanities Research Institute, Emily Apter, Ali Behdad,

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Janet Bergstrom, David Carroll, Valerie Kaussen, Patricia Morton, Kenneth Reinhard, Tyler Stovall, Richard Terdiman, and Georges Van den Abbeele; my colleagues from the UCLA Department of History (Joshua Goode, Gavriel Rosenfeld, Dani Eshet, Dave McBride, Gopal Balakrishnan, Adam Rubin), the Department of History at Iowa State University, and especially from the Department of History and College of Letters at We!ileyan University. A special thanks to Manolis Kaparakis, whose technological savvy and human kindness helped me survive the "lost data hell" that is the fate of all modem scholars. And I would like to thank John G. Ackerman for his patience, persistence, and support, along with thanks to Candace Akins and the editorial and production staff at Cornell University Press. This book would not have been possible without financial support from the UCLA Department of History, the Center for German and European Studies at UC Berkeley, the Monkarsh Foundation, the UCLA Critical Theory in Paris Program, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the J. William Fulbright Commission, and Wesleyan University. Thank you for your support and confidence. To my friends and family, I thank you for your patience and encouragement throughout this long process. To my parents, Marvin and Irene Kleinberg, thank you for everything you have done for me. I love you very much. Thank you, Sarah, Donal, and Ciaran. Thank you, Joel, Letitia, and Maia. Thank you, Nancy, Sol, Scott,Jody, Mike, and Susan. I want to thank my daughters, Lily and Noa, who have made my life a pleasure and filled every day with joy (a scratch on the ears to Robes as well). Finally, I must thank my wife, Tracy, without whom none of this would have been possible. I love you more than anything and I dedicate this book to you.

viii

Abbreviations

Maurice Blanchot ED LDM TO

L'ecriture du desastre. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1980. "La litterature et le droit a Ia mort." In La Part dufeu. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1949. Thomas l'obscur. Paris: L'Imaginaire Gallimard, 1950.

Martin Heidegger BT LH SZ Q

Being and Time. Trans.John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. NewYork: Harper and Row, 1962. "The Letter on Humanism." In Basic Writings, edited by David Krell. San Frantisco: Harper Books, 1993. Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1986. Questions I et II. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

Alexandre Kojeve ILH IRH

Introduction a la lecture de Hegel, compiled by Raymond Queneau. Paris: Grasset, 1990. Introduction to the &ading of Hegel, edited by Allan Bloom. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Emmanuel Levinas EE TI Tlf TIHP TIPH

a

De !'existence l'existant. Paris: Vrin, 1993. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980. Totalite et Injini. Paris: Kluwer Academic, 1971. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Theorie de ['intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl. Paris: Vrin, 1963.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty SC

La structure du comportement. Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1942.

ix

ABBREVIATIONS

Jean-Paul Sartre BN EH EN N Nf TE

X

Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1953. L'existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1970. L'etre et le neant. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1943. Nausea. New York: New Directions, 1969. La nausee. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. The Transcendence oftheEgo. New York: Octagon, 1972.

On the Way to France ...

Introduction

While I was attending a dinner party in Paris some years ago, the conversation turned to the intellectual climate in France after World War II. At first the discussion was dominated by the works of Sartre, an author on whom everyone at the table held an opinion. One of the guest-, asked a question he thought I might be able to answer: "How was it that Sartre was able to Cartesianize Heidegger?" The question was soon refommlated: "How did Sartre make Heidegger French?" I began to explain that the story of Heidegger's reception in France is complex, that the answer requires an investigation into the intellectual climate of France between the wars as well as into the relation between young French intellectuals such as Sartre, Raymond Aron, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the foreign intellectuals who emigrated to Paris in the 1930s and brought the work of Heidegger with them. Unfortunately, before I could go any further, I found myself fielding a veritable barrage of questions. The first flurry concerned Heidegger's influence on Sartre, in contrast to his influence on the "postmodem" philosophers (the names Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard were mentioned). The next flurry changed the tenor of the conversation entirely. I was asked to explain Heidegger's affiliation with the National Socialist Party and the relation of his political actions to his philosophical work. As I tried my best to tie all these topics together, the conversation around me degenerated into a mini-Heidegger Affair. Voices were raised, tempers flared, and I was left pondering a familiar question. How could I tell the story of Heidegger's reception in France in a way that would do justice to all these issues without being sidetracked by any one? In many ways the story of Heidegger's reception in France (which is also the story of the intellectual figures who brought Heidegger's work to France and their influence on modern French culture and society)

3

ON THE WAY TO FRANCE

has been eclipsed by the popularity of Sartre and the notoriety of Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism. Emmanuel Levinas, Alexandre Kojeve, Jean Beaufret, and Maurice Blanchot are hardly household names in the United States. Furthermore, in France these intellectuals have been traditionally understood to be supporting players in Sartre's existential drama. Thus for me, the task at hand was to explain the ways in which Heidegger's philosophy was imported, incorporated, and expanded on in France. At the same time, I had to keep in mind the problematic issue of Heidegger's political choices, while bringing to the fore a number of intellectual figures whose influence on modern French philosophy has been enormous but whose lives and works have been illdefined and underexplored. The reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France is the story of a "generation" of French intellectuals who grew up in the shadow of World War I and subsequently turned away from traditional French philosophy and toward a new and different strain of philosophical thought imported from Germany through an influx of foreign intellectuals. To present it in broad strokes, this was a generation whose earliest intellectual formation took place within a set of institutions devoted to a ne
Jean-Fran~ois

Sirinelli's Ghleration

;nfR[lerfuPlle: Kltli.gneux et normaliRns dans l'nttre-dl'UX-gtte'ffl!S (Paris: Fayard, 1988), but is guided by Robert Wohl's critique of"generational" history as presented in ThP Generation of

1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). To this end I take Wohl's assertion that "generations are not born; they are made" (5) in the most literal sense. For Sirinelli, the group of French intellectuals born between 1900 and 1910 are the "generation of 1905," a term thal denotes the median age of birth. Sirinelli points out that he might have opted for the "generation of 1925," a reference to these young intellectuals' formative years in French preparatory school and at the Ecole Normale Superieure. In my work I label this same age group of intellectuals the "generation of 1933," referring to the year that the select group investigated in this book turned away from the institutions of their formative years and toward alternative venues for critical and philosophical thought. These varied characterizations of the same age group of intellectuals point to the problematic nature of the term "generation," which probably tells us as much about the goals of the historian employing the tenn as it does about the intellectuals being investigated. Furthermore, while I do explore certain representatives of the "generation of 1933," I do not attempt to represent the concerns of the entire French age group born between 1900 and 1910. Instead, this work deals with specific representatives of that age group who had an active interest in philosophy and writing. The individuals I investigate tend to be middle-class males.

4

Introduction

The answer lies in the generation of 1933's perception of a grave crisis in French academic philosophy. For students such as Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean Beaufret (all born between 1900 and 1910), philosophical thought was dictated by the structure of the French academic system. During the 1920s and 1930s, two schools of thought ruled supreme within this structure: neo-Kantian rationalism and Bergson ian spiritualism. 2 Given the educational agenda of the Third Republic from its inception, it is not surprising that the government favored neo-Kantianism. The university professors were given a mission by the state: to impress on their students the legitimacy of the new republican institutions. Two doctrines vied for this role and both were decidedly rationalistic. The first was Durkheim's sociological positivism, the second French neo-Kantian rationalism as embodied in the critical idealism of Leon Brunschvicg. 3 \Vhile opposed to each other, both these doctrines taught that humankind, from its distant origins, had never ceased to progress toward an agreement on specific reasonable principles, which were precisely those on which republican institutions are based. 4 The fact that neo-Kantian rationalism prevailed in the end can be attributed to its compatibility with the ideology of the government, which placed Brunschvicg at the head of the jury d'agregation and gave him the power to determine the syllabus for philosophy departments throughout France. Bnmschvicg's academic position is essential to our understanding of the educational background of the generation of 1933, who took their exams in philosophy guided by Brunschvicg's syllabus. Nominated directly by the minister of education, the head of the jury d'agregation selects the other members of the jury, presides over its deliberations, and decides which subjects are suitable for the examination. Under Brunschvicg's reign, students studied Plato, Descartes, and Kant, in that order, presented as the logical progression of philosophy. For authors whom Brunschvicg and the French neo-Kantians rejected, such as Aristotle and Hegel, only a cursory refutation was required. 2. The French variant of neo-Kantianism is entirely different from that of the German schools. For a succinct description ofthe French variant, see Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twnttieth Cmtury (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 40-48. For an understanding of the German phenomenon, see Thomas Willey, Back to Kant: ThP Reuival ofKm1tiani.sm in German Social and Historical Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978). For a detailed account on Bergson and spiritualism, see Dominique Janicaud, Une grnPal.o[!j.e du fpirilualismp fram;ai\ (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969). 3. On the life and work of Leon Brunschvicg, see Rene Boirel, Bmnschvicg: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964); Dominique Parodi, La pltilosophie co11ternparainP m Fra11ce (Paris: Alcan, 1919); and the section on Brunschvicg in Gutting, Frmr.h PhiltJ.mphy in the Twentieth Century. 4. Vincent Descombes, ModPTn Hnl('h Philosophy, trans. L. Scott Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), G-7.

5

ON THE WAY TO FRANCE

Brunschvicg's critical idealism was based in part on Kant and thus belonged to the neo-Kantian tradition, but Brunschvicg was equally indebted to the French positivist tradition and the work of Auguste Comte. Thus Brunschvicg paralleled the German neo-Kantians who, "taking their cue from Kant's critique of metaphysics[,] set out to demonstrate that philosophy properly conceived must confine itself to laying down the formal conditions for knowledge," and allowed no room for transcendentalism or a theory of the dialectic. 5 But Brunschvicg takes the Kantian notion of formal conditions of knowledge and weds it to the positivist understanding of science as the realm of the "most" formal conditions. This leads to a critical idealism that rejects the thing in itself, a priori conditions, and thus transcendentalism as well. All that is left is intellectual judgment, and the most productive scaffold for this is "science."6 In Brunschvicg's philosophy, science provides the foundation for the laws of reality and thus manifests the initiative of the human spirit, which has no limits to its development. Thus he could claim that we are "destined to create a moral universe in the same way we have created the material universe of gravitation or of electricity. "7 As a philosophy that upholds the primacy of formal reason and the unlimited development of rational humanity, Brunschvicg's neo-Kantianism was an ideal match for the Third Republic that held these same values dear. The rise of spiritualism in the person of Henri Bergson came in direct response to the dominant materialist/ rationalist tendencies of the Third Republic. The link between the Third Republic and the advancement of philosophical movements that reinforced its own values placed the scientific method on a pedestal in an attempt to define and assert "universal truths." These truths demonstrated the validity of the Enlightenment project and the Third Republic that was its heir. In contrast, Bergson's philosophy was an optimistic affirmation of life that privileged all human beings as the material for the making of "gods." Bergson's work was conceived in opposition to a perceived overemphasis on science and reason. His philosophy catered to the desire of those who needed more than rationality, and in this way he awoke academia from a deep rationalist sleep. Bergson believed that advances in science, and specifically in the theory of determinism, were coming at the expense of the freedom of human thought. Mechanical laws left no room for instinct, pure emotion, or faith. The choices offered to humans were seen as increasingly 5. Peter Gordon, "Science, Finitude, and Infinity: Neo-Kantianism and the Birth of Existentialism," Jnoish Social Studies 6 (Fall 1999): 33. 6. See Leon Brunschvicg, /,a rnodaliti dujugeme11t (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964). 7. Leon Brunschvicg, "Vie interieure et vie spirituelle," Rcoue d.e rnitnphysiquR f't de rnural.e 32 (1925):146. Unless otherwise noted, translations from the French are my own.

6

Introduction

limited by the parameters of science. 8 Bergson used the argumentative tools of science and mathematics to open a place for the individual in modem philosophy. It was this validation of instinct, of hope, and of indeterminacy that struck a chord among Bergson's readers-in France and, ultimately, throughout the world-who had been suffering the impersonalization and objectification of the subject at the hands of rationality. Through rigorous method and sound reasoning, Bergson was able to return the ideas of faith, free will, and indeterminacy to the forefront of academic life. Bergson's philosophy was universal in that it allowed for an underlying bond among all peoples, yet it did not sacrifice the importance of particular identities or subjectivity. Indeed, at the apogee of Bergson's popularity before World War I, it seemed the Bergsonian revolution had freed philosophy from the empirical chains of positivism and surpassed the methodical rationalism of French neoKantianism. To the generation that came to maturity between 1890 and 1914, he looked like a philosophical liberator and an opponent of the intellectual establishment. 9 In many ways, Bergson's philosophy of optimism, based on an affirmation of human potential, resembled precisely the teleological, anthropocentric, progressive program asserted by the neo--Kantians. They were all prorepublican in their call for certain specific universal principles and in their unwavering optimism toward the concept of progress. Bergson questioned the fundamental validity of scientific method and rational thought by creating an opening for "irrational" human thought and free will in the modern world of universal mechanisms, but he did so using the tools of positivism and determinism to prove their inherent errors. 10 In the aftermath of World War I, Bergson's optimism seemed naive, and further advances in science and biology showed many of his theories to be faulty. He had disproved the cruder philosophies of positivism and determinism, but the events of World War I disproved his own optimistic philosophy. The generation of 1933 did not see Bergson as a philosophical liberator or as an opponent of the intellectual establishment, but rather as part and parcel of a French academic tradition unprepared to deal with the hardship of concrete existence. This is not to say that his influ8. See John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 9, 24-27. 9. R. C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controvnsy in Frar1ce (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988), ix. Also see Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Philippe Soulez and Frederick Worms, Bergson (Paris: Flammarion, 1997); A. E. Pilkington, Berg.1on and /lis Influence: A lvassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 10. See Henri Bergson, F:ssai sur les d011nPes immedintes dP La consciRnre (1889; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1927).

7

ON THE WAY TO fRANCE

ence on the generation of 1933 was not substantial. But the generation of 1933 wanted to move beyond Bergsonian spiritualism, which they considered overly subjective and optimistic, and this created a gap in the French philosophical world. The French neo-Kantians attempted to use recent advances in science to explain the increasingly complex nature of the world, but they too faced the harsh challenge that World War I presented to the French notion of progress. Thus both strains of French philosophy appeared insufficient to the generation of 1933. For them, the starting point of philosophy was the desire to come to grips with the events of World War I in relation to the optimistic view of progress and history embodied by French philosophy and the Third Republic. Neither the spiritualists nor the materialists could explain the senseless killing and mass destruction that marked the "victory" of France in World War I, nor the precarious economic position of an industrializing France. To the generation of 1933, the traditional academic system seemed more concerned with perpetuating itself and its republican ideals than with confronting the realities of a changing world. The events of history had debunked the theory of historical progress that had guided the Third Republic from its inception. The answers the generation of 1933 sought lay beyond the familiar territory of French academic philosophy. A new way of thinking was required to make sense of a world that eluded the grasp of their teacher. It is in this sense that I will describe the reception of Heidegger in France as an intersection of heimisch (familiar, of one's home) and unheimlich (strange, foreign). The tem1 unh£imlich is usually translated "uncanny," "curious," or "strange" (all ofwhich are applicable in this case as well), but can be rendered more literally as "not at home." 11 This is a particularly appropriate model to keep in mind when discussing the reception of Heidegger in France because it was an influx of foreign emigres who brought Heidegger to France and provided the basis for the domesticated version of Heidegger's philosophy presented by the generation of 1933. Thus I refer not only to the unheimlich nature of the importation of a German philosopher's works from his "home" to the "foreign" soil of France 12 but also to the principal agents of importation: Emmanuel Levinas, Alexandre Koyre, Alexandre Kojeve, Georges Gurvitch, and Bernard Groethuysen, to name several. All these figures were foreign intellectuals who made themI L Heidegger himself uses the term unhrimlir:h to denote that which questions the status of knowledge, truth, and the limits of appropriability. For Heidegger, the unheimliclt is what seems most familiar but is in fact the most strange. "Here 'unheimlich' also means 'not-being-at-home' [da.s Nidtt-z.uhnuse-sei11]" (BT, 233). 12. The reverse argument can also be made, that a "foreign" German philosophy was imported onto "native" French soil, thus pointing out the particularly slippery question of national identity or of nation and identity.

8

Introduction

selves "at home" in post-World War I France. The arrival of figures fleeing Russia in 1917 via Germany infused French intellectual life with scholars raised on Russian literature, exposed to Marxist doctrine, and schooled in modem German philosophy. German:Jewish intellectuals fleeing antiSemitism in German universities represented a later wave of intellectuals coming to France. Levinas brought a new way of reading philosophy; Alexandre Koyre and K.ojeve imported interpretations of Hegel. 13 These "foreign" intellectuals working on the periphery of the French university system and publishing in French provided concrete answers to the questions the generation of 1933 felt their own philosophical tradition was unable to answer. They also imported interpretations of Heidegger's philosophy, on which such French thinkers as Raymond Aron, Jean Beaufret, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, and Jean-Paul Sartre (all graduates of the Ecole Norrnale Superieure) would base their work and thereby secure Martin Heidegger's place in twentieth-century French intellectual life. But this is not to say that Heidegger has found a "home" in France. The very process of rooting Heidegger's work in that country has been tense and often violent, as exemplified by the numerous Heidegger Affairs that continually resurface. The process of amnesia and rediscovery of the "insidious," "foreign," "totalitarian," and "hostile" nature of Heidegger's work is indicative of a larger French trend toward appropriating and then disowning academic traditions. 14 But this process of rediscovery also points to the phenomenon rediscovered. Any serious work on Heidegger, his philosophy, or his disciples 13. See Descombes, Modem French Philosophy; Michael Roth, Knowing and Ilistary: Appropriations of llegPl in Twentieth-century Franre (Ithaca; Cornell University Press, 1988); Judith Butler, Subjfcts of DesirP: Hegelian RRjlertions in 1iventiPtlz Cro.tury France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Tom Rockmore, Jleidegger and French Philosophy: 1-lumanMm, Antihumanism, a·n.d Being (New York: Routledge, 1995). 14. This is perhaps best exemplified by the wave of work in the mid- to late 1940s by such French thinkers as Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sartre, and even Paul Valery, nominally on the subject of Rene Descartes but more concerned with proving that Heidegger's philosophy was derivative and secondary to the original French genius of Descartes. The most blatant of these works was Sartre's introduction to his own selection of texts by Descartes: Descarte.~. 1596-1650 (Paris: Traits, 1946). Other works on Descartes from this period include: Leon Brunschvicg, [)psrartes et Pasca~ l.eciPurs de Mont.aign.e (Paris: Brentano, 1944); Henri Lefebvre, De~cartes (Paris: Editions d'hieret aujourd'hui, 1947); Paul Valery, Vs pagps immort.el~ de Desrart.es, choisi.es et expN.qufes par Paul Valhy (Paris: Correa, 1946). I wish to thank George Van den Abbeele for his help in compiling this bibliography. The subsequent attacks on French Heideggerianism can be read as internal conflicts attempting to refocus the future of French philosophy based on purely French philosophical grounds. Alain Renault and Luc Ferry's I-leidegger et l.es Mod.emes is a particularly transparent attempt to extricate all things German from "French" philosophy in an attempt to right the listing ship of the French intellectual tradition-the dismissal of deconstruction in favor of a return to liberal humanism as exemplified in the more traditional reading of Descartes.

9

ON THE WAY TO FRANCE

necessarily stands in the shadow of Heidegger's political decisions in the 1930s. The problematic nature of Heidegger's political choices and the ramifications of those choices are central issues in this book. But Heidegger's politics is not the main focus of this work. 15 Instead, I approach the relation of Heidegger's politics to his philosophy by focusing on the reception of Heidegger in France in the hopes of addressing specific historical questions concerning the first Heidegger Affair in France, while also shedding some light on the larger historical, philosophical, and ethical questions involved. Most of the historical work on French intellectuals after 1930 addresses the reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France peripherally if at all, exploring the results of Heidegger's influence in France without addressing the origins of that influence. 16 As a result, the French understanding of Heidegger's philosophy looks very different in an investigation into Sartre's work than it does in an investigation into the work of Beaufret or Derrida. This is because the reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France is not the story of a singular French understanding, but of a series of distinct understandings or "readings" of Heidegger's philosophy. For reasons that will become apparent, I have chosen to limit this study to the first three "readings" of Heidegger's philosophy in France, which

15. On the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics, see Richard Wolin, ThP Politic..r of Being: 11ze Political Thought of Marlin I lf'idegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Tom Rockmore, On /leideggt:r:~ Nnzi~rn and Phiwsoplty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., The /leidpgger Case: On Pltilo.rophy and Poli.tics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Hugo Ott, Martin IlPidRggf'T: l!nfRrloegs zu stini'T Bi.ographie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988); Hans Sluga, lleidf'{!J{f'T's Criril: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of 11mt 11wught, trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996); and Victor Farias, J/pifkggrr and Nazism, trans. Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 16. A notable exception is Rockmore's l!ndeggt:r and Frnuh Phiwsaphy, a substantive investigation into the "relation between Heidegger's theory and his politics through a selfcontained, independent inquiry into the French reception of Heidegger's thought" (xi). Rockmore's work differs from my own in that he focuses on the relation between politics and thought in the French reception. His book is organized thematically around the role of "humanism" and "antihumanism" in French philosophy and attempts to understand "how an apparent genius who was drawn to Nazism has continued to attract attention among many philosophers who do not share his political views, above all those working in the humanist tradition of French philosophy" (xv). As such it is an excellent companion to this work's chronological account of the initial importation, reception, and incorporation of Heidegger's philosophy in France and its subsequent immense popularity. Of equal importance is Dominique Janicaud's llridPggPT er1 Franc~, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001). The first volume presents Janicaud's own account of the reception of Heidegger in France from an insider's perspective. The second is a series of interviews with French intellectuals that provides multiple perspectives on the process of reception.

10

Introduction

occurred between 1927 and 1961, the "first phase" of the reception of Heidegger in France. The basis for these divergent readings lies in the tension in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (first published in 1927) between his attempt to present a primordial collective and his desire to preserve the individuality of the specific actor. The organizing motif of Being and Time is Heidegger's investigation of the individual being in relation to the collective background in which that being finds itself. For this reason, Heidegger organized Being and Time into two "divisions." Division 1 is concerned with the ''way of being" in the largest sense of the term, Division 2 with the specific aspects of particular being. But the earliest French readers seem to have had little interest in the obscure and elusive category of the "way of being," and their own interest in "individuality" led them to the later parts of Being and Time, where Heidegger's concern with the actual conditions of human existence came to the fore. Heidegger did not intend for the two divisions to stand in opposition, but in the French reading the emphasis was placed on the second division, specifically the chapters "Temporality," "Death," and "Historicality." This shift created an oppositional dynamic between the two divisions that emphasized the primacy of the individual who asserts his individuality through "authentic choice" and "resolute action." This fundamentally humanistic, anthropocentric reading of Heidegger's project I will call the first reading ofHeidegger in France. In Being and Time, Heidegger is equally concerned with the collective contextual referent of "the world" (which gives us all our possibilities and is the social nexus into which we are thrown), and the particular individual who exists as a being-in-the-world and for whom being is an issueP But Heidegger's language is difficult and his intentions are at times unclear. His investigation into the larger ontological issue of being necessarily begins with the localized investigation into the omic properties of the specific being for whom being is an issue. 18 But this does not mean that the individual holds the answer to the question of being. On the one hand, everything we do and have is based on the world we live 17. On Heidegger's philosophy and &ing and Time, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Bei11g-in-the-World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Theodore Kisiel, The Gnle'iis of 1/eidPgger:'i Bring and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jeffrey Barash, Marti11 Hl'idegJ.,Tt'T and the Problem of I li.'it.orical MP.fJning (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); Michael Gelven, ed., A Commentary on !Ieidegger's Being and Time, rev. ed. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989}; Richard Polt, lleidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999}; Harrison Hall, "Intentionality and World: Division I on Being ami Time," and Piotr lloffman, "Death, Time, History: Division II of Bnng and TimP," both in The Cambridge Companion to lll'idegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Michael Murray, ed., llei.dJ>gwrand Modern Phil.ofnphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 18. For Heidegger, on tic properties determine the specific ways we exist on an everyday level, for example, being a carpenter who builds houses.

11

ON THE WAY TO FRANCE

in and the cultural referents the world presents us with (and thus not on our individual self); on the other hand, it is only through the individual Dasein that we can come to investigate this phenomenon. While Dasein does imply "human existence," it is not to be confused with anything like the Cartesian cogito, the Freudian ego, or Husserl's concept of consciousness. Dasein is not a conscious subject. It is not cognitive, localizable, or definable as a process or event. Instead, Dasein is the way human beings are. It must be understood as more basic than mental states and intentionality and therefore as the basis on which these concepts are grounded. 19 Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence-in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, or got into them, or grown up in them already. Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking hold or by neglecting. (BT, 33)

The possibilities that Dasein can "choose'' are based on the world around it, but, because Dasein is self-interpreting in its nature, it approaches the world individually. "The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence' (BT, 67). Heidegger's language can be interpreted to emphasize either the collective referent or the individual existent. For reasons we will explore, the first French readers inclined toward the individual, while the proponents of the second reading, such as Jean Beaufret, inclined toward the collective. Heidegger wants to explore the difficult dynamic between the individual Dasein and the world that gives it its possibilities, but he is not clear about which of these two themes holds greater weight in the overall investigation. This is because Heidegger's model represents an intersection between the often conflicting influences of Wilhelm Dilthey and S0ren Kierkegaard, which become muddled in Being and Time because of the free-flowing manner in which Heidegger moves between the two without really spelling out their differences. The issue is compounded by Heidegger's attempt to reconcile the communal and the individual by using impersonal linguistic constructions in German. Heidegger appropriated the use of the German impersonal from neo-Kantianism but modified it to alter its philosophical significance. Heidegger takes the neo-Kantian es gilt ("it holds," "it is valid") and, by shifting the emphasis to the it, produces a philosophical construct that emphasizes that which is prior to what is valid and which, in fact, gives validity. Thus Heidegger presents a pretheoretical "hold" to accompany the theoretical "it holds" of neo-Kantianism, a "hold" given by the impersonal it. In this move, Heidegger "gives priority to the impersonal event enveloping the 19. Dreyfus,

12

Bfing-in-II~R-World,

22.

Introduction

I which 'takes place' in that event." 20 He_idegger relies on the German impersonal throughout Being and Time to imply the action that occurs prior to reflection or cognition. It is thus on the basis of his critique of neo-Kantianism that the es giht shifts meaning from the Kantian "there is" to the Heideggerian "it is given." The es gibt as "it is given" removes the emphasis from the thing in itself and instead emphasizes brute facticity. The world is given to us a priori. But this impersonal giving also implies the "who" it is given to. Heidegger's goal (as is evident in the structural division of Being and Time) is to present the larger collective issue of the way of being, which is the impersonal basis for all our practices and possibilities, and then to investigate how that common way of being is differentiated in each specific case. In this sense we can understand Heidegger's use of the je as in ]emeinigkeit ("in each case mine") as the relation of the collective facticity of Dasein to the specific differentiated case that is mine. Facticity occurs first (it is given), and that which is given is understood in relation to the specific case of Dasein, who presses into the possibilities that are given. This "shows that there is already a pre--cognitive moment in which the initial categories or forms first present themselves as simply given before they are known." 21 But the understanding of the je as the specific case of a larger common way is easily lost in the rhetoric of what is "in each case mine." In the first reading of Heidegger, the generation of 1933 read ]emeinigkeit as indicative of the primary importance of the singular and individual Dasein. This reading of Being and Time focused on the primacy of the individual Dasein, who is thrown into a world beyond its control. This shift of focus was due largely to Heidegger's language but also to Kierkegaard 's influence on Being and Time and the overemphasis on this influence that characterized the first reading of Heidegger in France. This reading seemed to be corroborated by chapter 4 of Division 1 of Being and Time, titled "Being-in-the-world as Being-with and Being-one's-self. The One (Das Man)." The purpose of this chapter is purportedly to explain the relation between referential context (the world) and the case of specific Dasein that is in the world. 22 But Heidegger does not distinguish between the Diltheyan model he is using and the Kierkegaardian model, which might have shown how these two structures work together. Furthermore, Heidegger's language betrays an 20. Kisiel, 7711' Genesis of I leid.egger:~ Being and Time, 25.

21. Ibid., 27. 22. Heidegger's term das Man is commonly translated as "the they." It connotes a separation between the individual Daseirt and the "they" who inhabit the world. I have instead chosen the term "one" (as in "it is what one does") because it implies that the individual Da.~t'in is incorporated into the referential whole of dm Man and is not outside it. As often as possible I will use the original German.

13

ON THE WAY TO FRANCE

individualistic tendency indebted to Kierkegaard (and Nietzsche), which becomes the central theme for the first reading of Heidegger in France. Heidegger's description of the "who" of everyday Dasein is ambiguous; he presents Dasein as equiprimordial with the Mitsein (being-with others) but also as "an entity which is in each case I myself; its Being is in each case mine" (BT, 150). Heidegger points out that this conflict underlies the common assumption that the "I" is the source of all investigation (which in a sense it is), an assumption that disguises the fact that the world in which we live is there already. Just as the ontical obviousness of the Being-in-itself of entities within-the-world misleads us into the conviction that the meaning of this Being is obvious ontologically, and makes us overlook the phenomenon of the world, the ontical obviousness of the fact that Dasein is in each case mine, also hides the possibility that the ontological problematic which belongs to it has been led astray. Proximally the "who" of Dasein is not only a problem ontologically; even ontically it remains concealed. (BT, 152) The obviousness of the self leads to the flawed conclusion that it is the source of ontological investigation, but this conclusion obscures the antic everyday understanding of the self as well. In this sense the obviousness of the self makes it difficult to discern. For Heidegger, the self as the locus of cognition is not primary but derived. We experience others through our Dasein, which is our own; the others, however, are not derived from our self but are already there with us: Thus in characterizing the encounter of Others, one is again still oriented by that Dasein which is in each case one's own. But even in this characterization does one not start by marking out and isolating the "I" so that one must then seek some way of getting over to the Others from this isolated subject? To avoid this misunderstanding we must notice in what sense we are talking about "the Others." By "Others" we do not mean everyone else but me-those over against whom the "I" stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself-those among whom one is too. (BT, 154) For Heidegger, the way we encounter others is not from the self that distinguishes itself from the other but first and foremost as part of a collective referential system where we exist among others. Others are experienced first and foremost precognitively, and we do not reflect on the others unless the situation calls on us to do so.

14

Introduction

Theoretically concocted "explanations" of the Being-present-at-hand of Others urge themselves upon us all too easily; but over against such explanations we must hold fast to the phenomenal facts of the case which we have pointed out, namely, that Others are encountered environmentally. (BT, 155) For Heidegger, others are not encountered intentionally as present-at-hand objects but instead environmentally as part of the world in which we live. We do not reflect on others unless something disturbs the situation in such a way that we are called to reflect on them. 23 In this sense it is individual Dasein that encounters others, but the others are always already there for Dasein as Being-in-the-world. "Dasein singly is already Dasein with Others." The term that Heidegger designates for this equiprimordial phenomenon is das Man. "The Others" whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one's belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part "are there' in everyday Being-with-one-another. The "who" is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people, and not the sum of them all. The "who" is the neuter, the"one" [dasMan]. (BT, 164) Based on the influence of Dilthey, the category of the one ( das Man) is the social nexus that is in fact the basis for all our meanings and possibilities. Everything we do is conditioned by the way "one" does that something in our culture. This is why it is natural for "one" to eat with a knife and fork in France but equally natural for "one" to eat with chopsticks in China. "We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as one takes pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as one sees andjudges; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as one shrinks back; we find shocking what one finds shocking. The one, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness" (BT, 164). For Heidegger, das Man is an essential component in the structure of Dasein because it is what gives Dasein its values, norms, and practices. It is in this sense that Heidegger says 23. This model of being-with presupposes that there is nothing different or disturbing about the other that would cause an immediate reflexive reaction. In this sense, the other must be the same so as to seamlessly fit into the self's environmental nexus of what an other should be. We will return to this issue in subsequent chapters. For an account of the ethical possibilities of the Mifseir1, see Lawrence Vogel, 11tf' Fragilf' lVf': Efhiml bnplimlion.s of 1/eideggPT's Being a11d TimR (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994). For a contrary account, see Samuel Moyn, "Selfhood and Transcendence: Emmanuel Levinas and the Origins oflntersubjective Moral Theory, 1928-1961," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000.

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ON THE WAY TO FRANCE

that "Das Man is an existentiale; and as a primordial phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein 's positive construction" (BT, 167). Heidegger defines an existentialeas that which makes up Dasein's ontological construction. Therefore, Heidegger is presenting das Man as a positive component essential to Dasein's makeup. But this message is largely lost in the substantive critique of das Man that constitutes the bulk of the chapter. Heidegger is trying to present das Man as a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, it is the basis for all shared practices and is an essential component of Dasein's ontological makeup, but, on the other, it is the locus of conformity wherein the individual Dasein loses itself in the anonymity of shared practices. In the first reading of Heidegger in France, the latter reading subsumed the former. Heidegger's critique of das Man as the agent of conformity and the source of the leveling process mirrors Kierkegaard's critique of the present age· In this averageness with which it prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. (BT, 165) The particular danger of the present age is the rationality and universal principles that reinforce the grip of das Man by making everything appear self-evident, including one's self. But this leads to an obscuring of Dasein's ontological makeup and to the faulty assumption that existentiell answers arc existential answers. Heidegger presents these negative aspects of das A1.an as the result of das Man's "publicness." Publicness proximally controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted, and it is always right-not because there is some distinctive and primary relationship-of-Being in which it is related to "Things," or because it avails itself of some transparency on the part of Dasein which it has explicitly appropriated, but because it is insensitive to every difference of level and of genuineness and thus never gets to the "heart of the matter." By publicness everything gets obscured, and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone. (BT, 165). Publicness has an answer for everything, but its answers are what was known to it already and in this sense it never approaches the real question of being. In the interest of uniformity and complete systematic understanding, publicness invents responses that make all cases conform to one rule, one logic, and thus removes all differentiation. Thus the

16

emphasis of chapter 4 seems to lie in Heidegger's criticism of the evils of conformity and the inherent problems of living with others. These themes become the central focus of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. By the end of chapter 4, Heidegger appears to understand the apprehension of authentic Dasein as the individual's will and resolve to assert its individuality in the face of the banal confom1ism of the herdlike das Man. What is obscured in Heidegger's criticisms of das Man and publicness is his prior assertion that the collective category of das Man is precisely what presents the individual with all its possibilities (including the possibility for authenticity) and that this is not a bad thing. Heidegger's Diltheyan understanding of das Man as an existentiale, and therefore as a necessary, constructive component of Dasein makeup, is lost in his Kierkegaardian critique of conformity. As a result, Heidegger's first readers in France understood his structure to be derived from Kierkegaard 's individualist existentialism and did not sufficiently take into account the influence of Dilthey or Heidegger's modifications to Kierkegaard's structure. In contrast, the second wave of readers overemphasized Heidegger's ontological antisubjectivism and dismissed his use of Kierkegaard in Being and Time. The internal tensions in Heidegger's Being and Time ultimately became the fault line that opened when the first reading of Heidegger's philosophy in France, based on the subjectivist elements in Heidegger's work, was confronted by the second and third readings, which focused on the ontological, postsubjectivist aspects of his project. These themes also translated into a political understanding of Heidegger's thought, so that proponents of the first reading interpreted Heidegger's work as antithetical to authoritarian collectivism and thus in opposition to totalitarian movements such as National Socialism, by virtue of the perceived emphasis on the individual and the individual's freedom. This in fact is the basis for the first Heidegger Affair. Now that we have explored the tensions within Heidegger's Being and Time that allowed for both a humanistic, anthropocentric reading and a postsubjectivist ontological reading, let us turn to the main focus of this work, how these understandings manifested themselves in France. ~ The structure of this book follows chronologically the three "readings" ofHeidegger's philosophy in France. Part 1, "On the Way to France," discusses the arrival of Heidegger's philosophy in France through the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Part 2, "The First Reading," explores the initial French understanding of Heidegger's philosophy as anthropocentric, teleological, and fundamentally humanistic. Chapter 2 explores Alexandre Kojeve's seminar on Hegel at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes as both the intersection between German phenomenology and the generation of 1933, and as the basis for this first reading of Heidegger's philosophy in France. Chapter 3 looks at the

s

17

ON THE WAY TO fRANCE

dissemination ofKojeve's interpretation ofHeidegger through the works of Raymond Aron, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Chapter 4 traces the influence of Heidegger's philosophy on Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the popularization of the first reading of Heidegger's philosophy through the writings and person ofSartre. Part 3, "The Second Reading," attempts to situate Heidegger's own response to the French understanding of his work (in his "Letter on Humanism," written to Jean Beaufret in 1945), in relation to the first "Heidegger Affair" of 1945-1946. The results of these two phenomena led to a second reading of Heidegger in France as an "ahumanist" postsubjective philosopher whose work stood in opposition to the existentialism of Sartre, Aron, and Merleau-Ponty. Part 4, "The Third Reading," explores responses to both the first and second readings but also to Heidegger's political affiliation with National Socialism in the wake of the Final Solution. The works of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas are both attempts to use Heidegger's critique of the Western philosophical tradition to move beyond Heidegger and to construct a new type of ethics in the aftermath of World War II and the Shoah. Finally, I need to say something about the relation between my project and the critique of history in the work of both Heidegger and Blanchot. The narrative structure of this sort of intellectual history necessarily belittles the nature of the questions asked and reduces the plurality of responses, of possibilities, to a single one. A history of the reception of Heidegger in France is truly a paradoxical enterprise because to take Heidegger's philosophy seriously is to forfeit the necessary strategies of narration and representation that make such a chronological account possible. In essence this is the poverty of this particular work which, in my desire to present the events that occurred, may obscure the most important questions, which lie precisely in the issues of representability, narrative, and repetition. Further reflections on these issues in relation to historical methodology are necessary, but if readers take seriously Blanchot's critique of history as presented in chapter 6 and apply it to the structure of this work, they will be able to dislodge the narrative supremacy of the author and engage these philosophical issues in a more fruitful way.

18

CHAPTER

1 Emmanuel Levinas: de l'etre .

Kovno, 1905-1921 Kovno, Lithuania, might seem an odd place to begin a history of the reception of Martin Heidegger's philosophical oeuvre in France, yet to borrow a term from Heidegger himself, it is indicative of the unheimlich nature of the series of events that would root Heidegger's work so firmly in French intellectual circles. In 1906, the year of Emmanuel Levinas's birth, Kovno, Lithuania, was still very much a part of czarist Russia. Thirty percent of its eighty thousand inhabitants were Jewish. Kovno and the area surrounding it were known for their yeshivas and their history of Talmudic scholars such as the Gaon of Vilna and Chaim of Vol on. Equally prevalent was a spirit of Enlightenment and the assimilation of Russian and Jewish heritages. 1 The enlightened Jewish families spoke Russian, rejected Orthodoxy, and embraced traditional Russian culture while keeping kosher and celebrating "Jewish traditions." 2 The Levinas household was just such a family. The tension between the desires for assimilation and autonomous Jewish identity can be seen in the incongruities of the Levinas family's everyday life. They lived outside the Jewish area, spoke primarily Russian at home, owned a Russian bookstore, and wanted their children to attend Russian schools. Yet they interacted in primarily Jewish circles, kept kosher, celebrated the Jewish holidays, and learned Hebrew, albeit I. For an overview of the intellectual and religious climate in Lithuania, see Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). For an account of the tensions inherent in the Russification of modern Jews, see Michael Stanislawski, Zioni.srn and the Hrt-d!!-Sikle: Cosrrwpolitanistn and Nalio'Tialism Nordau wjacobotinsky(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 ). 2. Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine.

19

UDC'aoo.y/not at home

ON THE WAY TO fRANCE

as a modern language. 3 Speaking Russian at home, reading Russian literature, and becoming schooled in Russian politics and culture were part of the larger objective of gaining entrance into the Russian school system. As Levinas himself points out, the desire was not to assimilate but to gain access to Russian literature and culture and through this culture to another intellectual horizon that would be an opening to Europe. This is why Emmanuel Levinas's parents would speak nothing but Russian with their children but would communicate in Yiddish between themselves. 4 This is also why Emmanuel Levinas first encountered the Old Testament as material to be translated into Russian and Hebrew as a way of learning those languages, without the "famous commentaries that would later appear to me as being essential. The silence of these marvelous Rabbinical commentaries was also an homage to modernity." 5 Levinas's father's bookstore provided texts to the Russian high school and therefore the Levinas family was financially secure. Growing up in Kovno, Levinas was spared the most blatant and viplent forms of antiSemitism that were prevalent in surrounding areas, but he was made well aware of the limits placed on Jews under the czarist regime. The most glaring example in Levinas's early childhood was the restriction on the number ofJews allowed into the Russian high school-the reason for his parents' emphasis on academic excellence. In 1915, the German invasion of Lithuania forced the Levinas family to leave Kovno. Their original plan was to move to Kiev, but it was closed to Jews at this time. They moved to the Ukrainian city of Kharkov instead. 6 In 1916, Levinas passed several entrance exams designed to limit the number ofJews accepted into Russian secondary schools. 7 Only four other Jews were admitted, and the Levinases held "a veritable family celebration, a graduation! A Doctorate!!" 8 For five years beginning at age eleven, he followed the Russian school program with its emphasis on Russian culture and literature. He began to study German at school while continuing private lessons in Hebrew. One year after his entrance into the Russian school, the czar abdicated and the Levinases were once again caught in a situation beyond their control. As bourgeois jews they had much to fear from the Revolu3. ~\1arie-Anne Lescourret, EmmamJRl Levin as (Paris: Flam marion, 1994), 32-33. 4. Ibid., 34. 5. F. Poirie, EtntiUZnURl uvinn.s: Qui eles-vmJ,j? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 67. 6. See Eric Lohr, "The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I," Russia.n Rrmno60 Uuly 2001): 404-19; Peter Gatrell, A li-1wle Empirr Walking: IU>Jugr?es in Russia during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 7. Friedlander, Vilna on till' St'int, 81. 8. Poirie, E.L.: Qu.i it.es-l!ou.s? 67. On Kharkov, see Arthur E. Adams, Bolslwoiks in tlte Ukraine: 17te Sermnl Cnmpaig;n, 1918-/9/9 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

20

Emmanuel Levinas: de l'itre ...

tion. 9 Levinas found himself in a precarious position. He was too young to understand the complexities of the Russian Revolution, but he was caught up in the excitement of the times. He spent his first year of school under the czarist regime and the following year under the regime of the February Revolution. Levinas was drawn to the excitement and hope of communism and Leninism, but his parents insisted adamantly that he avoid politics and keep to his studies. 10 Mter the German evacuation in 1919, Lithuania declared its independence and formed a republic. In 1920, the Levinases took the "first possible opportunity" to leave Kharkov and the Soviet Ukraine to return to Kovno. But the Kovno to which the Levinas family returned was not the Kovno they had left. The Russian bookstore had been sold, since in an independent Lithuania the need for a Russian bookstore was greatly diminished. Furthermore, and perhaps more troubling to the Levinas family, the Russian high school had been closed as part of the reformation of the Lithuanian national school system. Emmanuel Levinas returned to the Jewish high school; his hopes of graduating from the Russian school and being part of the culture of Russia and Europe were dashed. 11 But as one "opening to Europe" closed, a new one opened. The director of the Jewish school, Dr. Moses Schwabe, was a German Jew "who had discovered Eastern European Judaism during his captivity in Russia. He was a doctor of philosophy, and it was he who taught me German. " 12 Dr. Schwabe taught courses on German literature, and Levinas became enamored with the works of Goethe. Under Dr. Schwabe's instruction, Levinas finished high school with an emphasis on Russian literature. Philosophy classes in the traditional sense did not exist in the Russian or Lithuanian school systems, so it was through authors such as Nicolay Gogol, Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Lermontov, Leo Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev that Levinas was introduced to what he termed "metaphysical unease" (inquietude metaphysique) .13 While Levinas was familiar with the Bible and the Jewish traditions, it was the study of Russian literature, rather than his position in the Lithuanian Jewish community, that marked his first step toward the investigation and interrogation of the "sens de la vie." He had not studied the Talmud or the methods of the Gaon of Vilna. He would not come to his love of

9. Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine, 81. 10. Poirie, E.J•. : Qui eti's-vm.ts? 68. 11. For an overview, see Alfred Erich Senn, 11~e Grmt Polllers, J.ifhuania, and the Vilna Question, 192{}-/928 (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1966). l2.Myriam Anissimov, "Emmanuel Levin as se souvient," Les nO!lvea'UX cahiers 82 (Fall 1985): 32. 13. Poirie, E.!..: Qui ete.NJ01.U?69.

21

ON THE WAY TO FRANCE

Torah, which he believed was crucial to answering these questions, until much later in his life. At age eighteen, Emmanuel Levinas faced the crisis of losing one of his formative cultures. The czarist Russian Kovno of his youth was now part of the Lithuanian Republic. His ascension in the Russian world had been arrested and with it his academic possibilities. Levinas was not "at home" in Kovno, Lithuania. He found himself "a jew in an age of Christianity, a Iitvak in a world of Jews, a Russian speaker among people who spoke Yiddish, enlightened and observant at the same time, rationalist and sympathetic, panhumanist and an exile." 14

Strasbourg, 1923-1929 Emmanuel's parents had originally planned for him to attend a Russian university, but after the Revolution it became clear that this was no longer an option. Given his studies with Dr. Moses Schwabe, his knowledge of German, and the proximity of Germany, the German university system seemed a logical choice. But Emmanuel Levinas decided to venture to the University of Strasbourg, "the city in France closest to Lithuania," where he did not speak the language well, and which was certainly more distant than many universities in Germany. Increasing anti-Semitism in Germany, the unstable value of a diploma from a jewish school in Lithuania, and the reluctance of German universities to admit Eastern European Jewish immigrants may have determined the choice for him. 15 In any event, Levinas had made a good choice. Strasbourg was a bilingual city and Levinas was able to use his German while he improved his French. In many ways Strasbourg was the perfect place for Levinas, a city whose nationality had changed with the multiple redrawings of the map. Neither ~lly German nor fully French, the Alsatian capital was unheimlich in the sense that it called the notions of borders and national identity into question. After World War I and the return of the Alsatian territory to France, that country set about reintegrating Kaiser-Wilhelm University into the French academic system under the name of the University of Strasbourg. It was the Third Republic's intention to establish a first-rate French university that would rival Paris in order to assert France's cultural as well as geographical control over this disputed territory. The university filled its ranks with France's youngest and brightest scholars, primarily from the Ecole Normale Superieure, to guarantee the success of French culture. The University of Strasbourg was different from most French universities in that it comprised 14. Lescourret, Ernrrtar1uel Levina.s, 50. 15. Ibid., 51.

22

Emmanuel Levinas: de l'etre ...

not only the five traditional colleges-Letters, Law, Science, Medicine, and Pharmacy-but also two schools of theology (Protestant and Catholic) .16 To counterbalance the two religious faculties, the University of Strasbourg packed the Department of Letters with "nonreligious" staff. Regardless of the criteria by which the "nonreligious" instmctors were chosen, they turned out to be extremely avant-garde. By the early 1920s the University of Strasbourg's Faculty of Letters consisted of such notable scholars as Martial Gueroult, Maurice Pradines, Maurice Halbwachs, Marc Bloch, and Lucien Febvre. But while these young professors sought to challenge the more traditional Parisian universities, their rebellion would go only as far as their Parisian education would let it. Furthermore, their isolated position in Strasbourg kept them out of many of the spirited debates over politics, academics, and Parisian affairs. How could these Young Turks venture beyond Paris when they did not know where Paris was going? For this reason, many of the professors would leave StrclSbourg the first chance they got for university posts in Paris. By 1925 the dean began referring to his university as the waiting room for the Sorbonne. 17 By the time Levinas came to Strasbourg, the university was more or less in step with the rest of the French academic world, with the exception of the Department of Theology, which still followed its Protestant interests. The French philosophical world Levinas entered was caught between the poles of neo-Kantian rationalism as exemplified by Bmnschvicg, which focused on a rational approach to philosophy based on the model of scientific investigation, and the philosophy of Bergson, with its emphasis on spiritualism, intuition, and interiority. During his first year at StrclSbourg, Levinas studied Latin and perfected his French. To pass his language exam he translated a text by Kant from Latin in to French: "Principorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio," Section 3, part 2.6. The following year he enrolled as a student of philosophy in the Faculty of Letters. This was Levinas's first foray into the academic world of philosophy. What he lacked in formal training he more than made up for with his knowledge of the Old Testament and Russian literature. His approach was not that of a student brought up studying philosophy in the French school system. Instead, as Lcvinas writes, his interest in philosophy came from the courses he had taken on 16. Fran~ois-Georges Dreyfus, "Strasbourg et son universite de 1919 a 1929," in CharlesOiivier Carbonell and Georges Livet, Au bnr:eau des AnnalPs (Toulouse: Presses de I'Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Toulouse, 1983), 11. See also John F. Craig, Srltolars!tip artd NalionbuildJng: The Univt'TSily of ~trasbourg rmd Alsatian SociRty, 1870---1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 17. Lescourret, Ernmamul Ler.•inas, 52-53.

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Pushkin, Lermontov and Dostoevsky, above all Dostoevsky. The Russian novel, the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy appeared to me to be completely preoccupied with fundamental things. Books that were traversed by anxiety, by the essential, by religious unease; but that read like a quest for the meaning oflife (sens de la vie). These novels where love in its innocence revealed its dimensions of transcendence prior to all eroticism, and where an expression like "to make love" would be a scandalous profanation before it became indecency. It was certainly in the sentimental love of these novels that I found my first philosophical temptations. 18 Levinas was not interested in the theoretical idealism of neo-Kantianism, which he felt was too abstract to deal with the fundamental things of everyday life, but turned instead to the work of Bergson and the fields of sociology, psychology, and theology. The work of Bergson and these other disciplines seemed much closer in their concerns to the issues Levinas had been exploring in the work of Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Levinas spent his first years in the Department of Philosophy at Strasbourg studying with Maurice Pradines, professor of general philosophy, and Henri Carteron, professor of ancient philosophy. But soon he branched out to psychology under Charles Blondel and sociology under Maurice Halbwachs. In contact with these masters the great virtues of intelligence and intellectual probity were revealed to me, but also those of clarity and the elegance of the French university. Initiation into the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and the Cartesians, Kant. Not yet Hegel, in those twenties at the Faculty of Letters at Strasbourg! But it was Durkheim and Bergson who seemed to me especially alive. They had incontestably been the professors of our masters. 19 Maurice Pradines was a contemporary of Max Scheler and Ernst Cassirer. A Bergsonian, he was trying to define a new type of rationalism that would "de-divinize" reason without reducing it to a positivist schematic of facts. This rationalism was to be based on a philosophy of sensation that would preserve the understanding of the excess of the soul while still allowing one to place reason in a position that did not regress into pure irrational mysticism. Pradines's primary concern in this philosophical system was the privileged position of ethics and morality, and specifically the relation of ethics to politics. One of the first courses Levinas took with Pradines was on just this topic, and as proof of the privileged 18. Poirie, E.L: Qui eii'H101tS?69. 19. Emmanuel Le"inas, f:t1tiq1v 1'1 lrtjitti: J>ialtl{ftu•.s avec PbiliptJP Nnno (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 16.

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Emmanuel Levinas: de l'etre ...

position of ethics over politics Pradines gave the example of the Dreyfus Mfair. 20 This was an essential moment leading up to Levinas's decision to embrace French culture and society as his own. For Levinas, as for most Jews in Eastern Europe, the Dreyfus Affair was an event of mythic proportions: "Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews knew about Dreyfus. Old Jewish men with beards who had never seen a letter of the Latin alphabet in their life, spoke of Zola as if he were a saint. And then, suddenly, there was a professor before me in the flesh, who had chosen this [the Dreyfus Affair] as his example [of the superiority of ethics over politics]. What an extraordinary world!"2 1 Through Pradines, Levinas was introduced to the works of Henri Bergson, a figure as inspirational to Levinas for his Jewish background as for his philosophical prowess. But while the realization that a Jewish man could reach the heights of popularity in the field of philosophy was encouraging, if not seductive, to the young Jewish scholar, it was the realization of how the works of Bergson could guide the future of philosophy that truly sparked his interest. For Levinas, Bergson represented all that was new in philosophy, and he was swept up in the novelty of this sensation. Bergson was seen as the liberator of time and, through time, of free will. 22 For Levinas and the other young students at Strasbourg, Bergson addressed the fear of being in a world without new possibilities, without a future of hope, a world where everything is regulated in advance; the ancient fear before fate, be it that of a universal mechanism, absurd fate, since what is going to pass has in a sens~ already passed! Bergson, to the contrary, put forward the proper and irreductible reality of time ... It is Bergson who taught us the spirituality of the new "being" disengaged from the phenomenon in an "otherwise than being. "23 But Levinas's nuanced reading of Bergson surpasses Bergson in many ways. Despite the emphasis on fluidity and movement, Le\-inas came to see Bergson's philosophy as static because it had completed the task it set out to achieve. In some sense it had nothing more to offer. Bergson's work opened new horizons and new possibilities. It was the basis without which "all the new ideas developed by philosophers during the modern and postmodern periods, and in particular the venerable newness of Heidegger, would not have been possible." 24 But its impact lay in how it 20. Lescourret, Emmanuel Le'(!ina..~. 61-62. 21. Poirie, E.L.: Qui ete.s-vous? 70, my additions in brackets. 22. This is the central premise of Bergson's E.~.rai sur iPs donnees immidiate.s dP Ia ronscienre (1889), translated into English as Time a.nd Frt'e Will. 23. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 28. 24. Poirie, E.L: Qu.i iles-vou.s? 72.

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broke the grip of positivism and rationalism by emphasizing the concept of free will. For Levinas, Bergson's philosophy escaped pure objectivity but did so by going to the other extreme; it was dangerously close to pure subjectivity. Levinas did not want to replace the emphasis on the object with an emphasis on the subject that was equally removed from our everyday interactions with things in the world we live. For the time being, Levinas would continue his search for the "concrete meaning of the very possibility of 'working in philosophy. "' 25 Henri Carteron taught ancient philosophy and was an expert on Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was conservative in both his political views and his relations with students, preferring to keep a specific and ordered protocol. He would demand the highest standards of work from his students and would devote enormous time to them. Always keeping a critical distance, he would get the best from those who could survive the rigor of his instruction. To Levinas, Carteron represented all the glory and tradition of the French university, "the just authority of the Masters and the happy (bienheureuse) reverence of the students, a mutual relation based on the respect for knowledge and for France."26 Carteron's work on religion, specifically Catholicism, in relation to philosophy captured Levinas's attention. Levinas felt enormous respect and sympathy for Carteron's project of integrating philosophy and religion into a "modern" philosophy. This would become a fundamental tenet of Levinas's later work, as he attempted to reconcile his particular religious beliefs with a larger philosophical system. In 1927, Henri Carteron died at the age of thirty-six. In 1930 Levinas dedicated his first book to the memory of his professor. If Henri Carte ron represented the old France, Charles Blondel was the other side of the coin. Blondel's relationship with his students was z.cademic but also very social. He sought to foster camaraderie and openness among his students by treating them as friends. Of Levinas's instructors, Blondel was "the one you could tell anything." 27 He would often invite his students over for dinner and organize infonnal discussion groups. Blonde} taught psychology from a strictly anti-Freudian perspective. In 1924, Levinas took his course on psychoanalysis, which followed his book of the same name (La Psychanalyse). 28 Through Blondel, Levinas became acquainted with the works of Freud, but presented from a hostile perspecti,·c. 29

25. Levin as, Ethics and Infinity, 28. 26. Lescourret, f.'mmanuPl Lruina~. 57. 27. Poirie, E.L: Qui e/I'S-VmLf? 70. 28. La Psyrhanafysl' (Paris: Alcan, 1924). The course was roughly based on the chapters of the first volume titled La dor:trinl'tle Frmd. On Blonde I, see Lucien Febvre, "Un psychologue: Charles Blonde!," in Combal.f pour l'ltisloire (Paris: A. Colin, 1953). 29. Charles Blonde!, La con.w:iena morf1ide (Paris: Alcan, 1913).

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Emmanuel Levinas: de l'etre ...

While these eminent professors were responsible for the more formal aspects of Levinas's academic training, perhaps the two most important figures in Levinas's development at Strasbourg were a fellow student, Gabrielle Peiffer, and a young instructor and pastor named Jean Hering. It was Peiffer who introduced Levinas to the work of Edmund Husserl: In Strasbourg, a young colleague, Miss Peiffer, with whom, later, I shared the translation of the Husserlian Cartesian Meditations, and who prepared on Husserl what one then called the Dissertation of the Superior Studies Degree, had recommended to me a text which she was reading-! believe it was the Logical /nvestigations. 30 The following year Levinas enrolled in Jean Hering's course at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Strasbourg. Hering had been a member of the GOttingen circle, one of the original phenomenological groups that gathered to study around Edmund Husserl. The circle began in 1905 but did not become a cohesive entity until 1910, when the informal discussions and gatherings became a formal philosophical society. The group consisted primarily of German students, such as Adolf Reinach (b. 1905),Johannes Daubert (1905), Moritz Geiger (1906), Theodor Conrad (1907), Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1910), Max Scheler (1910), Hans Lipps (1911), and Edith Stein (1913); they were joined by foreign students such as Roman Ingarden (1912, from Poland), Alexandre Koyre (1910, from Russia via Paris), and Jean Hering (1909, from Strasbourg). 31 From its inception, the circle worked around Husser! but could not be defined as a school in the strict sense. The students in the group met once a week to read papers or hold discussions outside the university, usually without Husserl. For the members of the circle, phenomenology had a broader meaning than it did for Husserl himself, and while he approved of the experimental use of the phenomenological method in investigations of art and poetry, he did not see this application as particularly fruitful and referred to the more frivolous studies as "Bilderbuch phenomenology." Some of the investigations did seem frivolous; according to Herbert Spiegelberg, even the scent of a cigar or the taste of wine served as legitimate topics of phenomenological investigations within the circle. In many ways this foreshadows Raymond Aron's famous remark to Sartre that when using phenomenology, even a beer is philosophy.

30. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 29. 31. The years in parentheses indicate when each member joined the circle. See Herbert Spiegelberg, TltP Phenomnwlogiral Mmwment (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960). For the origins of phenomenology in France, see Eugene H. Frickey, "The Origins of Phenomenology in France, 1920-1940," Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1979.

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Furthermore, the members of the circle viewed Husserl's phenomenological strategy primarily as a universal philosophy of essences ( Wesenphiinomenologie), not strictly as the study of the "essence of consciousness." In this sense the group overemphasized Husserl's ontological concern with the essence of things and did not take seriously enough Husserl's movement toward phenomenological transcendentalism and idealism. The circle came to an end with the outbreak ofWorld War I and Husserl's move to Freiburg in 1916, but its members continued to explore the possibilities of phenomenology through Husserl's jahrbuch fur Philosophie und Phanomenologie Forschung, published between 1913 and 1930. When Levinas enrolled in Hering's course, none of Husserl's work had been translated into French (Levinas and Peiffer's translation in 1931 would be the first). The German phenomenologist was virtually unknown in France except for his lecture series on the Cartesian Meditations, which he gave at the Sorbonne in 1929, and a series of lectures on "the tendencies of German philosophy," delivered by Georges Gurvitch at the Sorbonne between 1928 and 1930. Gurvitch's lectures focused on phenomenology and specifically on Max Scheler, with attention paid to Heidegger as representative of the future of German philosophy. 32 Only one article had appeared on Husserl prior to the publication of Hering's Phenomenologie et philosophie religieuse in 1925. 33 Like other members of the Gottingen circle, Jean Hering had taken Husserl's methodology and applied it to his own concerns. Specifically, Hering was interested in ontology and the understanding of individual essences. 34 Furthermore, Hering presented Husserl as the heir apparent to Bergson in the legacy of philosophy. This can be traced to Hering's relationship with Alexandre Koyre in Gottingen. In a 1939 article Hering cites a remark Koyre made to him during their GOttingen days: "We [the Gottingen Circle] are the true Bergsonians." 35 Koyre had studied with Bergson and Husserl; therefore, his statement, though reckless, was taken quite seriously because of the similarities between Bergson's and Husserl's understandings of the concept of time. Hering's course and his use of the phenomenological method was inspired by his personal interest in the ontological investigation of man's

32. These lectures were published as Les tendenr.es acttulles de fa jJhilosophie allemarule (Paris: 1930). 33. Victor Delbos, "Husserl: Sa critique du psychologisme et sa conception d'une logique pure," IW.mR dR mPtophysique el df morniR 19 (1911). 34. See Jean Hering's "Bemerkungen iiber das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee," jahrbuch fil.r PltilowfJitie 7lTid Pltiinomenologie For.~r.lt'IU/g 4 ( 1921): 495-543. 35. Jean Hering, "La phenomenologie il y a trente ans," IW.nu internalionale de philofophiP 1 (1939):368.

J. Vrin,

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Emmanuel Levinas: de retre ...

relation to God, but conserved Koyre's understanding of the philosophical lineage from Bergson to Husserl. The importance of religion in philosophy was not lost on Levinas, but while the possibility of religion was important to him at the time, the future of philosophy was Levinas's primary concern. "It was with Husserl that I discovered the concrete meaning of the very possibility of 'working in philosophy' without being straight away enclosed in a system of dogmas, but at the same time without running the risk of proceeding by chaotic intuitions." 36 Husserlian phenomenology appeared to Levinas as a methodology that escaped the closed model of science, which was the basis for French neo--Kantianism; at the same time, he believed, it avoided the slippery slope of a spiritualism bordering on pure subjectivity and "chaotic intuitions," toward which Bergson's work veered perilously close. It was also at Strasbourg that Levinas began his lifelong and complex friendship with Maurice Blanchot. Two years Levinas's junior, Blanchot was born on September 23, 1907, in Quain, Saone-et-Loire. He was raised Catholic and as a monarchist, and at the time Levinas made his acquaintance he was heavily under the influence of Action Fram;aise. Blanchot's social position and right-wing political orientation made him an unlikely candidate for friendship with an immigrant Jew, but the two students soon found they were driven by the same philosophical concerns. Blanchot's interests in school were primarily literary, focused on the work of Stephane Mallarme, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud. At Strasbourg he had become interested in the works of Marcel Proust and Paul Valery. But as Blanchot notes in an interview from 1991, "Mter I met Emmanuel Levinas I was persuaded that philosophy was life itself. In his immeasurable passion, which was always reasonable, thought was constantly renewed in a way that would suddenly burst forth." 37 Levinas introduced Blanchot to the world of Russian literature and to the work of Husserl and Heidegger.M In turn, Blanchot introduced Levinas to the work of Proust and Valery. The two were virtually inseparable during their time at Strasbourg and would remain the closest of friends for the rest of their lives. In his essay Pour l'amitieBlanchot referred to Levinas as the "only friend that I tutoie." 39 But this friendship between the unlikeliest of friends was not without its troubles. Blanchot's relationship with Levinas led him to rethink his own 36. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 29. 37. Blanchot, quoted in R Maggiori, "Le precheur d'autrui," LibemJion, May 30, 1991,23. 38. "It was thanks to Emmanuel Levinas, without whom I would never have come to understand Being and Time in 1927 or 1928. It was a veritable shock that reading that book produced in me." Maurice Blanchot, "Pense,·J'Apocalypse," I.e nouvel observatntr,January 22-28, 1988, 79. 39. Maurice Blanchot, "Pour l'amitie," preface to A fa TPclwrrhe d'un commu.nisme tk pensee (Paris: Dionys Mascolo, 1993), 16.

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political and religious convictions, but he would not come to articulate the fmits of this labor until after World War II. This is perhaps why Blanchot refers to his friendship with Levinas and their complex relationship throughout the 1930s not in terms of circumstance or chance but as a pact: "Emmanuel Levinas, the only friend-my old friend-; this came to be not because we were young but by a deliberate decision, a pact which I hope I never break." 40 Levinas led Blanchot to rethink his understanding of his relation to the other, but this was not easy or immediate. TI1roughout the 1930s, Blanchot's right-wing Catholic tendencies led him to conceptualize the nation in opposition to the other. He conceived of the nation as the supreme subject, the "I" speaking in the name of an organic national community, and saw the other, the stranger or foreigner, not as an opportunity for dialogue but as a menace:'~ In a certain sense it was Blanchot's relationship with Levinas and the philosophical investigations they undertook together, based on the work of Heidegger, that led Blanchot to confront the unstable position of the subject and to seek stability at the site of the nation. At the time he saw this as the antidote to the crisis of modernity that had stripped the nation of its meaning and left it confused and powerless.12 But his personal relationship with Levinas was also a confrontation with the other. This, however, was an other who came to him in friendship, an other to whom he was infinitely close, but also an other that placed his own identity in question. Thus the pact to which Blanchot refers involved rethinking himself in relation to Levinas. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the relationship between Levinas and Blanchot existed outside politics but was always haunted by Blanchot's political choices. Blanchot would not come to grips with the schizophrenic nature of his political response to what he perceived as the crisis of modernity until after World War Il. 13 Levinas and Blanchot would continue their dialogue throughout their lives, and neither's work can be read without taking into account the other's.11 It was the alterity ofLevinas's understanding of the meaning of

40. Maurice Blanchot, cited in Phillipe Mesnard, "Maurice Blanchot, le sujet de !'engagement," L'infini 48 (Winter 1994): 113. 41. See Michael Holland's introduction to The Blanrhot H.etukr (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 6-9. 42. For Blanchot, the nation-state, as embodied by France under the Third Republic, was a result of the crisis of modernity. Blanchot's solution to this crisis was a return to the organic construct he termed the "Nation." The fact that the concept of the Nation is itself a product of modernity points to the conflicted and problematic nature ofBianchot's political theories. 43. See below, chap. 6. 44. There are a growing number of studies on the relationship between Blanchot's and Levin as's work. See, for example, Simon Critchley, "II y ~A Dying Stronger Than Death (Bianchot with Levinas)," Oxf(JTd Literary' Rroirw 15, 1-2 (1993): 81-131; Paul Davies, "A Fine Risk: Reading Blanchot Reading Levinas," in 1?11-R.eadirtg /.roinas, ed. Robert

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Emmanuel Levinas: de nitre ...

philosophy and the strange nature of his concerns that fascinated Blanchot and formed the basis of their pact. Levinas's education was not that of a French student in philosophy, nor were his concerns. His training in Russian literature and his knowledge of the Bible led him to study in the Department of Philosophy at Strasbourg, and his work at Strasbourg led him to phenomenology. Levinas had no stake in the French debates over Bergsonianism and neoKantianism. For him, the future of philosophy was phenomenology and the home of phenomenology was Freiburg. Levinas decided to go to the source.

Freiburg, 1928-1929 Levinas spent the academic year of 1928-1929 studying with Husserl, who had just retired from the University of Freiburg but was continuing his courses until a replacement could be chosen. The course for the first term was on "the notion of psychology in phenomenology," and for the second on "the constitution ofintersubjectivity." This was the last course Husserl taught at Freiburg, and its contents would later become the central focus of Levinas's work. But Levinas's immediate concerns were with phenomenology as a method and the new possibilities that Husserl's work might open up. In the first place, there is the possibility sich zu besinnen, of grasping oneself, or of getting back to oneself, of posing with distinctness the question: "Where are we?" of taking one's bearings. Perhaps this is phenomenology in the largest sense of the term, beyond the vision of essences, the Wesenschau which made such a fuss. A radical reflection, obstinate about itself, a cogito which seeks and describes itself without being duped by a spontaneity or ready-made presence, in a major distrust toward what is thrust naturally onto knowledge, a cogito which constitutes the world and the object, but whose objectivity in reality occludes and encumbers the look that fixes it. From this objectivity one must always trace thoughts and intentions back to the whole horizon at which they aim, which objectivity obscures and makes one forget. Phenomenology is the recalling of these forgotten

Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 201-26; Lars Iyer, "The Sphinx's Gaze: Art, Friendship, and the Philosophical in Blanchot and Levinas," Soutlwmjournal ofPhilo.~ophy 39, 2 (Summer 2001): 189-206;Joseph Libertson, Proximity, Leuinas, Blanclwt, Bataille, and Communication (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982); Gary D. Mole, Leuinas, Blanchot, jahes: Figures of Estrangement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Thomas C. Wall, Radical Passivity: l.ernnas, Blanchol, and Agamben (New York: State University ofNewYork Press, 1999).

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thoughts, of these intentions; full consciousness, return to the misunderstood implied intentions of thought in the world. 15 For Levinas, Husserl's phenomenology implemented a complete reflection that would allow the philosopher to get back to himself, to include himself in the equation, even at the expense of "objectivity." 4ti The philosopher near to things in their true status, without illusion or rhetoric, without the artificial distinction of subject and object in the Cartesian sense, moves beyond the question of knowing "What is" to the more essential issues of "How is what is?" and "What does it mean that it is?" For Levinas, phenomenology was the possibility of moving beyond the systematic organization of knowledge under the rubric of reason to the interrogation of the dynamism of the act of knowing and the mechanisms at its origin. In this way it moved past the subject-object split by emphasizing consciousness as the locus of the relationship between the subject and the object. In Husserl, Levinas found a kind and rigorous professor. He would often dine with the Husserls at their home; at the request of Husserl's wife he instructed her in the study of French. But ultimately Levinas felt constricted by Husserl. "At the time conversation with him [Husserl], after some questions or replies by the student, was the monologue of the master concerned to call to mind the fundamental elements of his thought." 47 Again Levinas found himself at an impasse. But this was Husserl's last year as a lecturer, and it was he who suggested to Levinas that he should remain in Freiburg to continue his studies with Husserl's successor, Martin Heidegger.

45. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 30. 46. For Husser!, phenomenology represented a more original investigation into philosophy than those modeled on traditional science. To distinguish his project from such a science, Husser! called phenomenology "eidetic science," which is prior to any specific field of investigation because its field of investigation includes all fields of investigation. Eidetic science is derived from the essence of objects as perceived in a specific given context by consciousness. The understanding of an apple in the real world is conditioned by such factors as its redness, its sweetness, its size, as well as the lighting and positioning of the apple in relation to the subject who observes it. The apple has its own essence and thus cannot be reduced to subjectivity, but the understanding of that apple is produced in its relation with consciousness. Thus eidetic science is an enlarged field of investigation that not only studies the nature of objects (like the science of facts) but also studies how we come to derive knowledge from objects. In this sense, even the science of facts is a realm of investigation for eidetic science, and furthermore, it is only on the basis of an understanding of the relation of the object to the cogito that something like a science of facts can become possible. 47. Levinas, f.'lhir.s m1d lt!fi.nity, 32-33.

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Emmanuel Levin as: de l'etre ...

Levinas had already been introduced to the work of Heidegger on a trip back to Strasbourg. He had gone to visit jean Hering at his hotel, and Hering had given him a copy of Being and Time (first published in 1927). Levinas was so impressed he immediately contacted Maurice Blanchot to tell him of this find. Before he left Strasbourg, he had given several impromptu lectures on the work of Husserl and Heidegger. A few words on the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger before we move on to the first encounters between Levinas and Heidegger: in 1928, Husserl and Heidegger were still on very good terms. When Husserl announced his intention to retire, he suggested only one candidate as his successor: Martin Heidegger. Their relationship had been far more than that of professor and student. Husserl looked on Heidegger as a son, the one man who had the brilliance and fortitude to continue his work. The Husserls and Heideggers would often dine together and go on outings; Hugo Ott describes the relations between the families as having "grown steadily closer since 1918 until the tone was of easy intimacy, particularly between the two wives."18 When Heidegger had trouble finding a university post in the mid-1920s, he wrote to Husserl for consolation. Husserl encouraged Heidegger, writing to him of similar experiences he had had when young. In December 1926, Husserl wrote a letter to Heidegger in reference to the impending publication of Being and Time, Heidegger's first major work: How fortunate that you are about to publish the work through which you have grown to be what you are, and with which, as you must surely know, you have begun to realize your own true being as a philosopher. From that beginning you will grow to new and greater stature. Nobody has more faith in you than 1-faith, too, that no ill feelings will confuse or divert you from the work that is purely a consequence of the talent entrusted to you, conferred upon you at birth. 19 It is easy to forget that it is precisely the faith that Husserl held in Heidegger as his pupil and his friend that made their later alienation and estrangement so bitter. 50 Nevertheless, in 1928, at the suggestion of an enthusiastic and content Husserl, Levinas decided to continue his studies at Freiburg under Heidegger. It was with Heidegger that Levinas finally discovered a means to explore the issues of metaphysical "unease" that had been his interest since his studies with Dr. Moses Schwabe in Kovno. Husserl's phenomenology had

48. Hugo Ott, Martin lleirlRgger: A Polilicnl Lift, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Harper Collins,l993), 175. 49. Ibid., 129. 50. See "Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger," in Ott, Martinlleidrggn;· A Political Lifo.

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begun the radical interrogation that allowed for the possibility of "grasping oneself," of understanding the relation to things as "consciousness of," which always implies a self that is conscience, but Heidegger took the investigation further by shifting the focus away from the intellectual activities of the specific self and toward an investigation into being. Through Being and Time and then through Heidegger's own lectures, Levinas was introduced to "the comprehension of the verb to be.' Ontology would be distinguished from all the disciplines which explore that which is, beings, that is, the beings,' their nature, their relations-while forgetting that in speaking of these beings they have already understood the meaning of the word Being, without, however, having made it explicit. These disciplines do not worry about such an explication." 51 Heidegger's project, however, made that explication of being its primary goal by extending and reshaping Husserl's phenomenological project. For the young Levinas, the work of Husserl seemed less convincing precisely because it "seemed less unexpected. This may sound paradoxical or childish but everything seemed unexpected in Heidegger, the wonders of his analysis of affectivity, the new access toward the investigation of everyday life, the famous ontological difference he drew between being (das Sein) and beings (das seiendes)."52 Like Husserl, Heidegger looked on science as a "certain modality of intelligibility-but a modality already derived. "53 Thus Heidegger saw science as a secondary investigation that took the primary investigation of being for granted and thus could not address the most important philosophical issues. Levinas's philosophical transition from Husserlian phenomenology to Heideggerian ontological phenomenology can be best traced through two of Levinas 's earliest works: his article "Sur les Ideen' de M. Husserl," written for the Revue philosophique de la France et de l'etranger (1929) and his doctoral dissertation, published as The Theory of Intuition irz Husserl's Phenomenology (1930). The article was the first comprehensive and articulate treatment specifically of the work of Husserl that was able to explain Husserl's project from the inside. 51 The dissertation would introduce the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to France through Heidegger's critique of Husserl's concept of intentionality. "'When Levinas began to work with Husserl, he was enthralled by the phenomenological methodology that apparently made it possible to reconcile

51. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 38-39. 52. Poirie, I~'.L: Qui ites-vmJS?75. 53. Ibid., 77. 54. The aforementioned works by Hering and Delbos were both parts of alternative philosophical or theological projects that used in terpretationsofHnsserl 's phenomenological method.

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Emmanuellevinas: de nitre ...

the subject-object split by expanding the field of investigation to include the consciousness who is investigating. For Husserl, consciousness is always "consciousness of' something; thus the ego is always implied in the relationship with the object. At the time of the publication of "Sur les Ideen' de M. Husserl," Levinas was interested in those possibilities presented by this method of investigation that avoided neo-Kantian rationalism without succumbing to the spiritualism of Bergson. As Levinas phrases it, Husserl's great originality consists in his seeing the "rapport with the object" not as something that is inserted in between consciousness and the object but to see that the "rapport with the object" is consciousness itself. It is the rapport with the object that is the original phenomenon and not a split between the subject and object who must then turn towards one another. 55 The attraction ofHusserl's phenomenology for Levinas and those who read Levinas's 1929 article and the 1930 book based on his dissertation was that it did not present a rhetorical solution to the problem of the subject and the object but instead allowed philosophy to move beyond the problem of the relation between subject and object through the idea of intentionality. Husserl's phenomenology was not a theory that separated knowledge from everyday life, but one that presented a "theory of knowledge that is the concrete study of different structures of the original phenomenon which is the rapport with the object of intentionality." 56 In The Themy of Intuition in Husser/'s Phenomenology, Levinas sought to provide an informed reading of Husserl's work but also included a consistent critique of Husserl's intellectualism based on Levinas's participation in Heidegger's seminars and on Being and Time. 57 Levinas's book was extremely influential, but the nature of its influence goes beyond the subject of Husserl to the understanding of the reception of Heidegger in France. The structure of the book is threefold. Given the academic climate in France, Levinas first had to distinguish Husserl's intuition from Bergson's intuition; second, he had to distinguish Husserl's rationalism and use of science from French neo-Kantian rationalism, with its emphasis on science; finally, Levinas sought to provide an informed critique of Husserl's work based on his understanding of Heidegger's thought. 55. Emmanuel Levinas, "Surles Ideen' de M. Husserl," in Les irnprevus de l'histoi·re (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994), 62. 56. Ibid., 62. 57. On this, see Adriaan Peperzak, Beyond: The Pht:losophy of Rmmnnuel Leuina5 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), chap. 4; RobertJohn Sheffler Manning, lntl'rprl'ting Otherwise 11uw Hridegger: Emmanuel Lroinass Ethics as First PhilosojJhy (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993); Craig R. Vassey, "Emmanuel Levinas: From Intentionality to Proximity," Phil.osophy Today 25, 3-4 (Fall 1981): 175-95.

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Husserl's phenomenology contained aspects that resembled both Bergsonism and neo-Kantian rationalism, and it was therefore important for Levinas to spend a good deal of time explaining the differences between them. In the case ofneo-Kantianism, Levinas was able to present his argument from "Les ldeen," which placed neo-Kantian rationalism within traditional science and phenomenology within eidetic science. On this basis Husserl could claim that phenomenology was more scientific than science and thereby present a rational philosophy that made it possible to interrogate the real without slipping into subjectivity. This leads to Levinas's distinction between Husserlian intuition and the Bergsonian variant. Whereas for Bergson intuition is spiritual and intellectual and therefore always in danger of falsifying concrete existence, for Husserl the distinction between morphological (perceived) essences and exact essences allow him to characterize intuition as "intellectual without thereby falsifying the meaning of concrete reality" (TIHP, 119). In a sense, Husserlian thinking differs from neo-Kantian rationalism in the primacy it grants to intuition, but differs from Bergsonian intuition in that Husserl's intuition is rational. Rather than distinguish Husserl from either of these camps, Levinas's book served to make Husserl appealing to both: his intuitionism appealed to the Bergsonians and his rationalism appealed to neo-Kantians such as Leon Brunschvicg. This is not surprising given that Husserl's work was largely unknown and thus was read through the lenses of each of these philosophical traditions. The very Heideggerian perspective of Levinas 's presentation of Husserl went almost completely unnoticed, but it is from that perspective that French thinkers such as Sartre and Aron were introduced to Husserl. Levinas's shift in emphasis can be seen from the very beginning of The Theory of Intuition. Whereas in "Les Ideen" he presented Husserl's philosophy as a "theory of knowledge," in The Theory of Intuition he presents Husserl's philosophy as chiefly concerned with the issue of ontology. Levinas wants to demonstrate that the most important question in Husserl is the ontological, despite Husserl's emphasis on constructions of knowledge: "We want to show how the intuition which he [Husserl] proposes as a mode of philosophy follows from his very conception of Being" (TIHP, liv). Beyond that shift in emphasis, Levinas offers an explicit critique of Husserl based on his work with Heidegger: In conformity with our goal, we shall not fear to take into account problems raised by other philosophers, by students of Husser!, and, in particular, by Martin Heidegger, whose influence on this book will often be felt. The intense philosophical life which mns through Heidegger's philosophy sometimes permits us to sharpen the outline of Husserl's

36

Emmanuel Levinas: de l'etre ...

philosophy by accentuating some aporias, raising some problems, making certain views more precise, or opposing others. (TIHP, lv) For Levinas, Heidegger's philosophy serves as more than a critique of Husserl. It indicates the direction that Levinas thinks phenomenology should follow. "It seems to us that the problem raised here by transcendental phenomenology is an ontological problem in the very precise sense that Heidegger gives to the tenn" (TIHP,lvi). In "Les Ideen" all references to ontology relied on Husserl's use of the tenn regarding either "fundamental" or "regional" ontologies, whereas in The Theory of Intuition the term "ontology" is defined in Heideggerian terms and becomes the basis for the phenomenological program. This emphasis on ontology is a shift away from the primacy of the cogito and the concept of intentionality. As opposed to his previous emphasis on consciousness as "consciousness of something," which is the structure of intentionality, Levinas now tries to emphasize ontology and the understanding of being so as to minimize the specific subject. In Husserl's philosophy (and this may be where we will have to depart from it), knowledge and representation are not on the same level as other modes oflife, and they are not secondary modes. Theory and representation play a dominant role in life, serving as a basis for the whole of conscious life; they are the forms of intentionality that give a foundation to all others. The role played by representation in consciousness affects the meaning of intuition. This is what causes the intellectualistic character proper to Husserlian intuitionism. (TIHP, 53) Here Levinas's critique of Husserl's intellectualism is based on Heidegger's critique of Husserl's use of the cogito as the locus of representation. While Heidegger subscribed to the methodology of phenomenology, he believed that Husserl's model was too dependent on the primacy of consciousness and a reflective cogito that makes sense of the world as it goes. Heidegger wanted to push Husserl's investigation further and explore a more radical variant of phenomenology that would explore what is prior to theoretical cognition; this is his program in Being and Time. Heidegger saw Husserl's phenomenology as insufficient because its emphasis on cognition "stills the waters" of what it investigates. Heidegger did not agree with Husserl that the primary mode of human existence was cognitive and theoretical but instead saw our primary mode of existence as pre theoretical and precognitive. For Heidegger, "philosophy as the primal science is like no other science, since it is to be a supra- or pre-theoretical science" that forces us to reconsider the limits of science. 58 Thus Heidegger attempted 58. Kisiel, '17tf' GertP.ru of 1/l'idPgger's Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 17.

37

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to deepen the phenomenological investigation by removing the primacy of the cogito and focusing on the phenomena of being-in-the-world. Heidegger did not agree with Husserl's concept of intentionality because he thought that our primary mode of existence was not theoretical but that it presupposed theory as being-in-the-world. The critique of intentionality as being overly intellectual and theoretical becomes a recurring theme throughout Levinas's presentation of Husserl's phenomenology. Thus Levinas's book swivels between serving as a critique of Husser} based on Heidegger and presenting Husserl's phenomenology in as close a proximity to Heidegger's project as possible. Levinas attempts to show that Husserl's real goal is ontology but is never able to incorporate Husserl's intellectualism into this program because of his preference for Heidegger's model of being-in-the-world. Therefore, Levinas must concede that "for Husser!, Being is correlative to theoretical intuitive life, to the evidence of the objectifYing act. This is why the Husserlian concept of intuition is tainted with intellectualism and is possibly too narrow" (TIHP, 94). In the final assessment, Levinas sees Husserl's work as providing a methodological framework but one still too indebted to traditional metaphysics and philosophical idealism because it does not leave the world of theory to come to terms with the way we exist in the everyday world in which we live. Even though [Husserl] attains the profound idea that, in the ontological order, the world of science is posterior to and depends on the vague and concrete world of perception, he may have been wrong in seeing the concrete world as a world of objects that are primarily perceived. Is our main attitude toward reality that of theoretical contemplation? Is not the world presented in its very Being as a center of action, as a field of activity or of caw-to speak the language of Martin Heidegger? (TIHP, 119) Levinas turned away from Husser} because he did not think that his intellectualist theory came to grips with our principal attitude toward reality. While Levinas praises Husser! for clearing the ground for the study of being, it is apparent in The Theory of Intuition that Levinas does not think that this investigation can be accomplished on Husserl's terms. The conclusion of the book opens the door to an investigation into being that follows the model presented by Heidegger. It is in this sense that Levinas felt that the possibilities of the phenomenological method were stunted by the very person who invented them. Finally, in The Theory of Intuition Levinas foreshadows what will later become his foremost concern, ethics and the place of the other:

38

Emmanuel Levinas: de ritre ... There is another reason why the phenomenological reduction, as we have interpreted it so far, does not reveal concrete life and the meaning that objects have for concrete life. Concrete life is not the solipsist's life of a consciousness closed in upon itself. Concrete Being is not what exists for only one consciousness. In the very idea of concrete Being is contained the idea of an inter-subjective world. If we limit ourselves to describing the constitution of objects in an individual consciousness, in an ego, the egological reduction can only be a first step toward phenomenology. We must also discover "others" and the intersubjective world. (TIHP, 150) At this point in his career, Levinas saw Heidegger's displacement of the primacy of the ego as the possibility of an opening to "others." Therefore, Levinas's movement away from Husser! and toward Heidegger was derived from the realization that there was no place for "others" in Husserl's phenomenological program. Based on Heidegger's seminar, which he had attended, and the concept of Mitsein presented in Being and Time, Levinas saw the work of Heidegger as a philosophy that did not think the "I'' first and thus allowed space for the other. Heidegger was very impressed with the young Lithuanian scholar from France and invited him to attend a philosophical retreat in Davos in 1929. Heidegger wrote a letter to the organizers of the Davos conference and to the Department of Philosophy at Strasbourg, recommending that Levinas be invited as a representative of the French universities. In Strasbourg, Charles Blondel authorized a grant that would cover Levinas's expenses as the University of Strasbourg's student delegate to the conference. 59

Davos, 1929 The first conference in Davos, Switzerland, was organized in 1928 to foster Franco-German relations. The conference was in theory to be an international event on the neutral soil of Switzerland that would allow all European intellectuals to participate in friendly discussion and debate as well as leisure activities (hiking, skiing). In reality, the participants were primarily from Germany and France and thus the conference focused on their concerns. The 1928 conference included among it-, participants Albert Einstein, Gottfried Salomon, Jean Piaget, Marcel Mauss, and Lucien Levy-Bruhl. For the second annual conference in the spring of 1929, the theme was "What Is Man?" and the participants included Henri Lichtenberger, Leon 59. Bulletir1 d' Ia facullP des let/res, 7th year, no. 7 (May-June 1929): 269.

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Brunschvicg, Maurice de Gandillac,Jean Cavailles, and Engen Fink. But the real attraction of the conference was the impending debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. 60 Levinas points out the irony of this debate between Cassirer the neoKantian, and Heidegger, the author of Being and Time. Heidegger was scheduled to speak on Kant and Cassirer was scheduled to discuss the works of Heidegger. 61 But the stakes of this debate were too high in the spring of 1929 to allow for such reflection. What had been planned as a refreshing retreat for the international intellectual community became center stage for the battle over the future of German philosophy. The subject of the debate was Kantianism and philosophy, but the subtext was the tension between the deeply rooted neo-Kantian tradition embodied by Hermann Cohen and Cassirer, and the new existential phenomenology, which broke radically with Cartesian and Kantian traditions. These tensions between the "old" and the "new" were further exacerbated by Cassirer's position as a Germanjewish intellectual and by Heidegger's conservative tendencies. 62 The situation was made more complex by the fact that Heidegger had replaced Hermann Cohen at the University of Marburg, thus ending the succession of neo-Kantians and perhaps determining the outcome of the Davos debate before it even started. Cosmopolitan, courteous, knowledgeable about protocol, and ever attentive to the philosophical tradition, Cassirer represented a certain humanism based on the primacy of reason and the intelligibility of science, and within this humanism he remained faithful to the aesthetic and political ideas of the nineteenth century. Rural, loud, unmannered, and without respect for his elders, Heidegger sought to violently break with all Western metaphysics in his attempt to reinvent the fundamental question of philosophy.63 In his investigation of being, Heidegger followed Husserl's phenomenological method, which presupposed traditional scientific investigation and gave it priority over scientific method and the physico-mathematic models. In Heidegger's system, the work of Cassirer and the neo-Kantians was derivative of science and thus had nothing to 60. Pierre Aubenque, "Presentation sur le debat sur le kantisme et Ia philosophie," in Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, DPbnt sur le ka11tisme et la pltilosophie (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), 7-9. 61. Poirit\ E.L.: Qu.i ites-vous? 76. 62. Heidegger's ambivalent feelings toward Jewish intellectuals were revealed in his decision to invite Levinas and in his behavior toward Cassirer while at the conference. Cassirer's wife, Toni, later remarked that those at the conference "were not unaware of Heidegger's anti-Semitism" at the time. See Toni Cassirer, Mein l..ebm mit Ern5t Cassirer (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981), 182. 63. Hendrik Pos, "Recollections of Ernst Cassirer," in Tlte Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1949).

40

Emmanuel Levinas: de 1·etre ...

say about philosophy in itself. For Heidegger, Cassirer and the neo-Kantians had missed the point ofphilosophy. 64 In the end, most of the audience seemed to have the impression that Heidegger had "won" the debate. Levinas later pointed out, "Cassirer was the representative of an order that had been defeated"; it was the end of an epoch in philosophy and the end of a certain type ofhumanism. 65 For the French, however, the debate was quite a different event. Given the agenda of philosophy at the time and the absence of phenomenology in France, the initial reaction to the debate was only mild curiosity. Most of the allegiances among the French professors and students were to Ernst Cassirer, because of the perceived proximity of the work of Leon Brunschvicg to the German neo-Kantians. The young normalien Jean Cavailles wrote to his sister on March 23, 1929: "There was only one defender of Husserl and Heidegger [among the French], Levinas, a Lithuanian who is publishing an article on Husser! in the Revue phi-

losophique. 66 Mter the debate, Levinas became the focal point for French scholars such as Maurice de Gandillac, who were intrigued and embarrassed that they knew nothing of this Heideggerian language. Levinas held informal seminars on the work of Husser! and Heidegger and the other students listened attentively. Later, they would go skiing or have snowball fights. All in all, the gravity of the debate, which would be overdetermined by the events of 1933 and the rise of Hitler, was lost on the young Levinas and the other French students. On the final evening of the conference, the students put on a show. One of the highlights was a mock HeideggerCassirer debate. A student named Bolnow donned Heidegger's country clothes and mustache, and none other than Levinas played the role of Cassirer: "I had at that time an abundance of black hair, and I had to put a ton of powder on it to replicate the noble gray of Ernst Cassirer." 67 They brought down the house with their caricatures of the two professors. Later, Levinas would regret very much the part he played in the conference, precisely because it was not the part of Cassirer. On reflection, Levinas would consider his choice to follow Heidegger necessary for the future of philosophy, but it would gnaw at him after the events 64. Heidegger's critique of Cassirer is excessive and unfair. For a detailed account of Cassirer's relationship to neo·Kantianism, see John Michael Krois, "Cassirer, Neo· Kantianism, and Metaphysics," RPvue d.P metaphysique ft de moralP 4 (1992): 436-53. On the affinities between the work of Heidegger and Cassirer as well as a detailed discussion of the debate at Davos, see Peter Gordon, Rosenz.weig nrullleideggPr: Betwfl!11 judaism arul German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chap. 6. B5. Poirie, E.L.: Qlli elPs-llmLr? 78. 66. G. Ferrie res, jean CmJail/R.s, u11 phi/{).wphe dans fa guerr11 (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 52. 67. Poirie, E.L.: Qui elPHim.ts?76.

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of World War II. "I hated myself very much during the years of Hitler for having preferred Heidegger at Davos. "68

Paris When Levinas moved to Paris in 1930 and took an administrative post with the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU), Charles Blondel told him he was making a mistake not to pursue an academic career. But Levinas was entering an intellectual world that was not yet ready to accept what he had to offer. Levinas's phenomenological methodology was largely unknown in France. It was not until 1933 that Sartre became interested in phenomenology, when Aron brought news of this "new" method back to Paris after studying Husserl in Berlin. And even then it was to Levinas's Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology that Sartre excitedly turned: "Sartre purchased Levinas's book on Husserl on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and was in such a rush to read about the philosopher that he leafed through the work while he was walking along, before he had even cut the pages."69 Thus, in one of Sartre's first encounters with Husserl, he was reading phenomenology from Levinas's Heideggerian perspective. It is therefore no surprise that in 1930 this Eastern European Jewish immigrant who had not taken the agregation and who studied decidedly un-French philosophy did not attempt to find placement in the Parisian academic world. It was Leon Brunschvicg, a member of the board of the AIU, who frankly told Levinas, ''With your accent I would never pass you on the oral part of the examination." 70 Levinas looked at his own position with resolute optimism: "The thesis had achieved nothing, I didn't know Greek ... but I was free." It would not be until the work of more rooted French scholars, all graduates of the Ecole Normale Superieure and all working from Levinas's thesis, that the mainstream philosophical establishment in France would be ready to accept what Levinas had to offer. For the time being, Levinas took advantage of his position outside the mainstream 71 to continue his philosophical education, while also contributing to the Jewish community in Paris. For Levinas, much of the 1930s was spent setting down roots in France. In 1931, he was allowed to become a naturalized citizen in France and in 1932 he did his obligatory service in the French army. His knowledge of Russian and German allowed him to ascend to the rank of petty officer before he was 68. Ibid., 78. 69. Simone de Beauvoir, l.aforre de l'flgp (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 141-42. 70. Lescourret, Emrnamu//.roina.~, 90. 71. Alexandre Koyre and Alexandre Kojeve would adopt similar strategies, finding teaching posts at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, a subsection of the College de France.

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Emmanuel Lavinas: de l'etre ...

discharged. And somehow amidst his naturalization, his work, and his service in the army, Levinas managed to travel to Lithuania, marry, and return to Paris. Despite the unlzeimlich nature of his work in philosophy, or perhaps precisely because of it, Levinas adopted an allegiance of "literary chauvinism," a faith in the tolerance and equality of France as exemplified in the rights of man. His was the nationalism not of a Barres or a Maurras but of a Zola. He believed in a France based not on race and roots but on culture. While working at the AIU, Levinas taught several courses at the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale (ENIO), but also found time to continue his education in philosophy, taking courses with Leon Brunschvicg at the Sorbonne. Brunschvicg and Levinas had met briefly in Davos and were also in contact through Brunschvicg's association with the AIU, but it is hard to understand what interest Levinas found in the lectures of France's most eminent neo-Kantian. Indeed Levinas's correspondence with Maurice Pradines on completing an article on Heidegger in 1932 exemplifies his dissatisfaction with the results of Brunschvicg's method. "This article expresses my own preoccupation with the education I received at Strasbourg and which gave me the taste for philosophy that two years at the Sorbonne has been unable to stifle. "72 Instead it might have been an interest in the possibilities of Husserlian phenomenology that attracted Brunschvicg to Levinas. Brunschvicg had been instrumental in organizing Husserl's lectures on the Cartesian Meditations at the Sorbonne. On the whole, Levinas's philosophical work continued on the course set by Heidegger in Freiburg. In 1932 Levinas published the first article on Heidegger to appear in France. 73 "Martin Heidegger et !'ontologie" touches on the main themes of Heidegger's work according to Levinas. Levinas summarized what he believed to be the most important issues of Heidegger's ontology, as opposed to the dominant trends in French philosophy. To this end he emphasized Heidegger's interest in the displacement of the subject as the primary focus of investigation, a restructuring of the concept of time based on the temporal ek-static structure of Dasein, and the question of representation in relation to Heidegger's concept of being-towards-death. There is nothing especially original about this article, but what is of note is that while Levinas's exegesis of Heidegger's work appears to be quite faithful to Heidegger, the majority of the French thinkers who read it do not seem to have absorbed what 72. A. Grappe, ed., Pradines ou l'epofJee d-P /.a raison (Paris: Orphys, 1976), 338. 73. Emmanuel Levinas, "Martin Heidegger et )'ontologie," Rn.me philosophique (May-June 1932).

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Levinas was trying to present. Despite a clear presentation of the relation of and distinction between being and beings (etre and etant/das Sein and das Seiende) ,14 the French interpretation of Heidegger held fast to the primacy of the subject as the locus of being, following the Cartesian or Husserlian model. Levinas sent a copy of his article to Jean Wahl, who immediately brought both Heidegger and Levinas to the attention of Gabriel Marcel: "Levinas sent me the proofs of his article on Heidegger for the Revue philosophique. It's complicated but very interesting." 75 Marcel and Wahl were renowned in France as philosophers in their own right but even more important as men who could spot philosophical potential in others. Marcel hosted a philosophical salon every Friday and Saturday at his apartment near the Sorbonne. Young intellectuals seeking material outside traditional French philosophy would come to hear discussions about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and even Heidegger. Levinas recalls: Jean Wahl-to whom I owe much-was on the lookout for everything that had a meaning, even outside the forms traditionally devoted to its manifestation. He thought it was necessary to give the opportunity for nonacademic discourses to be heard. For this he founded this College in the Latin Quarter. It was a place where intellectual nonconformism-and even what took itself to be such-was tolerated and expected. 76 It was in the early 1930s that Paris also benefited from an influx of Russian and German emigres such as Alexandre Koyre, Alexandre Kojeve, and Eric Weil. Wahl and Marcel were interested in bringing views from outside France to their colloquiums, and a small community of intellectuals was formed around the organizations of Wahl and Marcel outside the confines of the university. With language and culture in common, Levinas found himself quite at ease with the two Russian intellectuals Koyre and Kojeve. The former had worked with Husserl and Hering and had written a review of Levinas's Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology. The latter shared Levinas's passion for Dostoevsky and was working at the time on texts by Heidegger in relation to his work on Hegel. Levinas often attended Kojeve's seminar on Hegel at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes between 1931 and 1939, and they became a major source of inspiration for much of his

74. Emmanuel Levinas, "Martin Heidegger et I' ontologie," in En dir.ouvranl l'existrnce a.vec 1/usserl et Ill'idegger (Paris:]. Vrin, 1994), 56.

75. Letter from Wahl to Marcel, Archives Gabriel Marcel at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 76. Levinas, Ethics nnd lrtjinity, 55.

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Emmanuel Levinas: de l'etre ...

work in the 1950s and 1960s. Between his publications and his presence at the colloquiums of Wahl and Marcel and of Koyre and Kojeve, Levinas became well respected among a small cadre of intellectuals, including such figures as Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Raymond Queneau, Eric Weil, and jean-Paul Sartre. 77 But working by day as a clerk and without an official university post, he remained unknown in broader academic circles. 77. Lescourret, Emmanuel Levinas, 107-8.

45

The First Reading

CHAPTER

2 Alexandre Kojeve and the Hegel Seminar at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

The importance of Alexandre Kojeve lies in the dynamic between his seminars on,Hegel and the enthusiastic participants who attended those lectures at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes between 1933 and 1939. At that seminar at that time, we find an intersection between traditional French academics, as embodied in the eleves of the Ecole Normale Supericure (ENS) and the French university system who attended the seminar, and the arrival of a melange of new philosophical approaches such as Gennan phenomenology and existential ontology as well as Russian theological mysticism and Marxism embodied in Alexandre K~eve. These young French intellectuals were attracted to a source outside the boundaries of the French canon, to an alternative way of viewing philosophy and history in the aftermath of World War I. The relationship between ~eve and the participants in his Hegel lectures stands at the intersection of the heimisch and the unheimlich. My investigation requires we understand precisely what was heimischr-the French educational system and its impact on the students of the 1920s and I 930s-and what was unheimlich: un-French, foreign, strange and new. From its inception the French national academic system was focused on the dissemination of a specific canon and the training of teachers to impose this canon. To achieve this goal it was essential that the republican government create an institution entrusted with the sole mission of training teachers how and what to teach. It was with this mission in mind that joseph Lakanal, representing the Committee of Public Instruction, presented the proposal for the "ecole normale primaire" to the Convention on 9 Brumaire Year III (October 30, 1794). 1 Under the Empire, Napoleon created l. Robert J. Smith, 171.1! icole Nunnale SupmeuTP arul tlte Third &public (New York: State University of New York Press, 1982), 7-14. See also Pierre Bourdieu, l.a nobiR.1·sr d'Ptat: Grandrs ecoles t'l rsp-rit d~ r.urfJs (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989). For an account of the ENS

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THE fiRST READING

a vast state educational corporation under which the national university would take charge of primary, secondary, and higher education throughout France. The Ecole Normale Superieure, as it came to be called in 1845, was designed to attract the brightest scholars from all of France, who were to be selected on the basis of a national examination given to students on completion of their secondary education in the lycees. The ENS provided three years of full support, and student would "repay" that support via a contractual agreement to serve the state for ten years as a teacher. Mter Napoleon, the substance and the structure changed very little. Under the Second Empire, a minister could look at his watch at a specific moment in time and declare, "At this very time, in such a class, all the scholars of the Empire arc studying a certain page ofVirgil."2 In 1885 Ernest Lavisse explained the educational mission in no uncertain terms: "It is up to the school to tell the French what France is. It says it with authority, with persuasion, and with love." 3 The national exams were rigidly structured: a student would take the concours on completing studies at a lycee to gain entrance to the ENS or one of the other grandes ecoles. Those students who scored high enough would be admitted; the others could get their educations in the university system or pursue other interests. On graduating from the ENS or another university, students would take the agregation, which determined their national ranking and position in the educational hierarchy. While these national exams were open to the general public, they were designed for the normaliens (especially the agregation, where normaliens competed with graduates from the national university). To this day, success in French academics requires an ability to recite and interpret the material that the minister of education deems necessary and important. The entire national structure of education is based on the mastery of a specific, government-endorsed, canon. The government did provide space for original work and research in the form of research institutes such as the Ecole Prati9ue des Hautes Etudes and the more prestigious College de France. 4 The Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes was founded in 1868, largely in response to the perceived superiority of German research institutes. In practice the EPHE was an administrative superstmcture designed to dispense funds for advanced research. At its inception, there were very few directeurs detudes (they were not called in the 1920s, see Jean-Fran~ois Sirinelli, Gfnimuum iniRliRctwll£: KhligrtnJX et nurm.ali.P.rls dan.\ L'nliTl'-dntx-gunre.\ (Paris: Fayard, 1988). 2. Hippolyte A. Taine, The Modern Regime (New York: Henry Holt, 1894), 2:162. 3. Ernest Lavisse, Question! d'nHeignement national (Paris: A. Colin, 1885), xxvi. 4. Smith, 1hl' ENS and thl' 17tird lVfmblic, 56--58.

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Alexandre Koieve

professors). In comparison to other academic institutions, the salaries at the EPHE were quite modest. The instintte became a magnet for intellectuals on the periphery of the national educational system-foreigners, those who professed theories outside the canon, and scholars more interested in ideas than in exams. The list of instn1ctors at the EPHE included such notable figures as Koyre and Kojeve, but also Marcel Mauss, Claude LeviStrauss, and Ferdinand de Saussure. Despite a dynamic faculty and, unlike most other institutions, no enrollment requirements (age, nationality, prior degrees, or even registration fees), the EPHE was consistently underattended. This can be attributed to the EPHE's assigned place in the larger framework of the French academic system: the EPHE neither helped one prepare for, nor awarded, any degree of immediate use for a career in the larger educational system.5 Students were discouraged from taking courses that had no bearing on the national exams and thus on their future. 6 The College de France also provided a venue for original research, recruited its instructors from a broad pool, and did not prepare students for any particular degree or examination sequence. But unlike the EPHE, the College de France was built to reward those professors who had reached the highest levels of popularity in France. The number of posts was restricted, and, unlike the faculty at the EPHE or even at the university, there were no junior positions from which one might advance. While some professors, such as Henri Bergson, lectured to consistently full halls, others conducted research in relative obscurity. The professors conducted their work and lectured to the general public but did not have specific teaching duties. 7 Aspiring students enthralled by a figure at the College de France would not look to the College to reach the heights of academia the celebrated institute embodied. Instead, they considered the Ecole Normale Superieure the fast track to academic success. But the graduates of the ENS found themselves in a double bind. Hailed as an intellectual elite and trained in theory and criticism at small seminars that encouraged class discussion and spirited debate (as opposed to the large lecture hall format in the national universities), the normaliens were given specific intellectual tools and then discouraged from using them. The fear was they would be discredited at the national examinations. The normaliens naturally felt quite comfortable in the small research seminars at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, or 5. That is, for French students looking for posts as instructors. The EPHE did award a "third cycle doctorate," which allowed emigres an opportunity to earn a French degree and thus the ability to teach in France without having taken the entire program of CQTlcours, awegatum, thrse de doctoraL The drawback of this degree is that it only made it possible tO teach at other small research institutes and not at the Iycee or university level. 6. Terry Clark, PmphPts and PatrQTls (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 42-51. 7. Ibid., 52.

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at advanced lectures at the College de France; but, knowing full well that their future depended on their results in the agregation, they were forced to acquire a very broad (and thin) education based on repetition and memorization, not in-depth research. By the beginning of the Third Republic the Ecole Normale Superieure was well entrenched in its role as the teacher of teachers, and the structure of the national examination board had created a dogmatic monopoly on ideas. The governing hand of the national examinations was so effective that reforms allowing more freedom for each individual professor and eradicating the standardization of classroom teaching were enacted without any effect on the overall structure of the system. There were two reasons behind the educational reforms, but it is essential to keep in mind that all advances or reforms were always checked by the exam process, which necessarily limited the field of "acceptable" subjects. The first reason for the administrative and substantive reforms at the end of the nineteenth century was the creation of the Third Republic itself. As its successive governments moved gradually to the left and acquired increased support from the lower social "strata," the Third Republic devoted more attention to public education. The intention of these reforms was to expand the primary and secondary schools and create more scholarships. The pressure this exerted on the existing structure led to the need for even more expansion and reform. The second reason was increased envy and admiration of the German university system. On the heels of a devastating loss to Germany, a number of studies had been conducted that gauged, by the number of professors and the number of students, or by the diversity and quality of publications, or by various other measures, that Germany had surpassed France intellectually. Whether this was the case or not, Hyppolite Taine and Ernest Renan, among others, took the issue very seriously. Revanche was not limited to the battlefield, and in the case of academics, the strategy of the Third Republic was to know the enemy in order to surpass it.8 While German scholarship enjoyed high prestige in the years following the Franco-Prussian War, those who admired it were not "uncritical imitators. Typically the French pursued erudition not for its own sake but to achieve some broad new synthesis.'o9 The German university became the mark by which the French system would be measured, but the changes made would be uniquely French. Alumni of the ENS played a crucial role in the education programs and reforms put forth by the Third Republic. In 1880, the Societe de l'Enseignement Superieure was created to evaluate the existing system in 8. See Claude Digeon, /.a cr~:re allnna.nd.e d.e Ia fJmser. fr,mraise (Paris: Pres.se Universitaire de France, 1959). 9. Smith, 'HI£ ENS and the Third Republic, 69-70.

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relation to educational advancements abroad. The members were primarily partisans of scientific research, republican secularism, and "modernists,:' and included such noted normaliens as Hyppolite Taine, Gabriel Monod, Emile Boutmy, as well as Louis Pasteur. They recommended funding advanced students to study in Germany, demanded changes in established fields, and discussed recent developments in the social sciences. 10 This agenda was based on the perception that the educational system had become mired in the classics and had lost its ability to deal with the future. The panel wanted to focus attention on the importance of the scientific method and modem languages, which would be more practical and would attract students from all social classes, creating a more democratic educational system. But perhaps more important was the public impression that graduates of the ENS dictated educational policy from positions in govemment. 11 The most significant event that led to the Third Republic's image as "the Republic of Professors" and inextricably linked the ENS to the French political scene was the Dreyfus Affair. In fact, prior to the Dreyfus Affair most normaliens did not consider themselves political in any way. There were socialist cliques around the school librarian, Lucien Herr, but in many ways these groups were more theoretical than political (though certainly not for Herr). As early as 1894, the year of Dre)fus's sentencing, the library of the ENS had become a center for pro-Dre)fus sentiment, probably because of Herr's friendship with Lucien Uvy-Bmhl, a professor at the Sorbonne, an 1876 graduate of the ENS, and a cousin of Dreyfus. By the time the affair came to a head in 1897, with the revelation of evidence proving Dreyfus's innocence, the government (in the person of Senator Scherer-Kestner) was attempting to restrain Gabriel Monod, director of the ENS, from making a public declaration to that effect. Monod ultimately refused and published his argument for a review of Dreyfus's case in Le temps. Since the Dreyfusard party had not yet been formed, it appeared that Monod had left himself vulnerable to the attacks ofanti-Dreyfusards. But on November 15, 1897, the student body of the ENS sent a unanimous letter in support of Monod and his political declaration, which was also published in Le temps. The ENS became a power base for political activity, and as the events of the case played out, the political activities of the day became part and parcel of normalien life. 12 In response to the political events of the Dre)fus Affair, opponents of the politically active students attempted to return the ENS to its original mission of teaching teachers. The result was the reformation of the ENS in 1903, which will loom large in this book. In that year the min10. Clark, Patrons and Prophets, 26--28. 11. See Hubert Bourgin, De Jau.res a Leon Blum: L'icole Normale rt fa politique (London: Gordon and Breach, 1970). 12. See Jean-Fran~ois Sirinelli, Int.ell.ectw>/s el pr~s.,·ion r franrr~isrs: Manifeste.\ et pititi.ons au XXf' siRcle (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Michel Winock, LP siirle de.r intRll.erluels (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

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istcr of education decreed that the Ecole Normale Superieure would be "reunited" with the University of Paris and that the normaliens would henceforth take their courses alongside all other university students at the "New Sorbonne." This reform was enacted in part to make the educational system more democratic, but also to reassert the ENS's original mission to teach teachers and break up the elite clique of professors and politicians. The ENS's separate teaching faculty was abolished and the maitres were given posts at either the Sorbonne or the College de France. While the reforms were designed to curtail the elitist character of the ENS, very little changed after the merger with the University of Paris. The entrance exams continued to stratify the general student population, and those who got into the ENS were well aware of their privileged position. The prestige of former students such as Jean Jaures, Edouard Herriot, Paul Painleve, and Leon Blum reinforced this understanding and enticed applicants to the school who were far more interested in making their mark in politics than in education. The chief and unforeseen results of these reforms, however, were that norrnaliens were given more autonomy to choose their own course work and that interaction between narmaliens and students from other institutions increased without altering the fundamental character of the ENS. The students were still a proud, envied, and self-conscious community held togetl1er by shared intellectual interests and the common goal of preparing for their examinations. 13 The ultimate result of the reform of 1903 was that the ENS increased the scope of its curriculum without losing the right to hold its own smaller classes for its elite cadre of students. The reform of 1903 shows that there were cleavages and differences between education and government and at times the ENS found itself in conflict with the ministers of education, only some of whom were graduates of the institution. In the public perception, however, the government and the educational institutions were inextricably linked.

Toward the Outside By the late 1920s, the intellectual tradition of the Third Republic had been called into question, partly by the reforms that the Third Republic had enacted at the end of the nineteenth century, but more seriously by the impressions that World War I left on the aspiring intellectuals too young to have fought in it. The generation of 1933 had been brought up amidst the exaltation of war but were removed from the fighting and hence impotent. They had witnessed a "victory" that was hardly victorious. Of the 8 million Frenchmen mobilized, some 5 million were killed or wounded. Fully 10 13. Smith, TlteENS aud tltP Third lvpublir, 72-75.

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percent of the active male population died and many more were partially or totally incapacitated. 14 But these were more than numbers to the generation of 1933; these were fathers, brothers, uncles, and friends. These bitter memories were exacerbated by other wartime conditions such as epidemics, rationing, and the destruction of property. For the generation of 1933, the starting point of philosophy was the desire to come to grips with the events of World War I in the face of the optimistic view of progress and history embodied in French philosophy and tl1e Third Republic. The notion of progress espoused by both spiritualists and materialists had been compromised and neither camp could explain the senseless killing and mass destruction that marked tl1e "victory" of France in World War I or the precarious economic position of an industrializing France. To the generation of 1933, the traditional academic system seemed more concerned with perpetuating itself and its republican ideals than with confronting the realities of a changing world. The events of history had debunked the theory of historical progress that had guided the Third Republic from its inception. The generation of 1933 was not ready to scrap the teleological project on which their education had been founded. Even as they sought to break with the ideological content of their formative education, they conserved certain fundamental aspects of it. These young intellectuals were dissatisfied with the purely theoretical nature of neo-Kantian philosophy and the overly subjective nature of Bergsonian spiritualism and wanted to move beyond the existing paradigms of French academia. In the late 1920s and 1930s, therefore, the generation of 1933 sought to rehabilitate the concept of progress in history. This dictated turning outward for a methodology they could not find at home. By 1925, the 1904 reforms of the Ecole Normale Superieure had created a new structure that allowed more freedom and less connection with the university proper. The students were still restrained by the yoke of the national exams but could pursue other interests that often went against the canon. An anecdote from Raymond Aron 's Mimoirr!s (36) illustrates this point quite well. Sartre and Aron were in a seminar at the ENS, "The Progress of Consciousness in Western Thought," given by Leon Brunschvicg. In a discussion of Nietzsche, Bnmschvicg took an approach based on the immanent nature of truth and dismissed Nietzsche's philosophical claims regarding the nature of truth. Sartre loudly protested that truth claims were based entirely on the fickle and absurd meanings individuals force on the objects that surround them. Even in a seminar given by the head of the jury d'agregation there was room for dissent; yet all the students knew that such dissent would not be tolerated when taking the n~tional exams. Sartre failed the agregration on his first attempt. 15 14. Gordon Wright, Franr.e in Modt>m TimPs (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987) 307-18. 15. Raymond Aron, Memoiffs: Cinq1.1.nnte ans de rijlexion politique (Paris: Julliard, 1983), 36.

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But while something as alien as modern German philosophy could not enter the French canon via the universities, the generation of 1933 c~ould search for alternativ<: answers via research institutes such as the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and journals such as Recherches philosophiques. Thus a student at the ENS was unable to take a course on modern German philosophy at the Sorbonne but could attend Kojeve's lectures on Hegel at the EPHE or hear Levinas speak on Heidegger at the College de Philosophic. Furthermore, the generation of 1933 could read French translations of works by Husser!, Karl Jaspers, and Heidegger in Alexandre Koyre's journal Recherches philosophiques, or could read commentary on Gennan phenomenology and Lebensphilosophie in the Revue de la France et de l'etranger. It was at these research institutes and on the editorial boards ofjournals that emigres such as Koyre, Kojeve, Eric Weil, Georges Gurvitch, Bernard Groethuysen, and Jacob Gordin could interact with established French intellectuals such as Leon Brunschvicg, Emile Brehier, and Jean Wahl. These new and foreign philosophies allowed thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Henry Corbin, Raymond Queneau, and Jean Hyppolite to rethink the project of philosophy in the aftermath of World War I outside the boundaries of traditional French philosophy. Thus the movement away from the traditional canon was accelerated by the rise in popularity of philosophical and literary journals. Students saw it was possible to pursue advanced and innovative thought outside the constrictions of the French university system. Finally, a growing sentiment in France since the 1870s that the Germans had surpassed them intellectually led to the creation of travel grants. Many of the students at the ENS and French university system spent a year studying in Germany and were thus exposed to innovations in the field of philosophy. The possibility of the failure of the Third Republic and the questioning of the validity of its academic framework was reinforced by the popularity of writers such as Charles Peguy, Georges Sorel, and Celine, who called the existing paradigm into question and forced the generation of 1933 to reconsider their positions. For rwrmaliens such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Hyppolite, Queneau, and Aron, as well as non-narmaliens such as Georges Bataille, Henry Corbin, Jacques Lacan, and Simone de Beauvoir, the neoKantian approach presented by Leon Brunschvicg, which approached history and philosophy using the model of science, appeared to fall short of the essential mission of philosophy: to make sense of the world in which we live. The theoretical nature of the French neo-Kantian project failed to address the concrete world. In a discussion of his education, Raymond ~on spoke of the impact of his first reading of Kant at the ENS as essential 111 his development but deceptive, since Aron "translated an understanding

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of Kant inLo an understanding of the neo-Kantianism of Leon Brunschvicg where Kant was integrated comfortably into the universalist program of French thought." 16 In response, Aron and his fellows students turned to the philosophers Vincent Descombes calls the three H's: Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Specifically, in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the generation of 1933 turned to the philosophy of Hegel as a concrete attempt to explain teleological progress using the rhetoric of struggle, bloody battle, repression, work, and desire. This language was far more compatible with the postwar realities and allowed philosophy to "make sense" of senseless killing in tenns of a larger teleological project. Here we see a vital component in understanding these young intellectuals from the generation of 1933. While they sought to reconceptualize French thought, their mission was principally philosophical. Much has been made of the political engagement of thinkers such as Sartre, Aron, and Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s and 1950s, but what is equally compelling is their lack of political engagement in the 1930s. It is difficult to speak for an entire generation, but in the case of these three and the majority of young intellectuals in and around the Kojeve seminar, politics were approached from a theoretical, not practical, standpoint. Sartre's reflections on his political indifference during the two decades prior to World War II in his War Diaries are corroborated by Jean-Fran(:ois Sirinelli's research based on Sartre's voluminous papers at the ENS. They show almost no interest in politics and an obsession with philosophy and literature. It is true that, as a rule, most of the normaliens tended to support socialism-largely a result of their contact with Lucien Herr, the librarian at the ENS-but this was more of a theoretical activity then a tangible political commitment. In an interview about his politics in the 1930s, Raymond Aron responded: "I was a socialist, vaguely, at least until I came to study political economy. All of my friends were for the Popular Front, so naturally I too voted for the Popular Front." 17 During the 1930s the lines between right and left were blurred, and contact between intellectuals of varying convictions was not only possible but accepted without great reflection. This would all change after World War II. Mter the war, those who had done nothing to prevent it felt compelled to act: "We all remembered the decadence of the 1930s. In 1944 and 1945, we were resolute, we manifested a profound will to rebuild our country." 18 The drastic nature of the change can be seen in the shift of the generation of 1933 from philosophical investigation to political 16. Ibid., 67-68. 17. Raymond Amn, fp ,~pclatP11r engagP. interviews with Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton (Paris:Julliard, 1981), 47. 18. Ibid., 113.

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engagement. A primary example is the difference between Recherches philosophiques and Les temps modernes. Both these journals were outlets for the writings of the generation of 1933, but the mission of Recherches philosophiques, published between 1931 and 1937, was purely philosophical, whereas the mission of Les temps modernes was equally philosophical and political.

Alexandre Koyre and Recherches philosophiques One could make the argument that Recherches philosophiques, which began publication in 1931, was the continuation of Husserl's Jahrbuch, which stopped publication in 1930. Many figures from the early phenomenological circles were featured prominently in Recherches philosophiques, and, beginning with the second volume, an entire section was devoted to presenting and reviewing works of phenomenology. But Recherches philosophiques wanted to move beyond the scope of phenomenology as presented by Husser!. Founded by Alexandre Koyre, a member of the original Gottingen circle, Recherches philosophiques had the goal of exposing the French intellectual world to foreign (and specifically German) philosophy. As when he was Husserl's student, Koyre wanted to expand phenomenological investigation into the fields of art, history, and science, while at the same time keeping his mind open to other possible methods of investigation. This allowed Recherches philosophiques to present an intersection of (principally but not exclusively) German and French thought. Koyre put together an editorial board that included Leon Brunschvicg and Emile Brehier, thus enlisting some of the most important names in traditional French philosophy. Recherches philosophiques presented philosophical ideas and methodologies that were completely foreign to traditional French philosophers. In recalling his friendship with Koyrc, Henry Corbin remembers the evenings they spent together preparing the journal: We had nothing equivalent to it at the time. Boivin, the courageous editor, took on the burden of publishing the six large volumes (each over 500 pages) a year which for many of us was a precious labor. If the researcher of today wants to know, Recherches Philosophiques constituted a rarely seen meeting of a constellation of philosophers who presented many new su~jects of which phenomenology occupied a large place. Hl

19. Henry Corbin, "Post-Scriptum biographique a un entretien philosophique," in /lenry Gurbin, les Calti:r.rJ de l1lernP. (Paris: Editions de !'Heme, 1981), 44.

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Koyre was born in Taganrog, Russia, in 1892. He had mastered both the French and German languages in school, and his parents intended for him to attend university in Western Europe. He moved to Paris around 1905; there he studied Bergson's intuitionism. In 1910, he joined the Gottingen circle, bringing Bergson's philosophy to the young phenomenologists. Koyre contended that Bergson opened the door to the philosophical method that would become phenomenology and that, in fact, Bergson and Husserl were entirely compatible. Husser!, he believed, had simply given Bergson's intuitionism a scientific foundation. During his GOttingen days, he was once asked about the phenomenologists' position in relation to the Bergsonians, to which he replied: "We are the true Bergsonians. "2 Koyre served as a bridge between Germany and France and between Husser! and Bergson. The first proponents of phenomenology in France, Jean Hering, Bernard Groethuysen, and Georges Gurvitch, would all follow his lead.21 Koyre returned to Paris ~in 1912 and began to work with Leon Brunschvicg. Impressed by Koyre's acumen, the depth and breadth of his philosophical knowledge, and his mastery of Russian literature, Brunschvicg befriended Koyre. At first Brunschvicg was quite skeptical of the phenomenology presented by Koyre. After Husserl's lectures at the Sorbonne in 1929, however, Brunschvicg became fascinated with phenomenology, though for very different reasons than those that·attracted Koyre. Bnmschvicg's neo-Kantian philosophy was oriented toward science; he used a Cartesian concept of consciousness. Bussed's lectures at the Sorbonne titled "The Cartesian Meditations" focused on Husserl's attempt to construct a program of philosophy as eidetic science, which appealed to Brunschvicg and the neo-Kantians. In this way, phenomenology managed to attract attention from representatives of the two poles of French philosophy. Given his status as a foreign intellectual, Koyre was unable to find a position at a major university. He therefore enrolled at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, receiving his diploma in 1919. 22 In 1929 he received his doctorate from the same institution. Fortunately, money was never an issue for Alexandre Koyre and he had the freedom to pursue

°

20. Jean Hering, "La phenomenologie il y a trente ans," RevuR internationale de philosojJitie 1 (1939):368. 21. For a complete account of the reception of phenomenology in France, see Eugene H. Frickey, "The Origins of Phenomenology in France, 1920-1940," Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1979; and Herbert Spiegelman, The Pltertom.mol.ogir.al Mu11ement, part 3, "The French Phase of the Movement" (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960). 22. The diploma awarded by the EPHE allowed the graduate to teach in France at a research institute.

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his philosophical interests and teach at the EPHE for a minimal salary. Kovre taught in the Department of Religious Studies and was granted en~rmous freedom in the topics he addressed. It was Koyre who began the Hegel seminar at the EPHE in 1932, as Corbin later remembered: Most of the seminars took place at the Harcourt, a comfortable and historic cafe at the corner of the place de la Sorbonne and boulevard Saint Michel. ... It was at the Harcourt that we worked out what would become the French philosophy of that era, Hegel and the renewal of Hegelian studies. Besides Koyre there was Alexandre Kojeve, Raymond Queneau, myself, and philosophers like Fritz Heinemann, as well as many Jewish colleagues [collegues israilites] who had chosen exile and through whose heartbroken accounts we learned about the course of events in Germany. The arguments would occasionally become very intense. Kojeve and Heinemann were in complete and total disagreement over the interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit. There were often confrontations about the phenomenology of Husserl and that of Heidegger. 23 Koyre's influence on the French academic scene can be attributed to his lectures at the EPHE, his participation in Recherches Philosophiques, and three articles published in the early 1930s. Koyre was interested in reading Hegel's early works, most important the Jena texts published in German in 1907.24 But, unlike Jean Wahl, Koyre saw no discontinuity between the young "existential" Hegel and the Hegel of the system. Instead Koyre sought to construct a continuous reading of Hegel relating the early texts to his entire body of work. 25 Koyre also used Heidegger's concept of time, which was later employed by Kojeve in his reading of Hegei.26 In 1933, Koyre was offered a post in Cairo and asked Kojeve to take over his lectures for him.

Alexandre Kojeve Born in Moscow to a wealthy merchant family on May 11, 1902, Alexandre Kojevnikov enjoyed all the creature comforts of the haute bourgeoisie. In 1904, at the onset of the war between Japan and Russia, Alexandre's father, Vladimir Kojevnikov, was sent to Manchuria. Kojeve's

23. Corbin, "Post-Scriptum biographique a un entretien philosophique," 44. 24 · Wilhelm Dilthey, DiP jugP.nrlgpsr.hidlte I lewl (Berlin: Verlag der koniglichen Akademie der Wisse~schaft, 1905); Herman Nohl, 17u•dtJt..Ti.5dw.J'IJfPUf.!rlrriflm (Tujingen:J.C.B. Mohr,l907). 25. Michael Roth, Knowir1gandllirtory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 5-7. 26. I will discuss Heidegger's concept of time in detail in chap. 4.

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mother, Alexandra, decided to follow her husband east; leaving the twoyear-old Alexandre with their family in Moscow. In a letter to his halfbrother, the painter Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir let his relatives know of his and Alexandra's immediate future: they would leave the Kazans en route to the Caspian Sea, and from there they would travel to Manchuria, though he did not know exactly where. Alexandra had decided to become a nurse, and they hoped they could remain together for as long as possible. 27 It would not be a very long time. Kojeve's father was mortally wounded on the battlefield in March 1905. He was brought back to a military hospital by his friend, Lemkul, and died shortly thereafter with his wife attending him. Alexandra Kojevnikov returned to Moscow alone, but Vladimir's friend Lemkul followed her. Despite the awkward nature of their first and only meeting, Lemkul had fallen in love with the wife of his fallen comrade. Mter a period of courtship, Alexandra married Lemkul and it was he Kojeve grew up calling father. 28 Lemkul'~ family came from England but had established themselves as among the premier jewelers in Moscow. They traveled in high society, believed in progressive democratic reform, and held education at a premium. Young Alexandre had shown enormous talent in language and mathematics, even at a very young age, and his stepfather was persistent in assuring him the finest education and every advantage. In an extract from a letter to Kojeve in 1929, Kandinsky speaks of staying with Lemkul and Alexandra and of his fascination with the brilliant young boy they called the "new Gogol." 29 Kojeve attended the Medvednikov Academy, one of the most prestigious and demanding secondary schools in Moscow. He could speak, read, and write in Russian, German, French, and English. He was also versed in Latin. He excelled in math and science but also in literature and history. The Russian school system did not offer philosophy per se, so, as in the case of Levinas, Kojeve's metaphysical investigations began with the rich field of Russian literature and the works of Gogo!, Push kin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Lemkul had hopes that Kojeve would attend university in Germany and then return to Russia to pursue a career in higher education. One reason Lemkul wanted to see his son go west was because of his skill and potential in science, where German universities were most advanced. But another reason may have been the instability of the Russian political climate.

27. Letter from Vladimir Kojevnikov to Kandinsky, Kazan, July 1904, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musee d'Art Moderne. 28. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojeve (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1990), 39-45. 29. Letter from Kandinsky to Kojeve, March 7, 1929, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musee d'Art Moderne.

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In 1917, when Kojeve was fifteen years old, the czar abdicated. Lemkul left Moscow to defend his property in the country from roving bands of revolutionaries reclaiming estates for the people. Because he was a bourgeois businessman and a vocal proponent of liberal democracy, he and his large estate were prime targets. In an action that seems more circumstantial than overtly political, Lemkul was killed and his house burned in July 1917. For the second time in thirteen years, Alexandre Kojeve lost his father to the events of history. Kojeve remained in Moscow, where he was completing his secondary work at the Medvednikov Academy. He was arrested in 1918 for trafficking goods on the black market. Why and what Kojeve was buying or selling is unclear, but it could not have been for need of money, as the family had secured a large source of capital. Kojeve spent almost a year in prison; this is where he first came into contact with the works of Karl Marx. As part of the rehabilitation program, the inmates were assigned passages from Marx and Lenin. Kojeve was fascinated by Marx and sought to learn more. When he was released in 1919, he took his college exams and then enrolled at the University of Moscow in the Department of Philology and Philosophy. But his professors were not very receptive to his readings of Marx, nor were they interested in his desire to pursue the more esoteric studies of Sanskrit and Buddhism. The university was compelled to follow strict guidelines dictated by the new government, and Kojeve realized that he would have to leave Russia if he was to pursue original thought. I was a communist and had no reason to flee Russia. But I knew then that the communist establishment would mean thirty terrible years. I have often thought of this. One day I said to my mother, "After all, if I hadjust stayed in Russia I could have. ."But my mother quickly responded, "If you had stayed in Russia, you would have been killed . at least twice!" I suppose that may have been. 30 His ambivalent relationship with the country he never stopped calling "Russia" would never be truly reconciled, even as Kojeve professed, from the safety of his apartment in Paris, his particular understanding of Marxism and his support for the Soviet experiment. .In 1920, Kojeve decided to leave Moscow with his friend George Wut-a daunting task for two eighteen-year-olds when the borders were clo~ed and the countryside was unstable. As luck would have it, they arnved safely in Poland. The Polish authorities assumed they had been sent by Moscow to spread Bolshevist communism and foster revolution in Poland. The two were promptly arrested and imprisoned; after six months they secured their release when the Polish authorities received a 30. Interview with Gilles Lapouge, Quinz.ninelitteraire, no. 500 ( 1980): 2-3.

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voucher from Witt's family in Gem1any stating that Witt was of German descent and that both he and his friend were en route to Germany seeking to escape Soviet rule. Kojeve and Witt were released on the condition that they leave immediately for Germany. They gladly complied. 31 Witt and Kojeve arrived in Berlin and stayed with Kandinsky while they pondered their next move. They decided to tour Europe and then return to Germany to attend university. They spent most of their time in Austria and Italy, and on returning to Germany Witt decided to forgo university studies to pursue a career in film; he took up residence in Berlin. Kojeve decided to enroll at the university in Heidelberg. There he worked with Karl Jaspers, but the young Kojeve was still unfocused and undisciplined. He and Jaspers shared an interest in Oriental languages and Eastern religions, but Kojeve devoted so much time to the study of Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, while taking courses on the religions of Buddhism and Islam, that he failed to absorb whatJaspers had to offer. Furthermore, Kojeve had decided he would simultaneously pursue a degree in physics. The result was that he had very little time to focus on philosophy. While he did work with Jaspers, he felt he had "no time" to work with Husser! and did not even know who Heidegger was. At age eighteen, Kojeve was far more interested in following his whims than in doing serious work. He relied heavily on his knowledge of Russian literature to get him through his philosophy courses. Kojeve would later regret the time he had lost and his failure to study under Husser! or work more attentively with Jaspers. "I voluntarily avoided the courses of Husser! and stupidly followed many other Professors, but at least I worked with Jaspers. I wasted my time learning Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese. I studied Buddhism because it seemed so radical-it is the only atheist religion-I realize now that I took the wrong path, despite my interest. I realize that I passed over several minor things that happened in Greece 2,400 years ago, and that those things are the source and the key to everything. "32 The tongue-in-cheek response given in his last interview captures both his ironic sense of humor and his serious sense of thought. Kojeve was running out of money, and he convinced George Witt to return to Moscow and pick up several packages of jewels that he had inherited from his stepfather, Lemkul. How Kojeve convinced Witt is a bit of a mystery, but the charismatic Russian was always a persuasive character.33 Witt successfully carried out his mission and was met by Kojeve 3l. Auffret, Kojime, 68-75. 32. Interview with Gilles Lapouges, 2. 33. Allan Bloom relates that Kojeve would always "convince" Bloom, a graduate student at the time, to pick up the check after dinner. See Bloom's tribute to Kojeve, "Kojeve, le philosophe," Cornmentllire no. 9, 1980.

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in Berlin, where the temptation of the fast life was too much to resist; he moved there in 1923. He claimed that Berlin had better research institutes than Heidelberg, but his declining class attendance and increasing cabaret attendance betrayed his rationalizations. Witt had become close to the film community, and Kojeve loved the fun and decadence of Berlin in the 1920s. It might be interesting to read Kojeve's concept of desire in terms of his days in Berlin, but it is enough to say that he did not resist his desires in any way. The most important event of Kojeve's wild days in Berlin was meeting Alexandre Koyre, who was there visiting his brother. Kojeve was dating Cecile Shoutak, ajewish woman ten years his senior. Coincidentally, Shoutak was recently separated from her husband, who was Koyre's brother. The first meeting between Kojeve and Koyre was confrontational, and the Koyre family's expectations were that Koyre would dismiss the younger Kojeve as an upstart. This did not turn out to be the case. Koyre was impressed by Kojeve's broad knowledge in a number of subjects, and the two talked long into the evening. When Kojeve left, Koyre's wife sarcastically declared, "Well that's marvelous, he's like a brother to you," to which Koyre responded: "No no no, he's much better than my brother, Cecile is absolutely right [elle a tout afait raison]." 34 Koyre had been living in Paris since 1912 and teaching at the EPHE since 1922. Koyre repeatedly urged Kojeve to move to the French capital. Whether Koyre's constant overtures succeeded in convincing Kojeve or Kojeve simply grew bored with Berlin life, he returned with Cecile Shoutak to Heidelberg in 1924, determined to finish his degree. He earned his doctorate in philosophy under Jaspers with a thesis on the Russian mystic Sergey Solovyov. In 1926 Kojeve moved to Paris, and at the age of twenty-four he married Cecile Shoutak. From 1926 to 1929 they lived the good life, staying in elegant hotels, eating out every night, and buying expensive clothes--in essence spending all of Kojeve's inheritance. His intellectual life depended heavily on Koyre, who connected him with a number of academic circles, most of them consisting of Russian emigres as well. It was through Koyre that Kojeve met Levinas, with whom he loved to discuss the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Kojeve would attend salons, listen to lectures at the Sorbonne, and attend seminars at the EPHE. He also took private lessons in mathematics and physics. In 1927 he read Heidegger's Being and Time, which he came to see as the key to rethinking philosophy and specifically the concept of history. By 1929 Kojeve was running out of money and his marriage was falling apart. His dilettantish approach to academics had left him well read and well versed in a myriad of subjects but unqualified to teach any of them; 34. Auffret, Kojeve, 154.

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without a French degree he was unemployable. Just as in Heidelberg, his life in Paris was unfocused. Perhaps still rattled by the constricting atmosphere he had encountered at the University in Moscow, Kojeve was distrustful of (or uninterested in) the world of traditional academics. He wanted neither to receive a degree from, nor to work in concert with, the accepted institutions, and it was only out of necessity that he turned to a career in teaching. When he arrived in France, Kojeve invested his money in the French cheese company La Vache Qui Rit (Laughing Cow). When asked where his money came from, Kojeve would playfully explain that he had an uncle who sold cheese and sent him money. Mter the French stock market crash in 1931, Kojeve lost all his holdings. When asked to explain why he started working at the EPHE, he replied simply: "My uncle who sold cheese died and I found myself ruined. "35 In 1929 Koyre convinced Kojeve that he needed to get his French doctoral d'etat so that he could teach. Kojeve set about achieving this goal but decided he wanted to get his doctorate in physics. By 1931 Kojeve was completely broke, he had filed for divorce, and his thesis in physics had been rejected by the Sorbonne. He was preparing to give up Parisian life and move back to Germany, where he had a degree and could teach. Once again it was Koyre who came to Kojeve's rescue. He arranged for Kojeve to write several book reviews for Recherches philosophiques, which provided some income, and he convinced Kojeve to translate his German thesis on Solovyov into French and submit it to the EPHE. Koyre also hired Kojeve to write several articles for Recherches philosophiques. In 1933 Kojeve received his diploma from the EPHE, and his these de doctorat, titled "The Idea of Determinism in Classic and Modem Physics," was accepted by the Sorbonne. Kojeve's timing in earning his diploma could not have been better; in 1933 Alexandre Koyre accepted a post in Cairo and suggested Kojeve as his replacement at the EPHE. The seminar was in its second year and a certain rapport had emerged among the students who met each week at the Cafe Harcourt. What happened in that seminar between 1933 and 1939 changed the face of modern French philosophy.

The Seminar When Koyre conducted the seminar it met every Wednesday at eleven in the morning. As a participant in Koyre's seminar, Kojeve had become friends with Georges Bataille; after the seminar they would go for lunch and discuss the events of the day. When Kojeve took over for Koyre, the first thing he did was move the seminar to a more civilized time: Fridays 35. In tetview with Gilles Lapouges, 2.

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at five thirty in the evening. This allowed Kojeve and BatailJe to go out for drinks and dinner afterward. (Indeed the social aspects of the seminar are as fascinating as the seminar itself. With a core group of Kojeve, Georges Bataille,Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau, and with such figures as Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eric Weil, Andre Breton, Emmanuel Levinas, Alexandre Koyre, Robert Marjolin, and others dropping by, the level of conversation and revelry was usually high.) But though Kojeve and Bataille were the same age, Bataille always looked on Kojeve as the sage. Kojeve's seminar on Hegel had such a profound effect on Bataille that he spent his entire career working through the problems Kojeve presented. In a note from Sur Nietzsche, Bataille described that overwhelming effect: From '33 (I think) until '39 I took Alexandre Kojeve's seminar on [Hegel's] Phenomenology of Spirit. The seminar was based on the text. I don't know how many times Queneau and I stumbled out of that little room gasping for air-suffocated, beaten. During those years I had attended innumerable lectures and I was up to date with the advances in science; but Kojeve's course left me broken, crushed, killed ten times. 36 Raymond Aron presents a more nostalgic description of the seminar: Kojeve first translated several lines of the Phenomenology, emphasizing certain words, then he spoke, without notes, without ever stumbling over a word, in an impeccable French made original and fascinating with his Slavic accent. He captivated an audience of superintellectuals who were inclined toward doubt or criticism. Why? Talent, dialectical virtuosity had something to do with it. I do not know if his talent as an orator survives intact in the book that records the final year of his course, but this art, which had nothing to do with eloquence, stemmed from his subject and his person. 37 These "superinte1lectuals" were a cross section of the French cultural scene and represented the shifting intellectual climate. Although enrollment figures never totaled more than nineteen, the participants would usually include in equal parts normaliens (Aron, Merleau-Ponty), graduates of the French university system (Henry Corbin), literary figures (Andre Breton, Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau), foreign scholars (Emmanuel Levinas, Eric Weil, Aron Gurvitsch), and the occasional representative

36. Georges Bataille, Omrm~ rwtTJjJI.i!tPs, vol. 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 416. 37· Aron, Mhnoir,.s, 94-100. The material covered in the final year of the seminar was pu~Iished as "En guise d'introdnction" in Me.fures (January 1939). The material for the entire seminar was published from Raymond Queneau's notes in 1947.

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of the religious community (Father Gaston Fessard).jacques Lacan's presence also represented a blurring of the lines between the traditional fields of advanced study. Trained in medicine and psychiatry, Lacan sought a new route through German philosophy. Other "third party" participants who were simply interested in what Kojeve had to say came as well. As the seminar increased in popularity, the "third party" observers increased in number. Kojeve recalls one participant who came regularly to the seminar in the late 1930s. At the beginning of 1939 he arrived at the seminar in his formal military attire and politely asked Kojeve to excuse him for the rest of the year. Kojeve realized he had been teaching Hegel to an admiral in the French navy. 38 It is impossible to tell exactly who else was there and how far-reaching the influence of the seminar was, as enrollment figures counted only those taking the course for credit. 39 Those attending the seminar represented a melange of intellectuals who came looking for answers to the concerns of a changing France and the questions presented by the events of World War I. Kojeve brought to the table a new way of looking at philosophy. He used no notes: he translated from German to French as he went and avoided putting anything in writing. 4 Furthermore, the oral nature of the seminar allowed him to move among philosophies that were often incongruent or contradictory. Kojeve was aware of the confrontational nature of his style and even attempted to employ what he termed a "propagandistic pedagogy" that relied on hyperbole and exaggerationY Kojeve would force the issue and push the participants further than even Kojeve intended to go. Some of the most fecund works to come from the participants in the seminar were attempts to make sense of the troubling contradictions and extrapolations Kojeve put forward with this strategy. But Kojeve captivated students with his ability to make connections. Using complex diagrams and graphs, he presented a reading of Hegel that drew from Einstein's physics, Bergson's intuitionism, Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger's ontology, and Marx's politics. For the young French intellectuals, everything Kojeve gave them seemed new. Lacking previous exposure to Hegel, and (in the case of many participants) any knowledge of German, the students were seduced by the interpretations that Kojeve presented so articulately and confidently. 42

°

38. Interview with Gilles Lapouges, 2. 39. Tom Rockmore characterizes Kojeve as a "French" master thinker in Heidl'(W'T and Fwndt Phill>Soplty: Ilumanism, Antiltumanism, and Being (New York; Routledge, 1995), 31-39. 40. Kojeve disliked putting anything in writing except in essential situations such as writing book reviews or articles for income or writing to earn a degree. 41. Nina Ivanoff explained this strategy to me while I was looking through Kojeve's papers at her home in Vanves. 42. The first complete translation into French of Hegel's Plummneuology ofSpiritwas done by

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The key to Kojeve's popularity and the lasting influence of his seminar lay in the new answers he provided within a familiar framework. Two factors were central to Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel. First, his teleological framework culminated with a radical, but at the time, optimistic "end of history." This progress was mired in pitfalls and struggle and thus presented the participants in the seminar with answers to the perplexing questions of war and conflict. Second, the entire project revolved around a fundamentally humanistic, anthropocentric existentialism that places the individual at the core of all understanding. Kojeve's anthropocentric reading used Heidegger's philosophy to read Hegel in the light of subjectivist tendencies(see above, introduction). This led to a fundamentally anthropocentric understanding of Heidegger's work in the years to come. The relation of these two factors to the existing tradition of French philosophy made Kojeve's lectures new and radical but not unfamiliar. As Vincent Descombes points out in his analysis of Kojeve's lectures and their influence on French phenomenology, the turn toward an existential subject in the throes of a conflict of consciousness already existed in embryonic form in the Cartesian cogito. For what was known as "the philosophy of consciousness," that is, for the Cartesian tradition, the "I think, I am," was at once the origin and the rule of all truth. It is the first truth, the truth which inaugurates all others; it is the exemplary truth. The ego, as it is given in ego cogito, ego sum, is the absolut-e to which all else is relative; its truth, independent of any other, is the condition of all others. The word "absolute," destined for a brilliant career in modem philosophy, is the one used by Descartes in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii. 43 But as Descombes points out, there can never be more than one absolute at a time. The primacy of the subject becomes a point of contention when ego 1 (myself) confronts ego 2 (the Other) leading to a struggle for recognition and dominance. There can be only ONE absolute subject and therefore the other must be reduced to the position of object. This modified but fundamentally Cartesian premise is the motor that propels

Jean Hyppolite between 1939 and 1941. The first full-length study of Hegel in French was Henri Niel's De La miditation dans La phiwsopltie de /lege{ (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1945). On the reception of Hegel in France, see Vincent Descombes, ModRrn FTl'ndt Philosophy, trans. L. Scott Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; Roth, Ktwwing and IIL~tary; Judith Butler, SubjPrls of /)esirf: Ilegelian RRflections in TwentiRthrml11ry France (New York: Columbia University Press. 1999). For interpretations of Hegel in France, see Irving Fetscher, "Hegel in Frankreich," Antare~ 3 (1953): 3-15; Jacques d'Hondt, IIPr:,ref et hegelianisrnP (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982); Lawrence Pitkethly, "Hegel in Modern France," Ph.D. diss., London School of Economics, 1975. 43. Descombes, Modern French Philo.~ophy, 22.

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the Hegelian dialectic as understood by Kojeve. Seen in this light, the modesty of the revolt against the Cartesian tradition and the tradition of French philosophy is clear, since Kojeve's work retains the cogito as the fundamental basis of all philosophy. The confrontation with the other presents a series of contradictions regarding the place and primacy of self because, as much as the other is a phenomenon and object for me, I am a phenomenon and object for the other. The struggle is ultimately answered through a battle for domination. Kojeve's use of the masterslave dialectic and the struggle for recognition fit into this Cartesian mold with litde trouble and found great resonance among the generation of 1933, who saw it as an answer (from outside French philosophy) that conformed to their current philosophical vocabulary. Another reason for the resonance of Kojeve's work was the decline of Bergsonian spiritualism after World War I. While Bergson's popularity continued to soar among the general public, his work was taken less and less seriously by the generation of 1933 and this created a vacuum. Neo-Kantianism had managed to reinvent itself and continued to dominate materialist philosophical work in France, but those followers of Bergson who were looking for more metaphysical answers were left unsatisfied. Existentialism claimed this position at the end ofWorld War II, but in the 1930s many young thinkers who had followed the works of Bergson turned to the phenomenology presented in the lectures by Georges Gurvitch at the Sorbonne from 1928 to 1930, and then to Koyre and Recherches philosophiques, for an alternative to the neo-Kantian domain of French philosophy. This in turn led them to Kojeve's reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which presented Hegel as the first phenomenologist. Kojeve had also developed a sophisticated, if slightly impressionistic, understanding of Heidegger based on his relationship with Levinas and Koyre. His knowledge of Heidegger can also be attributed to his friendship with Henry Corbin. Kojeve and Corbin were both participants in Koyre's seminar and later both worked at the Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes. They shared a common interest in Orientalism, Eastern languages, and German philosophy. 44 Corbin had translated Heidegger's "Was ist Metaphysik?" for the journal Bifur in 1931 and was in the process of translating a collection of Heidegger's es~ays for publication. 45 In April 1934 and July 1936 Corbin visited Heidegger to show the German 44. Corbin, "Post-Scriptum biographique a un entretien philosophique," 40. 45. In his "Post-Scriptum biographique a un entretien philosophique" (44), Corbin credits Bernhard Groethuysen for securing the publication of this book. "It was thanks to his [ Gweth uysen 's] tenacity that my translation of Heideggcr, at the time a completely unknown philosopher, appeared despite the mediocre interest of the publishers."

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philosopher his translations and obtain suggestions and comments on his work. Thus it would not be an exaggeration to say that the first translations of Heidegger's philosophy into French took place in the room adjacent to Kojeve's Hegel seminar at the EPHE. Corbin's translations had a profound influence on the first reading of Heidegger in France and his vocabulary dictated the terms of discussion used by students of Heidegger such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre but also Jean Beaufret in his early work. To this end, a brief summary of Corbin's translations and their ramifications is in order. The most important issue is his translation of Heidegger's term Dasein as realite-humaine. Corbin's choice was in fact approved by Heidegger without hesitation in their meeting of 1936, and in his preface to the collection of essays published in 1938, Corbin does define the specific nature of this choice: 46 The existant that is designated by the term Dasein is not simply an existant to be analyzed as Being in relation to all other existants. Its Being is the being of man which is the realite-humaine in man. In French we have recourse to this composite term which refers to the composition of the term Da-sein. It is essential that we do not lose sight of the fact that this composite term does not designate a realite which is first posed and then receives the predicate "human." Instead, it designates an initial homogeneity specifically distinct from "reality" in itself and from all realities that are constituted differently. 47 Corbin does try to convey the specific nature of Heidegger's term by distancing it from the traditional philosophical understanding of "essence" and "existence," but his decision to use the term rialite-humaine betrayed his better intentions. The term rialite-humaine does not convey the spatial character of Dasein, which displaces the suf:tlect as the localizable site of being. The French scholars who read Corbin's translation were trained in the Cartesian tradition and therefore assumed that the presence of being was located in the specific human subject. Thus they assumed that Heidegger's concern was the investigation of being as presented in the specific human actor. This reading, based in the French philosophical tradition, was reinforced by Corbin's decision to translate Heidegger's Vorhandenheit as realiti-des-choses and Zuhandenheit as realite-ustensiles. In English we can use the terms "present-at-hand" and "ready-to-hand" to convey Heidegger's presentation of these two modes of being-in-the-world. The problem with Corbin's translation of Zuhandenheit as realiti-ustensile, the reality of utensils, is that it does not convey the active nature of Zuhandenheit. One 46. Ibid., 43. 47. Henry Corbin, "Avant-propos de H. Corbin," repr. in Heidegger, Q1ustions I f't l/ (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 14.

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could assume that the use of utensils is a theoretical act consistent with Husserl's concept of intentionality. Furthermore, Corbin's translation of Vorhandenheit as realite-des-choses does not convey the contemplative and theoretical aspects of Vorhandenheit and instead implies that Heidegger is investigating the reality of things. These translations led· readers to think that Heidegger's concept of being-in-the-world was a variation of Husserl's concept of intentionality, with Zuhandenheit representing the model of consciousness and Vorhandenheit the presence of objects. Therefore, it was sometimes assumed that Heidegger was emphasizing "human-reality" as the locus of consciousness, which is the basis for intentionality. This reading was further reinforced by Corbin's translation of GeworJenheit (thrownness) as sa dereliction. This notion of abandonment, or of having been abandoned, corroborated Wahl's analysis of Heidegger as an existentialist in the tradition of Kierkegaard but also led the readers of Corbin's translations to assume that Heidegger was emphasizing the specific and individual abandoned subject. These translations fit Kojeve's anthropological reading of Heidegger, which he then used in his reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Reading the Seminar To understand Kojeve's impact on the reception of Heidegger in France, we must understand the contents of the seminar he gave on Hegel from 1933 to 1939. It is difficult to understand the complex relationship between his original work, his interpretation of Hegel, and his understanding of Heidegger. This is made more complicated by the fact that Kojeve uses Hegel to read Heidegger as much as he uses Heidegger to read Hegel. Each interpretation is informed by the other and deviates from the philosophical projects of both German philosophers. Mter Karl Marx is added to the mix, we arrive at what Aime Patri described as "an intellectual and moral menage a trois." 48 Marx hovers in the background of Kojeve's lectures; his reading of Hegel is entirely compatible with his understanding of Marx. 49 For my own purposes, I will assume Kojeve's 48. Aime Patri, "Dialectique du maitre et de l'esclave," Lf contml socia~ 5, no. 4 QulyAugust 1961): 234. 49. For a succinct and substantive discussion of the relation between Hegel and Marx in the work of Kojeve, see chap. 2 (especially 64-65) of Butler's Subjfrts of Desire; and Roth, Knowing and History. On French Marxism, see Arthur Hirsch, The French Nno V~ft: An lntellertu,al/Iistury from Sartre to Con (Boston: South End Press, 1981 ); Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism (Baltimore: johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Mark Poster, Existmtial Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). See also Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Ad11entuw.s of a Concept from Lului.cs to 1/abrnna.r (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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,LIII.U

informed reading of Marx but will not refer to it except when made explicit by Kojeve. Instead, I will begin with an explication of Kojeve's reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit to give the reader the basic tenets of Kojeve's project as well as his particular understanding and use of Hegel. I will then try to disentangle exactly how Kojeve used his reading of Heidegger to create an existential reading of Hegel that addressed the issues most pertinent and compelling to the generation of 1933. But here we must remain constantly aware that Kojeve's reading of Hegel is not Hegel. It is contingent on the rhetorical structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit, as judith Butler has demonstrated. Hegelian sentences are read with difficulty, for their meaning is not immediately given or known, they call to be reread, read with different intonations and grammatical emphases. Because Hegel's rhetoric defies our expectations of a linear and definite philosophical presentation, it initially obstructs us, but once we have reflected upon the assumptions that Hegel wants to release us from, the rhetoric initiates us into a consciousness of irreducibly multiple meanings which continuously determine each other. 5° These conditions dictate that a work such as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit will necessarily produce multiple readings and understandings. The same could certainly be said about the work of Heidegger. In the case of Kojeve, we encounter a reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit (and one could say aU of Hegel) that is based entirely on chapter 4 and specifically on the related concepts of"Self-Consciousness" and "Desire." According to Kojeve, the key to understanding Hegel lies in the concepts of "Self-Consciousness" and "Desire."51 Kojeve claims that one becomes conscious of one's self the first time one calls oneself "1." "To understand man by understanding his 'origin' is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed by speech" (IRH, 3). But Kojeve problematizes this origin by asking how the word "I" came to be. In so doing he demonstrates that qualities such as "thought," "reason," "understanding," and all cognitive, contemplative, passive behaviors of being are secondary qualities in the creation of self-consciousness because they never force the subject, the one who is contemplating, to contemplate its self. 50. Butler, Suhjf'Ct!; ofDesire, 18. 51. An overview of the lecture series was written by Kojeve and published in the January 14, 1939, issue of Me.ntTPs. This is probably the most widely read version of Kojeve's interpretation of the Phiiuomnwlogie d~s (lf'irl~s and does indeed cover the essential points of Kojeve's pmject. I will try to follow the structure of this article but will also turn to the lectures themselves as recorded by Raymond Queneau and published by Gallimard in 1947. Citations will be taken from the translation byJames H. NicholsJr., which ls included in the English version of the Introdurti.on to the Reading of Jlegel, edited by Allan Bloom.

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It is only when one is '·brought back to oneself' that a being begins to feel itself as an "I." This bringing back comes about, not through reason or knowing, but through desire (Beg;ierde). "The man who is 'absorbed' by the object he is contemplating can be 'brought back to himself only by a Desire; by the desire to eat, for example. The (conscious) Desire of a being is what constitutes that being as I and reveals it as such by moving it to say 'I. '" (IRH, 4-5). It is through simple biological desires-"! am hungry," "I am thirsty," "I am tired," what Kojeve calls animal desires-that the human self is formed and revealed to itself and others. But we have already noted that the human self finds itself by being yanked back from the thoughtful contemplation that is also essential to the formation of self-consciousness. Thus we see that desire at the animal level is sufficient only to make one conscious of oneself but not to give one self-consciousness. The very being of man, the self-conscious being, therefore implies and presupposes Desire. Consequently, the human reality can be formed only within a biological reality, an animal life. But if animal Desire is the necessary condition of Self-Consciousness, it is not the sufficient condition. By itself, this Desire constitutes only the Sentiment of self. (IRH, 4) Furthermore, "reason," "knowing," and "contemplation" are equally unable to bring about self-consciousness or even self-realization. Here we see the formation of a "dualism" in Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel that essentially identifies the human as an animal with animal desires, but also as a critical, reasonable being who can transcend the animal realm. This movement above and through the animal becomes the essential motor in the teleological movement of human existence and subsequently of history. Kojeve sees animal desire as pure negation: one sees something and one eats it. The action is immediate, the satisfaction fleeting. "The I created by the active satisfaction of such a Desire will have the same nature as the things toward which that Desire is directed: it will be a 'thingish' I, a merely living I, an animal I" (IRH, 4). For the human to move beyond the realm of animals and to attain self-consciousness, the human must transcend the given natural reality. For there to be self-consciousness, desire must be directed toward a nonnatural object. But the only thing that goes beyond the given natural reality, the only nonnatural object, is desire itself. By this logic one can deduce that to move beyond the animal realm is to desire the desire of another. Implicit in t~is movement is a notion of plurality of being and of society, because this teleological movement toward self-consciousness can occur only if there is more than one desire to be obtained.

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Desire in and of itself is an emptiness in that it is the presence of a lacking. It is a void of sorts, and thus the desire of another does not lead to the immediate, if fleeting, gratification that animal desire leads to, nor to the recurring, unchanging stasis that is the animal realm. Instead, the I that feeds on desire, that is recognized as action, will be perpetual action: it is not what it is (static and given being, natural being, "innate character'') and is what it is not (it is always in the process of becoming something else) (IRH, 5). What is essential to this formulation is that the human I, according to Kojeve, is intentional becoming, deliberate evolution, conscious and voluntary progress. The human I does not realize itself in space but in and over time. This movement of becoming over time presents the human I as "an individual, free (with respect to the given real) and historical (in relation to itself)." This movement is essential to Kojeve's overall formulation in that it conserves two key themes in French philosophy: teleology and the notion of free will. It is human desire that produces this free and historical individual and we have already determined that human desire is the desire of another desire. To be human is to wish to be recognized as a human individual and not as an object or animal. Our own certainty of self is precisely what is at stake in our desire for recognition in that we know ourselves only subjectively and thus what we desire is that our sense of self be recognized by an other so as to give us objective certainty of our human self. In achieving full recognition one reconciles the objective and the subjective and in full mutual recognition one reconciles the particular, the individual human self, with the universal, the selves of other humans. If such a mutual recognition is achieved we arrive at self-consciousness. Simply put, the fruition of human desire is to have the value that I represent be the value desired by an other. But for my value to be recognized by the other, the other must see me as a human. Here is where Kojeve introduces what he claims is the fundamental difference between the animal and the human realms: For man to be truly human, for him to be essentially and really different from an animal, his human desire must actually win out over his animal desire. Now, all desire is desire for a value. The supreme value for an animal is its animal life. All the desires of an animal are in the final analysis a function of its desire to preserve its life. Human desire, therefore, must win out over this desire for preservation. In other words, man's humanity "comes to light" only if he risks his (aniAnd that is why to mal) life for the sake of his human Desire. speak of the "origin" of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of the risk of life (for an essentially nonvital end). (IRH, 6-7)

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The ramifications of this conclusion are staggering. To achieve the recognition of the other, an individual must prove to the other that he has overcome his animal self and is no longer afraid of death. For the other to prove to me that he has overcome his animal self and is indeed human and thus someone whose recognition I value, he must prove to me that he has overcome his fear of death. The on~y possible means of proving this assertion is to risk one's life for the sake of one's desire. "Therefore, to speak of the 'origin' of Self-Consciousness is necessarily to speak of a fight to the death for recognition" (IRH, 7). This is what Hegel calls the Kampf auf Leben und Tod. Thus, in Kojeve's interpretation, the initial encounter between human beings is necessarily violent and potentially lethal. Indeed, without this "fight to the death for pure prestige" there would never have been humans on this earth. Ironically, if one takes Kojeve's argument to the extreme, one could claim that if everyone is indeed human and able to overcome animal desire for selfpreservation, then all men would die in battle and there would be no humans on this earth. Here, Kojeve follows Hegel more closely and argues that, in fact, the battle for recognition serves not only to distinguish the animal from the human but more specifically to distinguish two classes of humans: those who have overcome their animal desires (masters) and those who have not (slaves). The fight to the death for recognition is a paradox. If both combatants turn out to have overcome their animal desires, then one must die. If one does die then he is returned to the form of a mere thing and as such his recognition is of no value to the victor, who must journey off to search for recognition elsewhere. If, as is and must be the case, one decides that he would rather live than die and gives in to his animal desire, then the two have distinguished themselves as unequals. The victor enslaves the loser who now recognizes the victor as master. But the master is not satisfied with recognition of a slave who has not proven himself to be human. The master continues to search for the recognition of another human who desires his desire. It is in this relationship of master and slave as conditioned by desire that Kojeve finds the basis for the historical dialectic that creates history and leads to the evolution of human being over time in the quest for selfconsciousness: If the human being is begotten only in and by the fight that ends in

the relation between Master and Slave, the progressive realization and revelation of this being can themselves be effected only in terms of this fundamental social relation. If man is nothing but his becoming, if his human existence in space is his existence in time or as time, if the revealed human reality is nothing but universal history, that history

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must be the history of the interaction between Mastery and Slavery: the historical "dialectic" is the "dialectic" of Master and Slave. (IRH, 9) We have already seen that the master is not satisfied with the recognition of the slave and thus does not attain self-consciousness by his apparently superior position of master. Instead, the master remains master in that he now has the slave to prepare his food, build his houses, and take care of all his natural desires. The master has overcome his fear of death but does not evolve because he is in a state of perpetual satiation in relation to the natural world and of insatiateness in relation to the human world. There is nothing for the master to do but seek out, confront, and enslave or kill all others he encounters. The slave is in a very different position. He must work ( arbeiten) to satisfy the master. This notion of work is essential because in it the slave represses his animal desire to consume and instead transforms the object in question by work for consumption by the master. The slave thus begins to overcome his natural desire but knows that he cannot attain his human self until he overcomes his fear of death and revolts against the master. In this realization, the slave has set himself a goal to be achieved in the future. The master, however, has no goal and perpetuates his existence as it is. The slave cannot master the master, so instead the slave seeks to master nature by work. In so doing the slave creates a human world that is under the slave's control. The slave thus acts historically in trying to achieve a goal, but until the goal is attained the slave acts always under the control of the master. "If idle Mastery is an impasse, laborious Slavery, in contrast, is the source of all human, social, historical progress. History is the working of the Slave" (IRH, 20). Contrary to appearances, the relationship between master and slave is ultimately beneficial to the slave. The slave overcomes the natural world and in so doing transforms himself: In becoming master of Nature by work, then the Slave frees himself from his own nature, from his own instinct that tied him to Nature and made him the Master's Slave. Therefore, by freeing the Slave from Nature, work frees him from himself as well, from his Slave's nature: it frees him from the Master. In the raw, natural, given World, the Slave is slave of the Master. In the technical world transformed by his work, he mles--or at least, one day will mle-as absolute Master. (IRH, 23) The future and history belong not to the master, but to the working slave. The slave represents the evolution of human being and it is the slave who will attain self-consciousness by first transforming the world 76

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through work and then overcoming the fear of death and overthrowing the master. Here, Kojeve's emphasis on chapter 4 is most explicit as he seeks to expand his commentary beyond the limiting scope of the conflict between individuals. Kojeve explains the historical progression of the slave in relation to the master by looking at three periods in time: the Pagan State, the Christian State, and the Bourgeois State, all as extensions of the master-slave dialectic. It is through these three periods that Kojeve traces the evolution of the human being, which culminates with "Self-Consciousness" (the realization of its goal) and the end of "History'' (the pursuit of its goal). Kojeve makes the move from the individual to society with the simple assertion that ancient society was created under the structure of the master-slave confrontation, with the masters ruling society in a hierarchy of mastery. This culminates in the Roman state, where a complex system of patronage defines the social hierarchy. But it is also under the Roman state that this system begins to break down. The territory of the Roman Empire is too vast and the masters can no longer fight for themselves. Instead they hire mercenaries to fight for them and become landowners and citizens under the emperor's rule. In so doing they give up their positions as masters, and, when all is said and done, they are transformed into slaves of the sovereign because "to be a Master is to fight, to risk one's life. Hence, the citizens who no longer wage war cease to be Masters, and that is why they become Slaves of the Roman Emperor" (IRH, 63). In becoming slaves, the former masters now turn to what Kojeve calls the three slave ideologies. The first is Stoicism, where the slave tries to convince himself that he is actually free simply by knowing that he is free, by having the abstract idea of freedom. Human beings abandon this ideology because it renders all action meaningless and leaves humankind bored. This boredom is not sufficient to convince the slave to act against the master, but it does drive the slave to action. This action is manifested in the second slave ideology, skeptic-nihilism. But this new attitude culminates in solipsism, and the only actions left for the truly skeptical and nihilistic slave is to confront the master, which the slave cannot yet do, or commit suicide, which the slave also cannot do. The slave is again left to reconcile the contradiction between the ifhal of freedom and the reality of slavery. This contradiction leads the slave to the third and final slave ideology, the Christian ideology. Here the slave gives up trying to reconcile the contradiction between freedom and slavery but justifies it by saying that all existence implies this contradiction. "To this end he imagines an 'other world,' which is 'beyond' the natural World of the senses." Here on earth one is a slave and docs nothing to free oneself, but one is right in doing this because in this world everything is slavery and the master is as much

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a slave before God as the slave is. In the Christian ideology, the place of the master is transferred to God, and the fear of death is once again avoided by the promise of the afterlife (IRH, 55). With the emergence of Christianity, the pagan world becomes a world of pseudomasters and pseudoslaves, or rather it is simply a world of slaves without masters. The master is no longer a concrete manifestation but instead God above. In the Christian State it is theology that has becomes man's master and it will only be by "overcoming Christian theology" that man will definitively cease to be a slave and realize his ideal of freedom. Here what is essential is that in the transition from the pagan to the Christian world, the role of master as a concrete entity has been abolished, and each slave is in fact a citizen of sorts in the Christian world. Thus the battle is no longer to overcome the master but to overcome theism with atheism. Kojeve claims that this was precisely the role of the French Revolution, which inaugurated the third historical world in which freedom was finally conceptualized by philosophy, attained by Napoleon, and understood by Hegel. Kojeve claims that absolute knowledge, that is, the attainment of self-consciousness, becomes possible at precisely the time Hegel was writing the Phenomenology and through the historical figure of Napoleon spreading the universal truth embodied in the French Revolution. In the bourgeois world, the citizen sees that "he is the passive subject of a despotic Emperor. Just like the slave, therefore he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by imagining a transcendent World, in which all men are equal before an omnipotent, truly universal Master, who recognizes moreover, the absolute value of each Particular as such." In the Christian world, that master is Jesus Christ, but after the Enlightenment and the fulfillment of reason, the self-conscious human being realizes that with absolute knowledge comes absolute reason, which allows one to recognize universal principles by which all human beings can be uniformly judged and thus objectively recognized as human-beings. The final step in attaining self-consciousness is to overcome God and, in so doing, to overcome the fear of death and to accept the finitude that is human being, a being with an end. "[It is] Hegel, the author of the Phenomenology, who is somehow Napoleon's Self-Consciousness. And since the perfect Man, the Man fully 'satisfied' by what he is, can only be a Man who knows what he is, who is fully self-conscious, it is Napoleon's existence as revealed to all men in and by the Phenomenology that is the realized ideal of human existence" (IRH, 69-70). In the person of Hegel writing about Napoleon, human being overcomes the fear of death, embraces atheism, and attains self-consciousness in a marriage of the universal and the particular made possible by absolute knowledge, reason, and science ( Wissenscha.ft), thus attaining

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the goal set by the slave at the beginning of history and bringing history to a close. Kojeve reads Hegel's understanding of human history as bloody struggle, violent confrontation, and ultimate revolution; but that history also secures a place for free will, reason, and the eventual progress of humankind. These are the qualities that spoke to the generation of 1933. It is important to note that the pessimistic connotations that Kojeve later gave to the .. end of history" do not surface until after World War 11. 52 From 1933 to 1939, the end of history was the closure of one set of possibilities and the opening of another. His interpretation of Hegel gave the participants in his seminar a new and radical way of interpreting history-a way that few would argue had much in common with Hegel's original intentions for his Phenomenolog;y ofSpirit. Thus, while Kojeve's reading of Hegel may tell us little about Hegel's own philosophical project, it can tell us much about the interests of the generation of 1933 and the reception of Heidegger in France. Kojeve began his seminar in 1933-1934 by following Alexandre Koyre's analysis of Hegel but also by making it clear that he was deviating from the path of traditional metaphysics in his attempt to "get Hegel right." In the Resume du cours 1933-1934 Kojeve sets out to describe Hegel's Phenomenolog;y of Spirit as a "philosophic anthropology," the same words he uses to describe Heidegger's Being and Time. He then goes on to describe the work as "a systematic and complete description, phenomenological in the modern (Husserlian) sense of the word, of the existential comportment of man, which is seen through the ontological analysis of Being which is its basis and is in fact the theme of the Logik" (ILH, 57). This sort of phenomenological ontology is usually associated with Heidegger and not with Hegel, but it was one of Kojeve's primary goals in the first two years of the seminar to show that both Hegel's work and the concept of the dialectic were primarily ontological and could best be understood through the work of Heidegger. In doing this Kojeve shifts the emphasis of each thinker and alters the framework of the Phenomenology of Spirit to create an existential Hegel and a historical Heidegger. In 1936, Kojeve published a review of a work by Alfred Delp in Recherches philosophiques. 53 In preparation for this review he completed a long

52. When asked by Gilles Lapouge about his understanding of the end of history in 1939, Kojeve replied: "At that time I had read Hegel, but I did not yet really understand that History was finished. Now." At the time of the seminars the end of history was still fraught with positive possibilities. This would not be the case after World War II. 53. Alfred Delp, Tragische Existenz: Zur Philosophie Martin Heideggm- (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1935). The review by Kojeve can be found in &chnrhes philosopltiquP.s, vol. 5 (19351936): 415-19.

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note on Hegel's relation to Heidegger; it remained unpublished until June 1993, when it was finally presented in the journal of the College International de Philosophie, Rue Descartes. If we read this note from 1936 in relation to Kojeve's interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we can grasp the tangled relationship between the three thinkers. Kojeve takes three key terms from Heidegger and Hegel and imposes a correlation that links each pair. Heidegger's Befindlichkeit is correlated to Hegel's Begierde; Heidegger's Verstehen is linked to Hegel's Arbeit; and Heidegger's Angst is linked to Hegel's Kampf auf Leben und Tod. 54 In making these correlations Kojeve constructs a philosophical structure based on the ontological problem of being but manifested in ontic reactions to ~he ontological dilemma. In Being and Time Heidegger uses the term Befindlichkeit to describe the state that Dasein finds itself "situated" in as a being-in-the-world. Dasein is thrown into a world already in existence and is situated in this world as a being for whom being is an issue. "To be affected by the unserviceable, resistant, or threatening character of that which is ready-to-hand, becomes ontologically possible only in so far as Being-in as such has been determined existentially beforehand in such a manner that what it encounters within-the-world can 'matter to it in this way" (BT, 176). In other words, as beings we find ourselves situated in a cultural context where the objects and possibilities we encounter are predetermined. According to Kojeve, this ontological issue is manifested by the ontic desire (Begierde) for recognition, which we have previously defined as human desire. We desire to be desired to satisfy the ontological condition of finding ourselves in a world as beings whose being matters. To validate our own being we tun1 to the other to recognize and desire our worth. According to Kojeve, the situation we find ourselves in (Bejindlichkeit) as beings in the world is desire (Begierde). Furthermore, it is desire that separates us from the animal realm. To make this point, Kojeve uses Heidegger to redefine the term Begierde. For Hegel Begierde in general is self-consciousness in the sense that "as desire, consciousness is outside of itself; and as outside itself, consciousness is self-consciousness." But the exact nature of this "outside" is difficult to determine and becomes a "crucial ambiguity in the section 'Lordship and Bondage.' "55 Kojeve seizes on this ambiguity and inserts a duality established by Heidegger in Being and Time between humans who are "being in the world," for whom being is an issue, and nature/animals who "belong to the world." Thus the human relation to the "world" is differentiated from the natural 54. Alexandre Kojeve, "Note inedite sur Hegel 1993): 38-39. 55. Butler, Subjl'rts of Desirl', 7.

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world in the very being of each. Kojeve takes this duality one step further, expanding on a theme he developed in his thesis on Solovyov. For Kojeve, humans exist in the animal realm but "find" themselves above nature, a realm they will eventually control. What is at stake here is the notion of free will, individuality, and freedom that humans achieve through their mastery of nature, which is brought about by the confrontation between humans, the direct result of human desire (Begierde), which is the situation human being finds itself in (Befindlichkeit). Mter the struggle for recognition, the slave must sublimate his desires to serve the desires of the master; this conservation of material is brought about by work (Arbeit), which leads to the slave's mastery of nature. Kojeve provides the ontological basis for the on tic experience of work (Arbeit) through Heidegger's term Verstehen. Translated as "understanding" but perhaps best grasped as "coping," this term is used by Heidegger to explain how Dasein understands and deals with the world into which it has been thrown. "In understanding [ Verstehen], as an existentiale, that which we have such competence over is not a 'what,' but Being as existing. The kind of being which Dasein has, as potentiality-for-Being, lies existentially in understanding. Dasein is not something present-at-hand which possesses its competence for something by way of an extra; it is primarily Being-possible" (BT, 183). In his lectures at Berkeley, Hubert Dreyfus used to make this point by explaining that understanding a hammer does not mean understanding the properties of the hammer or the procedure of hammering. Instead, to understand the hammer in the sense of Verstehen is simply to hammer. This is because at the most primordial level we are such skills. We exist as beings who cope with the world into which we are thrown and deal with possibilities as they are presented to us. Reading a manual on hammering, an activity that is present-at-hand, thus in no way equips us for the possibility of hammering in the sense of Verstehen, ready-to-hand. Kojeve sees the ontic manifestation of this coping mechanism in work (Arbeit) wherever humans turn raw material into utensils for our use and, in so doing, master the world into which we are thrown. In Kojeve's model it is the slave who performs this task because the master cannot. Furthermore, Kojeve's ontological basis only serves as a key to understanding the slave's ability to cope with and overcome nature, which in time transforms the slave and leads to the overturning of the master. While Verstehen is the on to logical basis for Arbeit, it is through Arbeit that humans can evolve and come to self-consciousness over time. But despite the slave's mastery over nature, the slave cannot overturn the master until the slave overcomes the fear of death that forced him into slavery in the beginning.

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Here, Kojeve turns to Heidegger's understanding of Angst, which is fear in the face of death, to give an ontological foundation to Hegel's Kampf auf Leben und Tod, the struggle of life and death. In Hegel, this is the moment that distinguishes master consciousness from slave consciousness but, as we have seen, in Kojeve it is more. The slave will never attain self-consciousness until he can overthrow the master or, more specifically, overcome his Angst (anxiety), which Kojeve claims is the fear of death in the Heideggerian sense. For Heidegger, Angst in the face of death is in far.t the anxiety that one faces when confronted with one's own finitude, but for Heidegger "anxiety in the face of death must not be confused with fear in the face of one's demise" (BT, 293). Kojeve's understanding of Heidegger supposes that the anxiety produced in Heidegger's concept of being-towards-death is equivalent to the fear for one's life in the struggle of life and death. Instead, for Heidegger, death is the limit of representation and understanding because it is "the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein," which is in fact the structure of Dasein: Death is a possibility-of-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With Death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein's Being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of no longer being-able-to-be-there (Nicht-mehr-Dasein-konnens). If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has no resort other than to its ownmost ability to be. (BT, 294,translation modified) Death is the moment that Dasein completes itself as a totality, but is also Dasein's demise. As long as Dasein is, death is not yet, but as such death is always outstanding as Dasein's ultimate possibility, and in this sense it is Dasein's ownmost potentiality-for-being. Kojeve interprets this ownmost potentiality-for-being in relation to the possibility of overcoming the fear of death and attaining absolute knowledge. For Heidegger, an authentic understanding of being-towards-death is not to overcome death but rather to accept it as the possibility of our own finitude, the possibility of no longer being possible. Thus for Heidegger, "death, as possibility, gives Dasein nothing to be 'actualized,' nothing which Dasein as actual, could itself be' (BT, 307). This means that death does not present us with anything that can be "used" in our everyday existence, as Kojeve supposed, but is always beyond us as our ultimate possibility. Kojeve's interpretation of Heidegger relies on Kojeve's supposition that an authentic understanding of death follows the model of overcoming the fear of death, as in his reading of Hegel's system, and thus Kojeve presents the authentic understanding of death in terms of Heidegger's concept of resolute action (Entschlossenheit). For Kojeve, resolute action overcomes the fear of death and thus attains an authentic existence,

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which is analogous to Hegel's system, where overcoming tl1e fear of death entails overcoming theism with atheism, which leads to absolute knowledge. 56 In Heidegger, the confrontation with death can lead to an authentic understanding of Dasein, of one's relationship with being. In Kojeve, the final overcoming of the fear of death as manifested in the transition from theism to atheism and the rule of reason leads to the reconciliation of the universal with the particular and the end of history. Again in Kojeve's reading, there is an important place for free will, self-determination, and a progress that is often reversed by brutal confrontations yet returns and triumphs in the end. It is important to note that Kojeve firmly believed that Hegel had gotten philosophy right and that Heidegger was incomplete in his work because he did not take the themes of battle and work seriously and thus did not take history adequately into account. Kojeve does note, however, that Hegel had be~n perpetually misread until Heidegger; in a footnote on the relation of theism to atheism in Hegel, Kojeve writes: In our times Heidegger is the first to undertake a complete atheistic philosophy. But he does not seem to have pushed it beyond the phenomenological anthropology developed in the first volume of Being and Time (the only volume that has appeared). This anthropology (which is without a doubt remarkable and authentically philosophical) adds, fundamentally, nothing new to the anthropology of the Phiinomenologie des Geistes (which, by the way, would probably never have been understood ifHeidegger had not published his book): but atheism or ontological finitism are implicitly asserted in his book in a perfectly consequent fashion. (IRH, 259n. 41) 57 Participants in Kojeve's seminar came to understand Heidegger as a philosophical anthropologist whose concerns mirrored those of Husserl. Heidegger's philosophy was seen as an attempt to liberate human being, free will, and action from the shackles of theism, scientism, and all other systems that did not take the individual (read: existential) nature of being into question. ""hat is essential is the influence that Kojeve's anthropocentric use of Heidegger's philosophy in the reading of Hegel had on the generation of 1933. This first reading of Heidegger in France would not be called into question until Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" to jean Beaufret in 1947. 56. This is also contrary to Heidegger's understanding of resoluteness, as he states it in &ing and TimP: "One would completely misunderstand the phenomenon of resoluteness if one should want to suppose that this consists simply in taking up possibilities which have been proposed and recommended, and seizing hold of them" (345). 57. In this note Kojeve also discusses the deficiencies of Marx in relation to Hegel, given that Marx does not adequately consider the issue of death.

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CHAPTER

3 The Dissemination of Kojeve's Heideggerian Interpretation of Hegel

Alexandre Kojeve introduced the work of Hegel to the generation of 1933 in a specifically Heideggerian framework. While some participants had read Levinas's articles, it was through Kojeve that these young French scholars engaged Heidegger's philosophy for the first time; thus their understanding of Heidegger relied heavily on Kojeve's interpretations. In this chapter we will explore the philosophical agendas and development of three participants in Kojeve's seminar: Raymond Aron, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Kojeve's seminar influenced these young French intellectuals in different ways and dictated their initial understanding of Heidegger's philosophy. We shall also further examine the intersection between the generation of 1933 and the foreign emigres who came to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The move away from traditional French philosophy and toward German phenomenology was made feasible by these figures, but it would not have been possible without the influence ofjean Wahl.

Jean Wahl Born in 1888, an eleve of the Lycee Louis le Grand and of the Ecole Normale Superieure, Wahl held a philosophy position at the Sorbonne. His work on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Heidegger was anathema to those who adhered to the rigid structure of the French canon but seductive and profound for the young intellectuals who came to study with him. Raymond Aron claimed that Wahl was the only non-necrKantian within the walls of the Sorbonne and that he gave his students the chance to explore philosophy from outside the constraints of the national system. Wahl's Le malheur de conscience (1929) introduced the possibility of an existential Hegel to France by focusing on the young Hegel and 84

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reading him through Kierkegaard's work. 1 In this reading, Wahl overemphasized the place of the individual subject in Hegel's system and thus altered the dialectic. For Wahl, it was "the unhappy consciousness" that served as the fundamental motor for the dialectic in the Hegelian system. This interpretation appealed to the angst and uncertainty of the generation of 1933. Wahl also relied heavily on the works of Kierkegaard in his reading of Heidegger's Being and Time (a work already indebted to Kierkegaard). In "Heidegger et Kierkegaard," written for Recherches philosophiques (1932), Wahl presented Heidegger as the philosophical successor to Kierkegaard: "That which was the existen·tial cry for Kierkegaard becomes the point of departure for the thinker [Heidegger] who investigates existence." 2 Wahl saw Heidegger's philosophy as the secularization of Kierkegaard's religious existentialist philosophy in a structure that reconciled "the two most profound tendencies in contemporary thought: existential subjectivism and realist objectivism." 3 This is exemplified for Wahl in Heidegger's interpretation of the concept of anxiety: Anxiety is for Heidegger the revelation of the greatest universality: for the world it is the most personal individuality: for the "I" it is the most profound possibility, the possibility of death. It is the passage from the inauthentic to the authentic. It is true that Heidegger transfonns Kierkegaard's thought by the fact that he situates the "I" in the world and that anguish is the revelation of Being-in-the-world. It is necessary to add that "in-the-world" can be taken in two different senses and that the passage between these two senses (authentic and inauthentic) is also made with and through the help of the idea of anxiety whose principal traits were borrowed from Kierkegaard. 4 Wahl saw Heidegger as compatible with Kierkegaard in every aspect except Kierkegaard's religiosity. This analysis would be essential to JeanPaul Sartre's understanding of Being and Time. It also helps explain the origin of the first reading of Heidegger in France and its overly humanist emphasis on the human subject and individualism. In Wahl's presentation, the philosophy of Heidegger remained foreign and new yet dovetailed nicely into the Cartesian legacy inherited by the generation of I 933. But while Wahl's publications moved beyond the boundaries imposed by his vocation as a professor at the Sorbonne, Wahl too was 1. On Wahl, see Michael Roth, Krwwing ar1d /Jistory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); on Wahl's role in Kierkegaard's reception in Francf', see Samuel Moyn, "Selfhood and Transcendence: Emmanuel Levinas and the Origins of Intersubjective Moral Theory, 1927-1961," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000. 2.Jean Wahl, "Heidegger et Kierkegaard," &dzndtPs phiiosophiq1U.\ 2 (1932-1933): 350. 3. Ibid., 349. 4. Ibid., 353.

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restricted by the academic structure of which he was a part and had to look to outside institutions to pursue the type of philosophy he deemed relevant and necessary. Jean Wahl's vision was to take French students, normaliens and nonnormaliens alike, and give them access to foreign students and philosophers in order to foster more progressive and profound work on both sides. This can be seen clearly in his relationship with Emmanuel Levinas. In the early 1930sJean Wahl organized salons with Gabriel Marcel and invited students they felt could contribute to the topic of discussion. These salons brought together emigres from Russia and Germany such as Koyre, Kojeve, Levinas, Eric Weil, and Jacob Gordin with products of the French educational system. Koyre's relationship to Wahl is especially important in understanding the dissemination of modern German philosophy to the generation of 1933. Koyre and Wahl traveled in similar circles, but Wahl possessed a certain symbolic capital, as a normalien and professor at the Sorbonne, that Koyre, a Russian intellectual, lacked. Hence the appearance ofJean Wahl's philosophical essay "Vers le concret" as the lead article in the premier issue of Koyre's journal Recherches Philosophiques was important for two reasons. First, it emphasized the shift in the balance of power from the university to journals; with such distinguished French intellectuals as Leon Brunschvicg and Emile Brehier sitting on its editorial board, Recherches philosophiques was able to legitimize itself in the eyes of the French philosophical community. This allowed the journal to serve as an intersection between the familiar grounds of traditional French philosophy and the influx of foreign philosophical methodologies so attractive to a generation of young philosophers and thinkers. Wahl would lead his students at the Sorbonne to Recherches philosophiques and subsequently to Koyre and Kojeve. 5 Second, in "Vers le concret," Wahl argued for a move away from the philosophical models based on idealism and theory and toward investigatizons into things as we encounter them in our everyday life, toward the concrete. This was a call to move away from the theoretical model of neo-Kantianism while at the same time conserving the importance of rigorous philosophical investigation so as to avoid the pitfalls of pure subjectivity. Jean Wahl presented phenomenology, and specifically the philosophy ofHeidegger, as essential component.;; in this movement toward concrete philosophy. "One of the most fecund teachings of phenomenology is that it allows us to grasp things in all their richness, at their face value, in the fashion that they are known. "6 Wahl supported the claim by citing from Being and Time. He also presented Heidegger as compatible with 5. See Regis De bray, !.R pom10ir intA/ectuel e11 France (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1979), chap. 2. 6.Jean Wahl, "Vers le concret," RrrhPrcltPs jJhil.osopllirpus 2 (1931-1932): 4.

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his larger humanist agenda. Furthermore, Wahl established a trend that lasted throughout the 1930s in his use of Heidegger as a tool for reading Hegel in such a way as to rehabilitate the notion of historical progress. In "Heidegger et Kierkegaard," Wahl claims that one can see in what sense we can sketch the relation between I leidegger and Hegel despite their differences. The existential conception of truth can be applied to certain expressions of Hegel. The return of the self can be conceived as a synthesis of the past and the future in the instant that they are absorbed. Hegel exposed a conception of Christianity as a religion of subjectivity, and he established another pan based on the fusion of spirit and things in a completely filled objectivity; one can say that Heidegger, at a higher point, carries the sentiment of subjectivity and the sense of objectivity at the same time. He shows our participation in the world at the same time as our absolute isolation. 7 Wahl establishes the connection between Hegel and Heidegger based on a mutual reconciliation of the subject-object split that is still based on the primacy of a subject. This use of Heidegger, while inspired by the work of Levinas, is decidedly Cartesian in that it places an existential subject, based on an ego cogito that evolves over time, at the center of the phenomenological investigation of ontology. In his interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy, Wahl reified and validated the interpretations of Koyre and Kojeve.

Raymond Aron Raymond Aron has often been falsely credited with introducing Heidegger's work to France. A more accurate, though less grandiose, claim is that he introduced Heidegger's work to Sartre. But while that introduction was a definitive moment in the present narrative, Aron's own intellectual development throughout the 1930s and 1940s is significant for understanding the generation of 1933. Through his memoirs, his interviews, and his works from the 1930s and 1940s, one can trace the development of the young intellectuals of 1933: the relations and tensions between them and their teachers, the influence of German philosophy, the specific concerns that led them to seek an alternative to the French canon, and the ways that that canon continued to shape their intellectual projects.8 Specifically, Aron can help us understand the influence of 7. Wahl, "Heidegger et Kierkegaard," 365n. 1. 8. On Raymond Aron, see Nicolas Baverez, Rnymond Aron: lin mura.li.slf au tnnps dPs idiologtu!s (Paris: Flam marion, 1993); Robert Colquhoun, H.t1ymond Amn: The Phiwsoplwr in 1/iswry, 1905-1955, vol. l (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986). On Aron's early life, seejean-Fran~ois Sirinelli, "Raymond Aron avant Raymond Aron ( 1923--1933) ," Vingliime siede: llelme d 'hi.~toire 2 (1984), and "Quand Aron etait a gauche de Sartre . . ," Le Monde dimanchl', January

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K~jeve on these young intellectuals as well as the impact of Heidegger's philosophy as used by Kojeve in his seminar. Aron was born in Paris in 1905. He studied philosophy at the Lycee Condorcet before entering the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1924. He was a top student and a hard worker, but like many of his contemporaries he was dissatisfied with the state of philosophy in France. To Aron, French philosophy existed solely on a theoretical level and thus could not prepare the generation of 1933 to understand a world that had deviated from the positivist and optimistic trajectory espoused by their teachers. Reflecting on his formation at the ENS, Aron concluded that

the education I received at the Ecole Normale prepared me to become a professor of philosophy at a lycee but nothing else. In 1928, after I passed the agregation in philosophy, and I passed in a brilliant manner with the highest score, I immediately underwent an internal crisis. I was crushed to realize that I had spent all those years and learned next to nothing. I exaggerate a little because the courses on the great philosophers were not sterile, but all the same I knew almost nothing about the world, about social reality, about modern science. So what was it for? To work in philosophy for what? For nothing? Or to write another thesis on Kant? So I fled, in a certain manner. I left France, ce milieu, and I went to find something elseY There were many instructors in France who were influential in Aron's de\-elopment, but for his generation there were no mo,itres a penser, as Bergson and Durkheim had been for the previous generation and Sartre would be for the next. Instead Aron decided to continue his investigations on the other side of the Rhine. Aron was in fact continuing a tradition by going to study abroad. It was common for French students in philosophy to complete their formation in Germany. Durkheim himself had completed courses in Germany two generations before Aron, and Celestin Bougie had also finished his studies there. But the older generation had gone to finish their training in Germany, whereas Aron went to Germany to begin his. There he found the intellectuals he wanted to emulate in the persons ofHusserl and Heidegger and in the work of Max Weber. His interest in phenomenology allowed him to apply philosophy to the concrete world, while his studies in German sociology allowed him to view history from outside the strict optimism of the Durkheimian and neo-Kantian schools.

17. 1982. See also the relevant sections in H. Stuart Hughes, The Obstrurtf'd Path: Frenr.h Social Tlumgltt in the Yean of DPsperalion, 1930-1960 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). 9. Rnyrrwrul A ron, lR spectateur engage, interviews with Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton (Paris:Julliard, 1981), 27.

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In Germany, Aron discovered "everything I could not find in France, principally the philosophy of history and political thought. Germany also led me to phenomenology." 10 Aron saw phenomenology and the philosophy of history as viable alternatives to the overly optimistic rationalism presented in France, which did not seem to jibe with the realities of an increasingly unstable Europe. As a result, he and the generation of 1933 found themselves at odds with those of the previous generation who were their professors. The older generation had been trained during the Belle Epoque of the Third Republic and had never lost faith in the systems they professed. The events of World War I had perhaps tempered their optimism, but France's victory validated their faith. Aron and the generation of 1933 had grown up during World War I; thus their temperament was totally different. Despite their classical training and their teachers' emphasis on the values the Third Republic held dear, they were not beholden to any of the classic understandings of philosophy and especially not to pure optimism (espoused by Bergson) or progressive rationalism (neo-Kantianism). This is not to say that the generation of 1933 had given up on the possibility of progress, but rather that they viewed their teachers' models as overly theoretical and unable to account for the realities of the world in which they lived. Thus Aron and the generation of 1933 turned to phenomenology (which had shown a more rigorous understanding of intuition than the Bergsonian variant in the works of Georges Gurvitch) and to German sociology. It is hardly valid to label either phenomenology or German sociology (in the tradition of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Georg Simmel) spiritualist in the French sense, but for the generation of 1933 "it was legitimate in the early thirties to oppose the 'spiritualist' inspiration of German sociology to the positivist or scientistic inspiration of French sociology." 11 Thus it was through an infusion of German thought that the generation of 1933 was able to reinvigorate the "spiritualist" tradition, but only by moving outside the traditional French canon, to the consternation of their teachers. When Aron returned to France from Germany in 1933, he found that he could continue the pursuit of his newfound philosophical interests at home. His return coincided with what Aron termed the "peaceful invasion" of France by German intellectuals fleeing the Third Reich. 12 D~spite the skeptical reception he received from his teachers at the Sorbonne, Aron found a budding intellectual culture based on a meeting of minds between French and foreign scholars. Kojeve's Hegel seminar 10. Ibid.,38-39. 11. Aron, Mhnoires: CinquanlP ans de rijlexi.on polilique (Paris: Julliard, 1983), 109. What Aron calls "spiritualist" we would now call "culturalist." 12. Ibid., 106.

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was thus a natural fit for Aron, who brought a particularly informed presence to the group. His years in Germany had given him a fundamental, though not formal, background in phenomenology and German sociology, and a profound interest in the philosophy of history. Furthermore, Aron knew German and was one of the few participants who could read Hegel in the original. This also made him one of the most skeptical and critical members of the seminar; he often challenged Kojeve, particularly with regard to Kojeve's conclusions about the "end of history," "Absolute Knowledge," and the "Homogeneous State." 13 Despite Aron's guarded skepticism, Kojeve's influence should not be underestimated. Indeed, Aron honors Kojeve as one of the three most important figures in his life. 14 But perhaps the most essential influence lies not in the critical engagement between the two thinkers but in a series of interpretations proffered by Kojeve and accepted at face value by Aron. These were: first, that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was in fact a phenomenology in the Husserlian sense of the term; second, that Heidegger's understanding and use of phenomenology mirrored Husserl's and that both projects were "anthropological" in their emphasis on a human subject; and third, that Heidegger's anthropological philosophy was existential in the Kierkegaardian sense of the term. This particular understanding of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger led to a conflation of Hegel's teleological dialectic with existential phenomenology that presented Marx and Heidegger as fundamentally compatible and eventually led to existential Marxism. The influence of Kojeve and Heidegger on Aron is implicit in Aron's Introduction a la philosophie de l'histoire, written in 1937 as his these de doctoral and submitted to a committee consisting of Paul Fauconnet, Celestin Bougie, Emile Brehier, Maurice Halbwachs, and Leon Brunschvicg. Brunschvicg and Brehier both sat on the board of editors for Recherches philosophiques, and Bougie had studied in Germany. They were all well versed in classic German philosophy and sympathetic to foreign intellectuals fostering dialogue between Germany and France, but they were also the product of a previous era. At Aron 's thesis defense in the Salle Liard of the Sorbonne (which was recorded by Pere Gaston Fessard and published in the 1938 supplement of the Revue de metaphysique et de morale), the differences between the concerns of the generation of 1933 and those of the previous generation became apparent. 15

13. Pere Gaston Fessard, La philosaphiR hi~toriqtJR de Rnyrrwnd Aron (Paris:Julliard, 1980), 51-52. 14. Aron, Mhnoires, 731-33. See Tom Rockmore, lleidPggerruul French Phil.o.wjJity: 1/umnnism, Antihu:mani1·m, and Bn.ng (New York: Routledge, 1995), 36-37. lJ. For other contemporary reviews of Aron's lntroducti.on a 1~, philo.wphi~ de l1tistoire, see H. Guuier, "Connaissance his to rique et philosophique de l'histoire," La vie iniRfJpr:tu.eUe 63 (April 25, 1939): 260-66; B. Groethuysen, "Une philosophie critique de l'histoire," NRF53 (October

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Aron 's committee saw his work as an attack on the established educational paradigms of the Third Republic, and this perception was exacerbated by the fact that the alternatives Aron offered were almost exclusively of German origin at a time when German-French relations were particularly poor. Aron's Introduction a la philosophie de l'histoire was devoted to the refutation of the overly rational "philosophy of progress" in favor of a more "realistic" approach employing German sociology and phenomenology. The stakes were high, given the precarious nature of the Third Republic and Hitler's proclamation of the Anschluss of Austria on March 13, 1938, thirteen days before Aron's thesis defense. Growing up in the shadow of World War I and on the eve of World War II, the generation of 1933 sought an alternative way of viewing history and philosophy that could make sense of events that were not progressive, rational, or necessarily explicable. They found the scientific method of investigation to be restrictive, stale, and inapplicable to the human condition. Conversely, the previous generation viewed the generation of 1933's attack on science, rationalism, and progress as an attack on the French canon and thus on France itself. Fauconnet's reaction to the Introduction ala philosophie de l'histoire summarizes the feelings of this older generation toward their pupils: Assuredly I commend your honesty and your loyalty to your work, but I must confess that I do not see where it is going. I cannot determine if you are diabolic or simply without hope [ un satanique ou un disespere1. 16 Aron recalled that his "refutation of progressive rationalism shocked all of the idealistic optimists that still dominated the left of the Sorbonne."17 Paul Fauconnet, a disciple of Durkheim's, may have felt personally attacked as Aron 's work gutted the suppositions on which his scientific sociology was founded and rejected the notion of la mission civilisatrice, which was a central tenet of his work. Fauconnet proclaimed Aron 's work a "menace to the sociological constructions advanced by the previous generation." 18 Aron's committee was disappointed with his break from the rational optimism that characterized the traditional canon of the Sorbonne, the ENS, the Republic of Professors, and, by extension, France as they conceived it: "In 1938 my book surprised our teachers at the Sorbonne who detected in my work, in my preoccupations and themes of reflections, a

1939): 623-29; H.-I. Marrou, "Tristesse de l'historien," E~prit79 (Aprill939): ll-47. 16. Pere Gaston Fessard, Rkit de la soutermnce par le jJhe G. Fi>.w1rd, Annexe 2, in Raymond Aron, In trod urtio11 iz ln philosopltie de l'hisloire (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 450. 17. Aron, Mbnoirt's, 117. 18. Supp!nneril rfp La remu de mitnphy.~iq1u et moral11 (July 1938): 28.

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style of thinking totally foreign to their universe." 19 Thus Aron's thesis exposed a definitive cleavage between the two generations. At his defense, Aron described his thesis in opposition to his teachers: I mean to say that the general direction of this thesis is entirely antiscientific and anti-positivist. It does not reject these ideas, however, in favor of the arbitrary or of an "anarchy" of individual preferences that concerns itself only with practical decisions. Nor does it favor an irremediable skepticism that concerns itself only with philosophy. In our everyday life we are confronted with decisions that we must justify but by means other than scientific reason. I am therefore trying to return a sphere of validity to man, to concrete man, by showing the possibility of a philosophical reflection that is beyond science and by arguing that this reflection is itself a function of history. 20 Aron wanted to return to an understanding of history based on our everyday existence in the world and not on scientific formulas or theories. Phenomenology served as a model to examine the relation of human beings to the objects they use and the world in which they live in a way that allowed Aron to examine the historian as well as the history written. In this sense Aron hoped to move past certain intellectual precepts his teachers held dear but that everyday life had convinced him were antiquated and inapplicable: By saying that there is no true history in history, I am neither hopeless, because thought is not everything-there is also the sphere of action-, nor diabolic due to the sole fact that I have eliminated a certain number of ideologies that our times have already apparently condemned. Among these I number the idea of indefinite progress that expands to cover all of society and the belief that the activity of objective research and pure contemplation will exhaust the vocation ofman. 21 Aron wanted to dispel the myth of unbridled progress, but he had not given up hope on progress altogether. Instead he believed that to understand progress as it occurred in the real world he had to move past the ideologies of his professors and toward a philosophical methodology that could account for the truncated and often violent path of progress. The most obvious and important influence for Aron 's Introduction a la philosophie de l'histoire is the work of Max Weber, but implicit in Aron's use of Weber is the "task to investigate further the question of the limits of historical objectivity and in so doing to move beyond Weber. "22 To 19. Aron, Memoirt's, 119. 20. Fessard, Recil dt' la smllcnancl', Annexe 2, 452. 21. Ibid., 452-53. 22. Colquhoun, Raymond A ron, 129.

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do so Aron follows the model Kojeve established in his seminar using a phenomenological methodology to understand the concept and movement of history. Thus, while Aron 's Introduction a Ia philosophie de l'histoire is explicitly Weberian, it is implicitly Kojevian and carries with it Kojeve's presentation of Husserl and Heidegger. Again it is important to remember that while Aron follows Kojeve in applying a "phenomenological" method to an investigation 'into history, this is not phenomenology as defined by Husserl or Heidegger. Aron relied heavily on Heidegger's concept of historicality ( Geschichtlichkeit ) as presented in Being and Time, but Aron's understanding of Heidegger is based on Kojeve's reading, which presents Heidegger's concept of resolute action as the locus for the Hegelian dialectic and the progress of history. Thus Aron derived from it an anthropocentric existential reading of historicality that focused on the decisions of the individual subject who acts in history: This is my central thesis: the relativity of historical knowledge reveals the moment where the decision intervenes. To establish this I apply the phenomenological method to the subject who discovers history. This shows that the subject of historical knowledge is not a pure subject, a transcendental I, but a living man, a historic I, that seeks to understand his past and his milieu. 23 Through this selective reading of Heidegger, Aron is able to present a concrete reading of history that begins with man as the historical subject who attempts to understand his being-in-the-world historically. Deviating from Kojeve, Aron eschewed the two-tiered ontological model (which Kojeve took from Heidegger) in favor of a two-tiered historical model based on "natural history" and "human history." Natural history is understood in terms of biology and physics (natural phenomena such as gravity) and therefore adheres to scientific laws. Human history, conversely, is based on choice and action and therefore cannot be reduced to formulas or theories. In this sense, Aron presents a variation of Husserl's critique of science because it is only on the basis of the human realm that we come to construct the natural sciences that apply to natural history; thus natural history does not apply to human history even though human history is essential to science. But Aron also follows Kojeve's assertion that the human realm is derived from the animal realm and thus always exists in it as well as above it. In both cases, "the logical truth of natural history in no way contradicts the ontological truth of human history. "24 Aron conserves the scientific rationalism of his teachers via a natural history that adheres to scientific laws, while at the same 23. Fessard, Rf.ril de Ia soulenanre, Annexe 2,452. 24. Aron, /ntrodu.dion tt La philosopltif de l'ltistoire, 40.

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time opening the way for an ontological "human history" that emphasizes choice and action, anticipating French existentialism. Aron presented a reading of history based on Heidegger's historicality but read through Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel presented in the seminar. As a result, he did not emphasize Heidegger's presentation of historicality based on the structure of care [Sorge] but instead presented a version that focused on the individual (thrown into a historical situation) who must choose a course of action based on the historical situation: "[My book] invites the reader to renounce the abstractions of moralism and of ideologies and instead determine the veritable capacity of our possible choices which are limited by reality itself. "25 Aron's understanding of Heidegger's historicality would play a major role in Sartre's understanding of the term and serve as a basis for his existen tialism. Aron passed his these de doctoral; his committee recognized the originality and sophistication of his work. But he did not pass without first hearing their grave reservations about the direction in which he was heading: "I conclude with an act of charity," said Paul Fauconnet, "I offer my admiration and my sympathy; an act of faith in the value of the theses that you have condemned, and of hope, the hope that the youth of the future will not follow the path you have chosen." 26 Fauconnet's hope and optimism were not rewarded.

Jacques Lacan Of the participants in the seminar the figure most directly influenced by Kojeve was Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a medically trained psychiatrist who was also schooled in psychoanalysis. 27 He was thus cut from a different cloth than the normalierts and other university students in Kojeve's seminar. But Lacan also represents a change in the French understanding of psychoanalysis in France. 28 Despite his scientific and medical

25. Fessard, Ricit dP la sou/.nltzrtre, Annexe 2, 453. 26. Supplement de la rerJUe de rnflaphysiqu.e el rnural.e Uuly 1938): 28. 27. On Lacan, see Mikkel Borch:Jacobsen, l.aran: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Carolyn]. Dean, '17te Self and Its Pleasures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Shoshana Felman, jacques Lamn and the Adventure of Insight: P1ydwanalysis in GmtRTTipurmy Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jane Gallop, lvadh1g Lncon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Alain juranville, Laran f't la philosophi" (Paris: Presses U niversi taires Fran{aises, 1984) ; An ika Lemaire, Jarque.r Lacnn, trans. David Macey (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); David Macey, Lamn in C.mtlext.r (London: Verso, 1988); Samuel M. Weber, The I_pgn1d of Frewl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Slavoj Zizek, 11u! Suhlim.e Ofljer/ of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). 28. In her La batailll' dr rmt anr (Paris: Seuil, 1986), Elisabeth Roudinesco argues that the

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background, Lacan 's concerns were strikingly similar to those of the normaliens and university students: he felt constrained by the narrow purview of the French academic world, specifically in psychiatry, where Freud and his theories were still viewed with great suspicion. To further his understanding of Freud, Lacan looked outside France for more fecund sources than the staid and idealistic interpretations presented by his country's psychiatric community. Freud's work on the unconscious had been accepted by the surrealists as a vital tool in breaking away from the chains of conventional society and was presented as parallel to the concept of "automatic writing." The surrealists believed they had found a kindred philosophy in Freudian psychoanalysis that could provide a theoretical basis for their work. 29 While the traditional psychoanalytic community (in Germany or France) might not have agreed with the surrealists' interpretations, Lacan found them intriguing and made himself a regular in the surrealist circles of the late 1920s, spending much time with Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, and Georges Bataille. But while Lacan found the surrealists engaging, he did not think their methodologies were rigorous enough. 30 Lacan, like Bataille, looked to German philosophy, and specifically Alexandre Kojeve, to provide the philosophical answers to a myriad of questions untouched by French philosophy and psychiatry. Lacan represented the future trajectory of French psychoanalysis but also the specific philosophical concerns of the generation of 1933. Lacan returned to Freud in the early 1930s to present psychoanalysis as the investigation of a concrete existence within history, and, like Aron, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, he looked to phenomenology to provide a basis for this movement toward the concrete. For Lacan, Kojeve 's seminar was more than just an exploration of German philosophy; it provided a whole new way of reading, understanding, and teaching texts. Kojeve's seminar unsettled participants and allowed them to engage a text in radical and often violent interpretations. This fostered an originality in both interpretation and reception that was entirely alien to the whole lycee system. The texts were not presented through dogmatic repetition but rather through temporal textual engagement.. Lacan would later bring this same subversive and history of psychoanalysis in France can be seen as two distinct movements: the first medical and clinical, the second literary and philosophical. According to Roudinesco, Lacan was able to bridge the two through his work and seminars throughout the 1950s and until his death in 1981. His work plays a major role in the second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France, but for our purposes we will limit the scope of this investigation to his early work and his relationship to Kojeve. 29. See Anna Balakian, Surreali.\m: 17te Jwrul to the Absolute (New York: Noonday Press, 1959); Maurice Nadeau, llistoire du surrealisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964). See also Andre Breton, Mar~yesteJ du surrealisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). 30. See Dean, The Sl'/f and Its Plensu11'.s.

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innovative methodology to his reading of Freud, pre sen ted in his seminars beginning in 1953. Tellingly, the series of works that Lacan published chronicling those lectures were simply titled The Seminar, and, like Kojeve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, the book was not written by Lacan but transcribed from notes taken during the course. Throughout the 1930s, Lacan followed Kojeve very closely, turning toward structuralism in the mid-1940s. Lacan's turn reflected his emphasis on language, which also led him to Heidegger, who had made a similar turn toward language in his "Letter on Humanism" (1947). Lacan's engagement with Heidegger is therefore based on the second reading of Heidegger in France and is itself a major force in the second phase of that reception. 31 But Lacan's turn is in fact based on his participation in Kojeve's seminar and Kojeve's lasting influence on his work. Lacan made the shift to language based on his understanding of several key Kojevian concepts: Desire, Self-Consciousness, and the MasterSlave dialectic. In an article from 1933 written for Le Minotaure, Lacan attempted to use the master-slave dialectic as a psychoanalytic category in his analysis of the Papin sisters. The two sisters had been model employees working as maids for a woman and her daughter in Le Mans. One d:ly, after an electrical outage interrupted their dinner preparations, they attacked and murdered the woman and her daughter, mutilating them almost beyond recognition with knives and other kitchen utensils. Mterward, they locked the front door and went upstairs to their room where they waited for the police. Lacan's assessment of the case was that the crime manifested a structural paranoia: the murderers sought to destroy the ideal of the master that they held within themselves in order to overcome their slavery. He saw it as a pathological manifestation of the stntggle for recognition. 32 In "Le stade du miroir," first presented in 1936 and then reworked for presentation at the sixteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich, Lacan displayed a more sophisticated understanding of Hegel in relation to psychoanalysis, based on his participation in Kojeve's seminar. Lacan explains le slade du miroir (the mirror stage) as the moment when the infant first recognizes himself in the mirror and thus posits himself as a self. This positing of the "I" is the locus of representation. But the self that the infant locates is not in fact his real self but a reflection of his self. "It is sufficient to understand the mirror stage as an identification in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation 31. I have identified the first phase of the reception ofHeidegger in France as lasting from 1927 to 1961. The second phase begins in 1961 and continues to the present. 32.Jacques Lacan, ".Motifs du crime paranoiaque: Le crime des soeurs Papin," Le Minotaure 3/4 (1933): 25-28.

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that is produced in the subject when it assumes an image-the predestination of this effect of the stage is sufficiently indicated by the use, in theory, of the ancient term imago. "33 Thus the self that is revealed to the infant transforms the infant through the production of a self that is not based on its self but on an imago of its self. For Lacan, this reveals the insufficiency of the self, which is not grasped in itself but via its reflection in the mirror. "The mirror stage manifests the effect in man, primarily in the dialectic, of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality. "34 This insufficiency manifests itself as a lack. Lacan's "lack" follows Kojeve's model of desire, where the subject first posits its self as an "I" based on its animal needs; but what is lacking in Lacan's model is not any thing but precisely the self. In both models, the positing of the self leads the individual to search for recognition of its self in the other and this translates into the desire for recognition. "This is the moment that decidedly tilts all of human knowledge in the mediation of the desire of the Other." 35 Thus Lacan uses Kojeve's concept of desire but alters the nature of desire so that the initial lack is not any thing but recognition of the self. In this sense Lacan is very close to Heidegger in his attempt to remove the self as the locus of being and to question the nature of representation. But here too, Lacan's work is based on Kojeve. In his seminar, Kojeve argued that the initial posing of the self that can attain self-consciousness was revealed through desire. "The (conscious) Desire of a being is what constitutes that being as I and reveals it as such by moving it to say 'I' ." (IRH, 3). In Kojeve's model, the self poses itself through language. It is the I who can say "I ... " that can attain selfconsciousness. This is a minor point for Kojeve but a point of departure for Lacan. Kojeve presents language (based on conceptual comprehension) as negation: In Chapter VII of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says that all conFor ceptual-comprehension (Beg;reifen ) is equivalent to murder. example, when the Sense (or Essence) "dog" is incarnated in a sensible entity, that Sense (Essence) is alive: the dog is real, it is a living dog that runs, drinks, and eats. But when the Sense (Essence) "dog" passes into the word "dog," it becomes an abstract Concept that is dif ferent from sensible reality that is revealed by its Sense, the Sense (the Essence) is murdered: the word "dog" does not run, does not drink, and does not eat; in the word the Sense (Essence) ceases to live; this

33.Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 90. 34. Ibid., 93. . 35. Ibid., 95.

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is to say it has been murdered. This is why conceptual-comprehension of empirical reality is equivalent to murder. (ILH, 372-73) Thus the word dog murders/ negates the real dog and replaces it with the concept dog. Kojeve presents this understanding of language within the framework of Hegel's larger teleology of self-consciousness and therefore sees the possibility that words and things will fall into line with each other, so that words will correspond to the essence of the things they name at the point of absolute knowledge. Lacan did not agree with this aspect of Kojeve's interpretation. 36 For Lacan, Kojeve's definition of language as murder/negation relates back to Kojeve's understanding of the self as constituted by desire through language. In this sense the subject that posits its self through language also murders/negates its self through the act of language. For Lacan, there can never be any possibility of absolute knowledge because the initial act of posing the self is also the negation of the self. The self that is named is not the real Sense (Essence) of self but the concept of self. This describes the mirror stage, where the infant first recognizes its self based on a reflection that is in fact not its self. The subject of investigation appears where it is already lost, but because this loss occurs in the objective act of naming (in representable language) it appears to us as something we have found. For Lacan this is the problem with both Cartesian philosophy and ego psychology. This understanding of the self as the site where being presents itself but not as the site of being is very close to Heidegger's work. Lacan presents a model of the self that loses itself in objective presentation. Heidegger sees being as lost in traditional metaphysics, which considers the ego cogito the site of being and thus conceals the essence of being. For Lacan, the self as posited is always a lack and this leads to desire, manifested in the desire for recognition; this view is compatible with Heidegger's understanding, presented in the .. Letter on Humanism," of the forgetting of being. While Heidegger sees the possibility of recovering being through language, Lacan sees the structure as a permanent lack, an infinite desire. The Lacanian subject is the place where being happens through language, but the positing of the subject as such is its own negation; thus it is never present to itself. Because Lacan follows Kojeve's (not Heidegger's) definition of language as murder/negation, language can never speak to Lacan in the revealing sense it does to Heidegger, but always remains infinitely ambiguous. Here we have already moved to the topic of Lacan 's confrontation with the second reading of Heidegger

36. See Phillipe Van Haute, "Lacan's Philosophical Reference: Heidegger or Kojeve?" I11ternntional Pltilosoplticnl Quarterly 32, no. 2 Uune 1992).

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in France, which belongs to the second phase of the reception of Ileidegger in France and is beyond the scope of this volume. 37

Merleau-Ponty Among the participants in Kojeve's seminar, Merleau-Ponty is doubtless the most important figure for the first phase of the reception ofHeidegger in France. 38 This is due in part to his relation to Sartre, but more important is the way Merleau-Ponty used the work of Heidegger throughout his career. Through Merleau-Ponty's work one can trace the evolution of the reception of Heidegger's thought in France, from being considered a continuation of Husserl's phenomenology to being seen as an integral part of Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of Hegel and Marxism (via Kojeve), and finally to becoming the focal point of Merleau-Ponty's final philosophical texts. 39 In fact, the central importance ofMerleau-Ponty in relation to Sartre has more to do with the influence of Kojeve than Heidegger per se, because it was not Merleau-Ponty but Raymond Aron who introduced Sartre to phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty, however, brought the Kojevian conflation of Hegel and Heidegger to Sartre's attention and convinced him of the importance of the dialectic that led Sartre to his version of existential Marxism. But to read Merleau-Ponty solely in relation to Sartre would be to minimize his particular role in the reception

37. The second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France is shaped by the rise of structuralism and the confrontation with Heidegger's political choices. See conclusion. 38. On Merleau-Ponty, see M. R. Barral, The Rnk of the Body-Su~jert in MPrlmu-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1965); Vincent Descombes, Modrrn Frenrlt Phi/,osophy, trans. L. Scott Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); M. C. Dillon, Merl~au-Pon(v's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Sonia Kruks, ThP Politiml PhilJJsophy of Merl~au.-Ponf~'V (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981); R. Kwant, The Pltroome1wlogiral Philosophy of Mrrl.enu-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966); Thomas Langan, Merleau-Ponty's Critiqut> of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). See also the relevant chapters in Fred R Dallmayr, Tw#ight of Subjedivity: Contributions lo a Post-Individualist 111Pory of Politics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Hughes, The Obstructed Path, 1966); Martin Jay, Marxism and 1otality: The Advmtu11's of n Conrept from Lukacs to 1/abermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Mark Poster, E.xist.mlial Marxism in Postwar France: From Sart11' to AlthussPT (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975 ). 39. For the influence of Husser) on Merleau-Ponty, see Theodore Geraets, Vt'T'S une nom1elle pltilosophie tran.w:endffltale: La genhe de Ia philosophie de Maurire MPTleau-Pmi~'Y jusq1ta In Phbwminol.ogi.l' de la perreption (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971); Herbert Spiegelberg, 11w Phenomenological Mu11nnent: Mauriu Mf'Tlmu-Ponty (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 538-81. See also Eugene H. Frickey, "The Origins of Phenomenology in France, 1920-1940," Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1979; Joseph Kockelmans, ed., Phenorn~moh1gy: 111P Philosophy o.f Edmund I Jmserl and Its lnl.erfrretations (New York: Doubleday j Anchor, 1967).

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of Heidegger in France. In fact, despite the distance Merleau-Ponty kept from Heidegger throughout his career, Merleau-Ponty's philosophical project was probably closer to that of Heidegger than to either Husserl's or Hegel's. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty provides one of the most informed and lucid readings of Heidegger of any of the initial French interpreters. In his homage to Merleau-Ponty after the philosopher's sudden death in 196l,Jean-Paul Sartre divided his estranged friend's life and work into three distinct phases, separated by specific historical events that changed the nature of his thought: an early phase during which he was enamored equally of Gestalt psychology and Husserlian phenomenology, and which concluded with the Phenomenology of Perception in 1945; his Marxist phase, which began with his work on historical materialism in the Phenomenology of Perception and ended in 1951 with his decision to break with Marxism; and finally, his return to phenomenology and ontology, which lasted until his death in 1961. 40 While Sartre's assessment is correct and the events do correlate with recognizable transitions in Merleau-Ponty's work, Sartre's model relies entirely on rupture and fails to account for the continuities in Merleau-Ponty's work, most of which stem from the formative years spent in Kojeve's seminar. For the purpose of our investigation into the initial reception ofHeidegger in France, we will limit our exploration to the first phase of Merleau-Ponty's development. Born in 1908, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was younger than Aron and Sartre but nevertheless a product of the same milieu. While at the Ecole Normale, he counted Sartre, Paul Nizan, andjean Hyppolite among his friends. As a boy he was interested in science and took his studies quite seriously, but by the time he entered the preparatory school at Louis-leGrand he had realized that his passion was for philosophy. His Catholic upbringing may have tempered his faith in science and, while he was a student at the ENS, his interest in philosophy was oriented toward Bergson's intuitionism, which allowed for a more religious reading of philosophy than the neo-Kantian rationalism of Leon Brunschvicg. His interest in the relation between Catholicism and philosophy remained a constant throughout his years at the ENS and on till the late 1930s. This influence is apparent in his relation to the group of Catholic philosophers associated with Emmanuel Monnier's journal L'Esprit, most notably Gabriel Marcel, whose Etre et avoirwould have a profound effect on Merleau-Ponty. In 1937 Merleau-Ponty broke with the Church when several clerics he knew refused to condemn fascist violence against workers. But just as Merleau-Ponty's interest in science was tempered by his desire to reconcile his religious upbringing with philosophy through 40.Jean-Paul Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty vivant," l.es temjJ!J modrmes, nos. 184--85, 1961, special issue on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 360.

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Bergson, his interest in Bergsonian philosophy was tempered by his understanding of science. Thus it was no surprise to find Merleau-Ponty attending Georges Gurvitch's lectures on phenomenology at the Sorbonne from 1928 to 1930. At these lectures he was first introduced to phenomenology through Gurvitch's interpretation, according to which Bergson and Husserl were compatible. It is also of interest to note that the majority ofGurvitch's lectures were devoted to the work of Max Scheler, which helps explain Merleau-Ponty's early understanding of Gestalt psychology as a companion to phenomenology. Finally, Gurvitch's lectures concluded with a section on Heidegger that presented Heidegger's work as being in complete accord with Husserl's, and furthermore anointed Heidegger as the heir apparent to Husserl in terms of the phenomenological project and the future of German philosophy. In this sense, Heidegger's being-in-the-world was considered compatible with Husserl's concept of intentionality, so that no emphasis was placed on the pre reflective, precognitive, and pre theoretical nature of Heidegger's Dasein, as distinct from Husserl's reflective, cognitive, and theoretical understanding of intentionality. Merleau-Ponty's main focus in his early work was on the nature of perception, and he saw phenomenology as a methodology that allowed him access to the concrete world that we perceive and that had been ignored by the empirical sciences and Brunschvicg's theory-oriented brand of neoKantian philosophy. Merleau-Ponty was so enamored by the possibilities of this new methodology, which was as rigorous as science but did not sacrifice its capacity to relate to the actual (not theoretical) world we live in, that he attended Husserl's lectures on the Cartesian Meditations at the Sorbonne in 1929, despite the fact that he did not yet know German. Merleau-Ponty's interest in Gestalt psychology and its relation to phenomenology was further developed in the years he spent working with Aron Gurvitsch, a German scholar who had moved to France in the late 1920s. Aron Gurvitsch had studied with Max Scheler and was well acquainted with the works of Husserl. He made a place for himself as the primary French translator of texts on Gestalt psychology. Merleau-Ponty worked as his assistant on anumber of these texts and specifically on an article that Gurvitsch published in the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique titled "Quelques aspects et quelques developpements de Ia psychologic de la forme. ( 1936). 41 41. Hubert Dreyfus claims that Merleau-Ponty attended a series of lectures by Aron Gurvitsch that explained Heidegger's account of behavior in terms of Gestalt perception, which helps establish the connections between Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's work. I have found no evidence of these lectures, and it may be that Dreyfus has confused Merleau-Ponty's attendance at George Gurvitch's lectures at the Sorbonne with his work with Aron Gurvitsch on phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. In either case Dreyfus's deduction is correct.

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In "La nature de Ia perception," a proposal for an extension of his grant from the Caisse Nationale des Sciences in 1934, Merleau-Ponty outlined his first philosophical project. 12 Merleau-Ponty sought to come to an understanding of the relation between consciousness and nature via the instrument by which we first come into contact with the world around us: perception. This investigation was guided (and nuanced) by a number of contemporary philosophical movements that all pointed in one way or another to phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty wanted to explore the body that "existed" in the world as a prereflected condition of consciousness. That is, he sought to understand our perception of the world as always already there and thus the primary condition by which we come to make sense of the world. This notion of being-in-the-world ( etre-au-monde ) owes much to Gabriel Marcel's Etre et avoir, written shortly after Marcel began working with Levinas. Merleau-Ponty believed that the way to explore the nature of our bodies as being-in-the-world was through the immediate sensual perceptions by which we come to make sense of the world around us. Here we see the influence of Henri Bergson. But Merleau-Ponty did not agree with Bergson's spiritualist conclusions that led to pure subjectivity and felt that the problem of perception was in need of new and detailed examination in light of the recent work in Gestalt psychology, which moved beyond the previous criticist and intellectualist theories. 43 Merleau-Ponty sought to conduct this investigation by using the phenomenological methodology of Edmund Husser!. There is a note written in the margin of "La nature de Ia perception" in which Merleau-Ponty cites the sources for his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology. The works cited are Emmanuel Levinas's Theone de l'intuition dans la phinomenologie de Husser~ George Gurvitch's "La philosophie phenomenologique en Allemagne: Edmund Husserl," taken from Gurvitch's Sorbonne lectures and printed in the Revue de metaphysique et de morale (1928), Jean Hering's Phinorninologie et philosophie religieuse, and Levinas 's translation of Husserl 's Meditations cartesiennes. As our previous investigations have shown, they all read Heidegger as fundamentally compatible with Husserl. For Hering and Gurvitch, Heidegger's phenomenology follows Husserl's model; and, for Levinas, Husser! should be read as following Heidegger's movement away from theoretical idealism. Therefore it should not be surprising that Merleau-Ponty also saw the work of Husserl and Heidegger as essentially congruous. This is especially the case 42. This proposal and his original grant proposal from 1933, "Projet de travail sur Ia nature de Ia perception," have been published in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, IR pnmat de /.a perception (Paris: Verdier, 1996). 43. Spiegelberg, The Pltenomenol.o!Jical MotJnfU'nf, 54 7.

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for Merleau-Ponty's understanding of Heidegger's project as a continuation of (and not a break with) Husserl's project, but also for his understanding of the relation between Husserl's concept of Lebenswelt and Heidegger's concept of Weltlichkeit. Merleau-Ponty's grant renewal application exemplifies his growing interest in phenomenology: whereas the original proposal of 1933 was concerned with the possibilities of Gestalt psychology as an alternative to the "criticist" theories that constituted an "objective" and thus theoretical universe, the later proposal presented phenomenology as the method by which to analyze, understand, and investigate perception. 44 Merleau-Ponty told Herbert Spiegelberg in an interview in 1953 that it was Jean-Paul Sartre who, on his return from Berlin in 1933, convinced Merleau-Ponty of the importance of Husserl's ldeen and the phenomenological methodology as a means for exploring concrete existence. 45 Sartre also came to Husserl through Levinas's Theorie de /'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husser[, so they shared a similar base in their understanding of Husserl in relation to Heidegger. One essential difference in the formation of Merleau-Ponty's and Sartre's thought is Merleau-Ponty's participation in Kojeve's seminar. The most obvious legacy of the Kojeve seminar is Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the dialectic as ontological and thus compatible with phenomenology. Thus his understanding of Hegel was from the beginning entirely compatible with his understanding of Husserl and Heidegger. This understanding allowed Merleau-Ponty to use both Husserl and Heidegger in the service of his existential Marxist philosophy after World War II. Furthermore, in Kojeve 's seminar Merleau-Ponty came to a sophisticated and articulate understanding of historical materialism and the works of Marx-something his friend Sartre did not have in the 1930s. 46 It was also in Kojeve's seminar that Merleau-Ponty came to address the relation of individual consciousness to the world in which we live-a fundamental question that would ·guide his work from the early Gestalt phase through his existential Marxism and into his later writings on language, structure, and ontology. Merleau-Ponty's first book was La structure du comportement, completed in 1938 and published in 1942. The dates are important because World War II had a profound effect on Merleau-Ponty and his work, but also because it was not until 1939 that Merleau-Ponty discovered Husserl's unpublished last works in the Husserl archive in Louvain. These texts 44. Merleau-Ponty, "Projet de travail sur Ia nature de Ia perception," 11-14. 45. Merleau-Ponty did not study in Germany nor did he ever meet Husser! in person. 46. For an overview of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty's differing understanding of Marxism, see Martin jay, Marxism and 1otality, chaps. 11 and 12; and Poster, Existmtifl.l Marxism.

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are the essential component in understanding Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of 1-Iusserl and phenomenology. The Structure of Behavior should therefore be looked at both as a prolegomenon to the phenomenological project of his second work, The Phenomenology of Perception, and also as a product of the 1930s and the generation of 1933's attempt to move beyond Bergson and neo-Kantianism. Its attempt to refute the primacy of science without falling into pure subjectivity can be seen as an effort to relocate philosophy within the concrete experience of existing in the world. It is also an excellent example of the differences between preWorld War II and post-World War II intellectual production in France. As a prewar work it is neither political nor prescriptive but profoundly descriptive and academic. The Structure of Behavior is the fruit of a research project that MerleauPonty began in 1933 and is largely conceived and structured to explain the relation of the body to the world it perceives. This exploration marks Merleau-Ponty's attempt to move away from the presumption of a subject-object duality based on the distinctions between interiority and exteriority, and to instead present an understanding of the relation of consciousness to perception as being-in-the-world ( etre-au-monde). MerleauPonty hoped to move beyond behaviorism, which understood behavior as solely determined by external movements. He also looked to move beyond Bergson's understanding of immediate sensual perception as predicated on an internal processing of that perception. Merleau-Ponty wanted to refute as inadequate both objective science, in its obsession with the exterior, and Bergsonian philosophy, obsessed with the interior. 47 Merleau-Ponty went on to show that the disagreements between the two schools of thought were simply two sides of the same coin in their understandings of the subject-object duality, and that both failed to adequately define the meaning of perception in relation to the world in which we live. "The negation of materialist realism is not possible except to the profit of mentalist realism, and vice versa. One cannot see that there is neither a material reality nor a psychical reality but a combination of the two or, better, a structure that does not properly belong to the external world or to internal life until the moment where behavior is understood 'in its unity' and in its human sense" (SC, 197). Merleau-Ponty proposes an understanding of behavior based on an investigation of our primary perception of the world we live in, which is neither exterior to us nor interior. Merleau-Ponty's concept of being-in-theworld (etre-au-monde) is the key to refuting the subject-object/interior-exterior models of behavior. This is because, as beings in the world, we are part of the world. We exist in the world and thus we are part of the phenomena 47. Merleau-Ponty cites Descartes as the source of both interpretations.

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we perceive. 'Ibis model is a mixture of Husserl's intentionality (ba-,ed on the "consciousness of") and Heidegger's being-in-the-world. Within Merleau-Ponty's understanding of etre-au-monde we also see several key Kojevian themes essential to Merleau-Ponty's structure and which refer back to the Heideggerian influence already present in Merleau-Ponty's work. Within his presentation of being-in-the-world (etre-au-monde ) in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty follows Kojeve in positing a dualistic ontology that distinguishes between the human world and the natural world. As we have seen, this model is imported into Kojeve's model from Heidegger's Being and Time. For Merleau-Ponty (following Kojeve's model), the animal world presupposes the human world but it is through the human world that we come to make sense of the world we live in and thus to have a project that explores something like perception. But the act of perceiving also shows that being-in-the-world is the domain of all beings. In the act of perception, of reaction to the world in which we live, all beings exert some sort of preconscious behavior. This understanding of preconscious behavior is much closer to Heidegger's precognitive understanding of being-in-the-world as being present-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Merleau-Ponty's comprehension of the pretheoretical, precognitive aspects of Heidegger's philosophy demonstrates the extent to which Merleau-Ponty was following Levinas's Theory of Intuition in Husserl, where Levinas attempted to reread Husser! through Heidegger's understanding of precognitive being-in-th.e-world. In this sense existence is the domain of all beings, but Merleau-Ponty makes it dear that, though we all exist in the world, there are different levels of that existence. "The chimpanzee can physically raise himself but will always revert to its animal posture in the case of an emergency" (SC, 137). (This example is explicitly Kojevian: the moment that separates the human from the animal is the moment of danger, the confrontation with death where the animal reverts to animal behavior. In Kojeve's understanding, only humans can overcome their fear of death.) Merleau-Ponty's understanding of being-in-the-world deviates from Kojeve's understanding of Hegel. Merleau-Ponty's understanding does not lead to the master-slave dialectic based on the desire to distinguish oneself as human and therefore worthy of recognition. Instead, MerleauPonty follows Husser!, seeing consciousness as the nexus of subject and object. But for Merleau-Ponty the object does not always imply the subject who perceives it. We exist in the world, but we also belong to the world. For Merleau-Ponty, we rise above the animal world but also exist simultaneously in the animal world. We exist ambiguously in both realms, and one is the condition of the other. But it is in the human realm that we come to make sense of the world in which we live and this separates us from the animal world. It is through our use of symbols, language,

THE FIRST READING

and social structures such as work or music that we determine ourselves as subjects in relation to a world, which is object. "It is this possibility of expressing many variations on the same theme, in this 'perspective of multiplicity' that we no longer exhibit 'animal behavior.' It is this that introduces a cognitive comportment and a path to freedom" (SC, 133). For Merleau-Ponty, the positing of the cogito does not limit us, but a reliance on the cogito as the measure of all things misconstrues our own being and the world in which we live. Merleau-Ponty actually distinguishes between three orders of existence, all of which share the same etre-au-monde but are decidedly hierarchical. They are the "physical" order, the "vital" order, and the "human" order. The first is the order of physical forces, where all activity takes place; the second is the realm of physiological reactions, the realm of animals and natural response (a rat escaping a maze, a chimpanzee by chance using a stick to get a banana); and finally, the human order, which Merleau-Ponty calls the mental field, a world of symbols and stnlctures. This structure conserves a space for universal rules and laws of science in the lower two levels while allowing for a realm above science and rationalism; in this way, Merleau-Ponty's stn1cture is not unlike Raymond Aron's in Introduction a la philosophie de l'histoire. The "fields" are all interrelated-the higher is always already in the lower, and therefore some scientific investigation is relevant to the human condition but can in no way exhaust the possibilities of human being. Thus Merleau-Ponty presents a totally new solution. The "fields" integrate like three different structural types and move beyond the antinomies of materialism and spiritualism, and of materialism and vitalism (SC, 141). Merleau-Ponty also contends that each of these three fields exists "dialectically," and we must now begin to question exactly what Merleau-Ponty meant by this term. A clue lies in his Kojevian approach to Hegel, where the dialectic is seen as ontological. 48 If all three fields exist as etre-au-monde, then they are all in a sense subject to ontological investigation, which is revealed to Kojeve (and to Merleau-Ponty) as the dialectic. It is only because being is dialectical that thought-the privileged act of humans as possessors of a conscience-is dialectical. Merleau-Ponty cites Hegel to make this distinction: "The spirit of nature is a hidden spirit It is not produced in the same form as Spirit; it is solely the spirit of the spirit that it knows: it is spirit in itself but not spirit for itself." In reality, we have already introduced the conscience and what we have designated under the name of life is already conscience of life. "The concept is nothing but the interior 48. See chap. 2. See also Sonia Kruks, "Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and the Dialt'ctic," jou.rual of the British SociPf.y far PltnwrflR1wlo~-,ry 7, 2 (May 1976).

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of nature" said Hegel and we have seen that the nature of the living body is unthinkable without this interior unity of significations which distinguish a gesture from simply a sum of movements. (SC, 175) Husserl's "consciousness of. ." is central to understanding this passage. The phenomenon of living is for us the relation of the interior to the exterior. The conscience is the projection of symbols and structure into the world, and the foundation of these symbols and structures is perception (precognitive), which is the means by which we come to understand the exterior and translate it into the interior. Merleau-Ponty describes perception as a dialectic of actions and reactions. Consequently, different from the physical system which keeps its balance with respect to the given forces around it, or the animal organisms which arrange themselves in a stable order that corresponds to the monotonous a priori of need and instinct, human work inaugurates a third dialectic because it places use objects ( Gebrauchsobjekte) such as clothes, tables, gardens, and cultural objects such as books, musical instruments, language, in between man and physic<Xhemical stimuli and in so doing constitutes. the proper human milieu from which emerge entirely new cycles of behavior. (SC, 175) Because human "action presents an adaptation of life, the word 'life' does not have the same meaning for the animal world and the human world. The conditions of 'life' are defined by the proper essence of the species" (SC, 188). The dialectical nature of the physical and vital fields remains unclear, but in Merleau-Ponty's investigation into the human order of conscience, of work and language, his understanding of the dialectic begins to become clear. Inasmuch as we exist in the world (etre-au-monde) as humans, we exist in and as the dialectic that is the source of all culture, social institutions, and history. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between the contemporary psychological terms "action" and "reaction," which could relate to the animal world, and the Hegelian term "work," which implies the activities by which man transforms the natural world and lives. But Merleau-Ponty does not find a distinct separation between one world and the next; even "the acts that are properly_ human (the act of speech, of work, of clothing oneself) are not significations entirely unto themselves. We come to understand them only in reference to the world we live in: clothes are an artificial skin, the instrument replaces an organ" (SC, 176). So that while work is the originating act of transcendence in which nature is altered but also created and re-created, we do not surpass nature through work. Or rather, "what defines man is not the capacity to create a second nature-economic, social, cultural-other than biological nature,

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but our ability to move past the structures we have created by creating others" (SC, 189). The human dialectic in Merleau-Ponty is ambiguous because it can never act without the codeterminism of the world we live in. We create structures, but in a sen11e we are also created by them. We use language, but language preexists us. "The human dialectic is ambiguous: it is manifested in the social and cultural structures it creates and these structures also imprison it. But cultural objects could not be what they are if the activity of creating them was not also, in a sense, the act of negating and surpassing them" (SC, 190). Merleau-Ponty's reading of Hegel differs from Kojeve's in his understanding of work; for Kojeve it is essential that man master nature via the diatectic to move forward teleologically to the end of history. For Merleau-Ponty what is essential is not a mastery over nature but the creation and re-creation of structures that allow us to live as humans in nature. While the structure of the dialectic is ambiguous in the double movement of creation and imprisonment, Merleau-Ponty conserves a progressive, if not teleological, movement that implies a certain freedom within the realm of human structures. Because the structures we have created exist to be negated and surpassed, and we are always already involved in a world we did not create, we can improve on what has come before. Merleau-Ponty's analysis of work mirrors Kojeve's understanding of Heidegger's Befindlichkeit as the essential corollary to Hegel's Begierde, which leads in turn to Hegel's Arbeit as the corollary to Heidegger's Verstehen. But Merleau-Ponty is far more interested in the relation of Befindlichkeit to Arbeit. Merleau-Ponty sees the issue of Begierde and the desire for recognition in the work of Kojeve as inherently tied to the subjectobject split. He hoped to understand the human dialectic through work in relation to the world that we find ourselves in prior to that split. His work with Gestalt psychology had introduced him to the concept of a referential whole, and his readings of Husserl had brought him to the concept of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), "the world in which we live." Through Kojeve's seminar he acquired the means for situating Heidegger's concept of Weltlichkeit (which at the time he saw as coterminous with Husserl's Lebenswelt) within the Hegelian system. The dialectic in Merleau-Ponty cannot be understood as "the motor of history" but must be seen as an infinite and indeterminate process that aUows man to transcend and change but does not move toward a specific goal. A fundamental tension exists between the individual conscience who perceives the world but who is at the same time part of the world ( etr~au­ monde) it perceives. \\'hile human being is dialectic, it is also being-in-theworld (etre-au-monde). It is prior to cognitive representation and thus prior to the subject-object split. This is why the Heideggerian concept of Befindlichkeit takes on far more significance for Merleau-Ponty than it does for

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Kojeve, especially as it comes to be dovetailed into Merleau-Ponty's reading of Husserl 's Lebenswelt in The Phenomenology of Perception. Furthennore, while Merleau-Ponty follows Kojeve's understanding that the dialectic is always in motion and that this is the mode by which man acts historically, for MerleauPonty there is no end to this historical movement. Instead, the weight of his analysis is given to an understanding of being-in-the-world ( etre-au-monde), which places limits on our possibilities and against which (but also through which) we attempt to progress by creating and re-creating the structures through which we come to understand the world in which we live. Through this infinite act of transcendence we reconcile our being as a su~ect that perceives the world with being-in-the-world. The Structure of Behavior is a purely descriptive philosophical essay that is more concerned with refuting previous philosophical and scientific models than with presenting a concrete political agenda. However, within the structure of his investigation, Merleau-Ponty preserves a space for human action that is not specifically progressive but does follow Hegel's schema, which implies a notion of progress. This move was essential for Merleau-Ponty's later political projects. Kojeve 's Hegel seminar ended on the eve of World War II, in 1939. Kojeve concluded with the realiza~ion of the end of history reached through the progressive evolution of the individual and society. But by the end ofWorld War II, the concepts of progress and history, shored up by the turn to Hegel after World War I, seemed essentially bankrupt. What do ·"history" and "progress" mean in a world where the atom bomb has been unleashed and the Shoah has occurred? Kojeve's project had an enormous influence on the generation of 1933, but after World War II his historical project seemed inadequate to explain the recent past, laying bare the existential ontological premise on which Kojeve had based his reading of Hegel. For the generation of 1933, the move away from the heimisch grounds of the traditional French canon led to Kojeve. But the attempt to rehabilitate the notions of history and progress came crashing down in World War II. The project had failed in one sense, but it had opened the field of French academics and infused the French intellectual scene with new methodologies and possibilities. Kojeve's reading of Hegel was foreign and unheimlich to the students in his seminar, yet it was familiar enough to be domesticated in a way that has left its mark on French thought even to this day. Kojeve's reading of Heidegger conserved the Cartesian subject and thus presented a domesticated Heidegger that became the basis for existentialism in the works of Aron, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. 49 Aron, Merleau-Ponty, and 49. For a discussion of the existential nature of Aron's lntmdw·tioTI ala jJhilo.fophiP de l'ltisf,(Jirf, see Tony Judt, 11w B?Lrde'TI oj Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998), 142.

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Sartre used the philosophy of Hcidegger to break with the philosophical training of their youth, but this break was not unqualified. 'While they did reject the neo-Kantian and republican rationalist ideologies that had dictated their educational formation, their nascent existentialism remained compatible with certain aspects of these ideologies and specifically with the more enduring legacy of Descartes.

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CHAPTER

4 Jean-Paul Sartre

The work of Levinas and the figures surrounding the Kojeve seminar prepared the ground for the understanding ofHeidegger in France, but the popularization of Heidegger can be attributed entirely to the work ofJean-Paul Sartre. In terms of our larger model, we can say that it was Sartre who domesticated Heidegger's philosophy and made it a mainstay of French intellectual culture. By presenting Heidegger historically in his seminar as compatible with Hegel and fundamentalJy anthropocentric, Kojeve brought Heidegger's work closer to the French tradition of a teleological project based on a definitive cogito. But his definitions and constructions were often slippery and led his students to reconsider them in a way that restored Heidegger's strangeness and alterity. Aron, Lacan, and Merleau-Ponty all returned to Heidegger to rethink their own projects. Heidegger's philosophy had become less unknown, less strange, and less uncanny, yet retained its ability to resist assimilation into the larger French canon. His work continued to shock and perplex those who sought to apprehend it, precisely because it questioned the established limits of truth, understanding, and appropriability. The work ofjean-Paul Sartre represents a shift in emphasis, from Kojeve's historical understanding of Heidegger veiled by Hegel's teleological dialectic, toward an understanding of Heidegger's work taken on its own terms. In fact, Sartre reversed the ~ectory of fellow members of the generation of 1933. He came to Hegel after Hcidcgger and thus understood Hegel in the light of his understanding of Heidegger and not vice versa. It is ironic that Sartre turned increasingly toward Hegel in the late 1940s based on his relationship with Merleau-Ponty, while at the same time Merleau-Ponty turned increasingly toward Heidegger based largely on his relationship with Sartre. 1

1. See Monika Langer, "Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: A Reappraisal," in The PhihJ.Iofihy (if.JmnPaul Sart:rt', ed. Paul A Schilpp (La Salle: Open Court, Library of Living Philosophers, 1981 ).

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Sartre's work on Heidegger hit the French intellectual scene on the eve of World War II, when the Hegelian historical project had lost some of its appeal. Kojeve's seminar had come to an end, and amid the disorienting events of defeat and collaboration, the teleological project of history could not satisfY the immediate concerns of the generation of 1933 or the larger French public. It was in this atmosphere of angst and uncertainty that Sartre's most Heideggerian works appeared-between 1940 and 1945. Sartre explained the attraction that he and his generation felt toward Heidegger's work in his War Diaries. On February 1, 1940, Sartre wrote: The menace of spring 1938 and then autumn slowly led me to search for a philosophy that was not only contemplation but also wisdom (sagesse), heroism, and holiness. I didn't care what as long as it permitted me to resist I was in the exact situation of Alexander, who had turned to Aristotelian science to incorporate the most brutal doctrines, more totalizing than the Stoics and the Epicureans who tried to apprehend life. What's more, History was all around me. First of all philosophically: Aron had come to write his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, and I had come to read it Furthermore, I was enclosed within it like all of my contemporaries; history made me feel its presence. I was ill equipped to understand and to grasp but I wanted to with all my force; I tried with every means I had. It was then that Corbin's book appeared [Corbin's 1938 translation of Heidegger]. Just when it had to. I was sufficiently detached from Husser}, and desiring a "pathetic" philosophy, I was ready to understand Heidegger. 2 It was against the backdrop of the generation of 1933's concern with history in the 1930s, and their subsequent desire to move from the passive contemplation that characterized this concern toward a philosophy of active engagement, that Sartre's interest in Heidegger and his language of "resolute decision" and "authentic understanding" came to the fore. But Sartre's work on Heidegger cannot be understood as mere derivation or repetition. George Steiner's claim that Being and Nothingness is a long footnote to Heidegger's Being and Time does not give Sartre's work the credit it deserves. If nothing else, Sartre's understanding of Heidegger is strikingly original, and his work on such topics as "the gaze" and "the body" enter territories that Heidegger had not considered within the scope of his project. Indeed, it is only by investigating Sartre and his understanding of Heidegger's philosophy, especially in its incorporation into Being and Nothingness, that we can come to understand the popularization and domestication of Heidegger's work in France, the events surrounding Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," and the first Heidegger Affair. 2.Jean-Paul Sartre, Carnrts de f.a droiR dR {!;'.terre (Paris: Gal\irnard, 1995), 406.

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Formation A normalien like his friends Aron and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre was born in 1905 and is very much a member, and some might even say the chief member, of the geheration of 1933. His interests in school were almost entirely literary and philosophical. His encounters with the work of Henri Bergson led him to focus on philosophy at the ENS, but he never gave up his literary ambitions. 3 In school and in his work, Sartre always bad something of the rebel about him. The secret of his success may lie in the fact that while his work and doctrines appear to be quite rebellious, they were always based on quite conservative philosophical notions such as the Cartesian cogito and did not take the risk of moving into new and untried territory. In this sense one could argue that despite his more conservative philosophical methodology, the works of Merleau-Ponty were far more radical and rebellious than Sartre's ever were. This is not to say that Sartre's ideas were not original, only that they guarded within them certain fundamental tenets that made them more easily accessible to an audience trained by the French school system. Sartre's chief originality and talent lay in his ability to dramatize a philosophical problem or situation and make it appear extreme. In a letter written in February 1929, six months after he failed the agregation, Sartre displayed this talent in his assessment of the fate of philosophy in France: It is the paradox of the human spirit . that man, whose job it is to create the necessary, cannot raise himself to the level of Being. It is for this reason that I see at the root of both man and nature sadness and boredom. This does not mean that man does not think of himself as a being. On the contrary, he puts all his efforts into it. Hence the notions of good and evil, ideas of man working upon man. But these are vain ideas. Another vain idea is determinism, which tempts us strangely to produce the synthesis of existence and Being (existence et l'etre). We are as free as you please, but powerless .... Everything is too weak: all things tend to die. 4

3. There is extensive material on Sartre. For biographical material I rely heavily on Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Biography (New York: Carroll and Graff, 1992)); the sections on Sartre in Jean-Franc;ois Sirinelli's Generation intelleclueliR: Khrigru'11X Pt normaliens dam l'entre-druxg'IU'1Tes (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Simone de Beauvoir's La force dP l'agP and La Jmre des clwses (Paris: Gallimard, 1960 and 1963); Annie Cohen-Sola!, Sartre, 1905-1980 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999); and Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les er.rils dP Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). See also Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in lhR World (London: NLB, 1980); Martin Jay, JHnrxisrn and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Maurice Natanson, A Criti.qW' of]ean-Pnul Sartre's Ontology (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). 4.Jean-Paul Sartre, letter written to Lel nouvt>Ues liltP.raiTP~, published February 2, 1929, 10.

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Here we see the themes that run throughout Sartre's work: notably, his desire to develop an articulate understanding of the relationship between existence and being that is not a mere synthesis of the two, and his odd and impotent notion of freedom. Sartre's thinking in 1929 is typical of the generation of 1933: disillusioned, bored, powerless. But Sartre presents these concerns with a forceful rhetoric that borders on exaggeration. Like the generation of 1933 generally, Sartre felt ensnared within the narrow confines of French philosophy as defined by the French academy. Bnmschvicg's brand of neo-Kantianism did not address the "necessary paradox that is man," and this led Sartre to consider it a variant of determinism. Bergson's philosophy, conversely, seemed to Sartre to provide an escape from the "vain ideas" of determinism, which understood man as a "synthesis of existence and Being." At first he thought that Bergson provided a solution in his investigation of immediate experience. But he soon became disenchanted with Bergson for making the same errors as the determinists, transforming consciousness into a thing and thus arriving again at a synthesis of existence and being. It was through his thesis for the ENS in 1927 (an investigation of "the image") that Sartre became disillusioned with Bergson. By the time of the publication of L'imagination in 1936, he had fully articulated his critique: Bergson has attempted to substitute his spiritualism for the geometric and spatial thought of Cartesianism and associationism: but he has only produced a physico-chemico fiction where the associations are pre-logical. . . He has created in effect a certain atmosphere, a way of seeing, a tendency to search everywhere for mobility, the living, and in this aspect in some respect methodological, Bergsonism represents the great trend in pre-war thought. The principal characteristic of this spiritual state appears to us as a superficial optimism without good faith, in that it believes it has resolved a problem when in fact it has only diluted the terms into an amorphous continuity. 5 Sartre saw Bergson's work as fundamentally no different from the od1er classical metaphysical systems (in L'imagination Sartre refutes the work of Descartes, Kant, Hume, and Leibniz, as well as the French neo-Kantians) who have all made the same fundamental error of turning consciousness into a thing. Instead of liberating free will in relation to time, Bergson had simply conflated the two terms. For "the Bergsonian reality," as for the others, "d1e thing is image, the matter is an ensemble ofimages."6 Furiliermore, Sartre felt that Bergson was worse ilian the others because he claimed to have solved the problem and thus duped an entire generation. Sartre wanted to begin his own philosophical project by rectifying the fundamental error of 5.jean-Paul Sartre, /.'imagination (Paris: Quadridge/PUF, 1994), 60, 65. 6. Ibid., 43.

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the philosophical tradition, which he saw exemplified in the subject-object split that was the basis for both Bergsonism and neo-Kantianism. In July 1929, Sartre placed first in the agregation (Simone de Beauvoir placed second). His ability to practice philosophy at the highest level was not in question, but his interest in the standardized nature of French academic philosophy was. Like his contemporaries, he was bored and unsatisfied with philosophy as it was taught in the French school system. Like Aron and Merleau-Ponty, he sought an alternative to the twin poles of spiritualism ~nd neo-Kantianism, and, like his contemporaries, his primary concern was to rethink the problem of the relation of the subject to the object in a way that would avoid the pitfalls of idealism and allow him to make sense of the concrete world in which we live. By extension, Sartre believed he could expose the fallacy of the distinction between interior and exterior and thus come to an understanding of the relation of being and existence that would not rest solely on the contemplative plane of ideas but could relate to actual experience. In this sense, we can understand Sartre 's claim, in reference to Merleau-Pon ty, that they "followed the same path from 1933-1939 but separately."7 Sartre is referring to the interest in phenomenology that the members of his generation developed in their search for an alternative route. But, as we have seen, this interest led Sartre's friends Merleau-Ponty and Aron to Kojeve's seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and thus to an understanding of Husserl, Heidegger, and phenomenology in relation to Hegel's teleological historical system as interpreted by Kojeve. 8 In contrast to his friends, Sartre did not stay in Paris to take university courses nor did he attend any of Kojeve's seminars on Hegel. Instead he chose to follow his own path. Sartre never had any interest in the teaching of others, and even under the "influence" of such thinkers as Husser! or Heidegger he did not take their courses or seek them out as instructors. Instead, he came to his conclusions through his own investigation of their texts. 9 Sartre did not turn to Hegel in the early 1930s and as a result did not come to an articulate understanding of the dialectic or of Marx and historical materialism until well after his friends Aron and Merleau-Ponty. 10 7.Jean-Paul Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty vivant," Les temps rnodenvs, nos. 184-85, 1961, special issue on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 307. 8. See chap. 2. 9. This aversion to intellectual dependency may explain Sartre's habit of planting "false dues" in interviews and in his journals. In the case of such thinkers as Bergson, Proust, Franz Kafka, and Heidegger, Sartre either downplays their significance for him or dates his introduction to them well after his own use of their philosophical ideas. See Tom Rockmore, Ilridpgger and French Philtw;plty: lhJ.manifm, Antihumanism, and Being (New York: Routledge, 1995), 77. 10. On existential Marxism, see Mark Poster, f:xislt!nlial Marxism in Post-War France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and Snrtre's MarxiHn (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Instead, Sartre turned to the phenomenological method exemplified in the work of Edmund Husserl. His work throughout the 1930s can be seen largely in the light of that influence.

Phenomenology The famous moment of Sartre's introduction to phenomenology is recounted by de Beauvoir in La force de l'age and by Aron in his Memoires. According to de Beauvoir, Sartre was gready attracted by what he had heard of German phenomenology. Raymond Aron, preparing a thesis on history, was studying Husser!. When he came to Paris (1932), we spent an evening together at the Bee de Gaz, rue Montpamasse; we ordered the specialty of the house: apricot cocktails. Aron pointed to his glass: "You see, my friend, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail, and that is philosophy." Sartre grew pale with excitement, or nearly so. This was precisely what he had wished for years: to talk of things as he touched them and that this was philosophy. Aron convinced him that this was exacdy what fitted his preoccupations: to transcend the opposition of idealism and realism, to affirm at the same time the sovereignty of consciousness and the presence of the world as given to us. On the boulevard Saint Michel he [Sartre] bought the book on Husserl by Levinas, and he was in such a hurry to inform himself that, while walking, he leafed through the book, whose pages he had not even cut. ... Sartre decided to study it seriously, and at Aron's instigation, he took the necessary steps for succeeding his "friend" at the Institut Franc,;ais de Berlin the following year. 11 According to Aron, the drink in question was a beer. Either way, while the meeting may have given Sartre the impetus to study phenomenology seriously, and to spend a year abroad in Germany, it was not his first contact with either Husserl or Heidegger. References to Husserl can be found in Sartre's works as early as his thesis on the image, written in 1927 while Sartre was still at the ENS. In 1928, Sartre met weekly for two and a half months with the Japanese philosopher Baron Shuzo Kuki. Kuki arrived in Paris, having studied in Freiburg with Husserl and in Marburg with Heidegger. He thus deserves credit for steering Sartre toward phenomenology. 12 Even more significant Press, 1982). See also David Caute, Communism and the Frntch IntelfRctualf, 1914-1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1964); Michael Kelly, Modern French Marxism (Baltimore: johns Hopkins LTniversity Press, 1982);Jay, Ma.rxi.sm ar1d Totality. 11. De Beauvoir, La force dP /age, 141-42. 12. See Stephen Light, Sltu.zo Kuki mul jmn-Paul SarlTf' (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), part 1.

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is that Sartre had read Henry Corbin's translation of Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik?13 The translation appeared in the June 1931 issue of Bifur, which also contained Sartre's first article, "The Legend of Truth." In his War Diaries, Sartre wrote in 1939 that he had read Was ist Metaphysik? in Bifur, that is, in 1931, "without understanding." 14 But this article had a far more profound effect on Sartre's work then is usually granted it. In terms of his interpretation of Husserl, the fact that Sartre did not truly understand Heidegger's essay only intensified its effect on him. In Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik? Sartre found an essay that directly engaged the questions he sought to answer. The essay's main focus is on the nature of being, and the text mirrors Sartre's own concerns about the shortcomings of the metaphysical tradition, as well as his deep mistrust of objective science. Furthermore, Heidegger confronted the two themes that would remain a central focus of Sartre's philosophical and literary career. These also lead directly to Sartre's interpretation of Husserl and, curiously, of Heidegger himself. The two themes are the relation of being to things ·(objects) and the understanding of being in relation to "nothingness" ( le Neant). Heidegger begins his critique of science in Was ist Metaphysik? by demonstrating that it is through science and its concern with that "which is" that we avoid any real metaphysical investigation. Instead of approaching the-difficult questions of philosophy, we satisfy ourselves with constant investigations into that which we already know. But, Heidegger contends, if we look beyond that which we already know, that "which is," we can commence an investigation of being based on the limits of being in relation to that which is not. For Heidegger, the shortcoming of science and philosophy is that the domain "which research penetrates is simply 'that which is' and outside of that-nothing (rien): only 'that which is' and otherwise-nothing: exclusively 'that which is' and beyond that-nothing. "' 15 Thus the issue for philosophy is to move beyond the realm of science and that "which is," in order to commence an investigation into the "nothing." This crucial movement is the basis for an understanding of being that places our entire understanding of truth and the limits of knowledge in question. According to Heidegger, it is only in relation to

13. This was Heidegger's inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg-am-Brisgau, given onjuly 24, 1929. 14. Sartre, f'..arnets dr Ia drole dr r;uerrr, 404. 15. Heidegger, Wrts ist Mrtaphysik? trans. He m-y Corbin as Qu 'rsf-cr que Ia rnetajJhy:.iqtu? for Bifur, June 1931, repr. in 1/eilkgger: Questions 1/Il (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 51. This essay, along with several other of Heidegger's essays translated. by Corbin, was published as Qu 'rst-ce qut> Ia rnetaphysique? (1938). This collection included two sections from Srirr ur1d l.eit that had not yet been translated into French.

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what we are not that we come to define what we are. But what does that say about that which we already "know"? The relation of being to nothingness became the central focus of Sartre's first philosophical treatise, La Transcendence de l'ego. This essay is primarily an investigation into Husserlian phenomenology, but it also serves as the prime motor for his displacement of the primacy of"things" in L'imagination and L'imaginaire, through his use of the relation between being and nothingness. In Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik? Sartre found a formula that could explicate the relation of "existence to Being" and finally deliver him from what he termed the chosiste philosophies, with their false distinctions between subject and object, interior and exterior. It is only by reason of the original manifestation of Nothingness that the human~reality [Corbin translated Heidegger's Dasein as realiti-humaine] of man can go toward the existant and penetrate into it. Nothingness is the condition that renders possible the revelation of the existent as such for the human-reality. Nothingness does not simply form the antithetical concept of the existan4 instead it is the essence of Being itself that comports the origin of Nothingness. It is within the Being of the existant that the negatingqualityofNothingness is produced. (Q, 62-63) Here Heidegger presents several themes that Sartre will seize on later in his work, but, for Sartre's early development, what is essential is that Heidegger does not fall into the trap of confusing being and things. Instead, Heidegger asserts that it is only through the concept of nothingness that we can come to approach things. Furthermore, this nothingness is not something exterior to what Sartre read as "human-reality" but is in fact the comportment of our human-reality. Heidegger writes, "Without the original manifestation of nothingness, there could not be personal being nor liberty" (Q, 63), and thus Heidegger also appeals to Sartre's interest in radical individualism. For Sartre, the question of being was always and only a question of personal being. The dilemma of the individual confronting the overwhelming problem of understanding the relationship of consciousness to things, of being to things, is the central focus of Sartre's novel Nausea, which he drafted between 1931 and 1934 while teaching at Le Havre. Heidegger's critique of science maintains that, because science is concerned primarily with the investigation into things, it constantly avoids the investigation into nothing. Instead, science makes everything fit its model and serve its purpose so as to avoid the possibility of nothingness. It is the "privileged character of science to take that which is left by principle, expressly and uniquely by the thing itself, as the first and last word" (Q, 49). Science is not interested in how things reveal themselves to us or how it is we come to make sense of them through interrogation, which always implies a negative as well as a positive. Nor does science have any 118

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interest in understanding the phenomenon of our need to understand, which implies our unique existence as beings for whom being is an issue. Instead, science simply seeks to extract a definition from the "things themselves" and to present that as unquestionable tntth. In contrast, Heidegger looks to the nature of the question as proof of the essential nature of nothingness in relation to our understanding of being. By exploring the question, he can commence an investigation into "negated-things" and the negative, which leads Heidegger to the conclusion that the negative is presupposed by nothingness, which exists prior to it and is "originally anterior to the 'No' of negation." By this logic, the entire process of understanding, which is based on the negating quality of the question, is dependent on nothingness. Thus, to investigate the nature of our being as beings who understand, it is necessary to explore the relationship of being to nothingness, which is the basis on which we come to understand things (Q, 54-55). For Sartre, nothingness becomes that which distinguishes the human-reality (which for Sartre is always equivalent to the cogito, the I) from things (the object). 16 There is no reason to doubt Sartre's claim, modest as it may be, that he read but did not understand Heidegger in 1931; but what is certain is that Corbin's translation in Bifur gave Sartre the vocabulary and the philosophical tools he needed to begin his investigation into an understanding of consciousness that was not beholden to the subject-oQject split nor to the distinctions of interior and exterior, which Sartre saw as characteristic of all French philosophy. But while Sartre acquired the impressionistic basis of what would become his philosophical and literary project, this project did not take shape until after he began his formal investigation into the works ofHusserl and phenomenology. And while Sartre's understanding of nothingness and the relation of being to things was coded by his early reading of Heidegger, it would be erroneous to deny or downplay the importance of Husserl on Sartre's intellectual development or to claim that Sartre's Heideggerian phase antedates his Husserlian one. Sartre did not develop an articulate and cogent reading of Heidegger's work until the late 1930s. Tlms we must first tum to Sartre's investigation into the work of Husserl while keeping in mind the issues raised by Heidegger in Was ist Metaphysik?

La transcendence de /'ego Mter his meeting with Aron and de Beauvoir in 1933, Sartre turned to Husserl's phenomenology as the only methodology that could present 16. On the differing interpretations and significance of nothingness for Heidegger and Sartre, see Charles E. Scott, "The Role of Ontology in Sartre and Heidegger," in Schilpp. 1711' Philosophy oJJmn-Paul Sartre.

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a philosophy of the concrete. Following Aron's advice, Sartre went to study in Berlin for the academic year of 1933.17 While in Berlin, Sartre did not take any university courses or work with Husserl or Heidegger. 18 Sartre's time seems to have been spent reading Husserl and working on the second draft of Nausea. It was also in Berlin that Sartre wrote La transcendence de l'ego, which was published in Recherches philosophiques in 1936. 19 In this work, Sartre sought to resolve the conflict between subject and object through his use of Husserl's concept of intentionality. 20 As Sartre understood it, phenomenology presented consciousness in a way that did not define itself by looking inward, as in Bergson or Proust, but by looking outward to the concrete world around it, to the world we live in; this is the notion that all consciousness is consciousness of something. Given that formulation, it is impossible to define an object while cutting it off from the subject examining it; likewise the subject is always revealed in its engagement with the object it is examining. For Sartre, phenomenology was a means to escape the subject-object dualism and the generalized hypotheses that inhabited the "world of ideas," which were the basis of French philosophy as taught at the ENS. Furthermore, Husserl's phenomenology is descriptive, not deductive, and therefore, unlike science or contemporary philosophy, does not rely on objective evidence. Instead, what is under investigation is human being in the "presence of things" and, by extension, consciousness itself (TE, 35). The phenomenological method is thus intuitive, because consciousness must investigate what it is and what it does and does not include. But it is here in this possibility that we see a divergence between Sartre and Husserl, based on the influence of Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik? In La transcendence de l'ego, Sartre tried to push Husserl's phenomenological program further than Husser! wanted to go: For our part, we readily acknowledge the existence of a constituting consciousness. We find admirable all of Husserl's descriptions in which he shows transcendental consciousness constituting the world 17. For an account of Sartre's place in the phenomenological movement, see the chapter on Sartre in Herbert Spiegelberg's 17te PherwmmouJ{Jical Movrrnmt (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982); and also Eugene H. Frickey, "The Origins of Phenomenology in France, 19201940," Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1979. 18.Jean-Paul Sartre, "Man muB fUr sich selbst und fiir die anderen Ieben" (interview with Rupert Neudeck), Merkur33, no. 379 (December 1979): 1210. 19. For a history of Recherr.IIP.s philo.mpluquRs and its position in the reception of Heidegger in France, see chap. 2. 20. Sartre's initial understanding of Husser! was based on his reading of Levinas's Theory of Tntuition in lhLuPTl's Plumom~mol.ogy. It is important to remember that the last section of Levinas's book on Hussed was written after Levinas had become more interested in Heidegger's work and thus is heavily oriented toward Heidegger.

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by imprisoning itself in empirical consciousness. Like Husserl, we are persuaded that our psychic and psycho-physical me is a transcendent object which must fall before the "phenomenological reduction." But we raise the following question: is not this psycho-physical meenough? Need one double it with a transcendental I, a structure of absolute consciousness? (TE, 36) While Sartre agreed with Husser! on the concept of a "transcendental consciousness," he did not agree on the posing of a "transcendental ego." 21 Sartre refutes this positing of a transcendental I, claiming that this "I is the producer of inwardness." Instead, he conten.ds there is no need for the transcendental ego because "the object is transcendent to the consciousness which grasps it, and it is in the object that the unity of consciousness is found" (TE, 38). For Sartre, consciousness does not come from the individual transcendental ego; instead, "individuality stems from the nature of consciousness" and, in fact, "the phenomenological conception of consciousness renders the I totally useless. It is consciousness, on the contrary, which makes possible the unity and the personality of my I. The transcendental /, therefore, has no raison d'etre' (TE, 40). By liberating consciousness from the self in its thingness (the I, the cogito), Sartre is able to liberate consciousness from the object in favor of pure spontaneity. Furthermore, he considers this move a definitive refutation of the solipsism of subjectivity because one's own self (as an object) no longer enjoys any priority over any other self, which is equally constituted by the same impersonal, or prepersonal, transcendental consciousness. This refutation of the traditional Cartesian subject in favor of a collective consciousness might seem to contradict the notion that Sartre is an "individualist" thinker, but it is on the basis of this move that Sartre inverts the Cartesian premise "I think therefore I am," and that his notion of freedom emerges. It is in fact through the pure spontaneity of consciousness that the possibility of freedom arises: "All is therefore clear and lucid in consciousness: the object with its characteristic opacity is before consciousness, but consciousness is purely and simply consciousness of being conscious of that object." By contrast, the lis itself an object and thus contains within it the "characteristic opacity" of the object. Therefore, far from being the source of consciousness as Husserl posited it, the transcendental I would be "a hindrance": "If it existed it would tear consciousness from itself; it would divide consciousness; it would slide into every consciousness like an opaque blade. The transcendental I is the death of consciousness" (TE, 40). 21. See Leo Fretz, "Individuality in Sartre's Philosophy," in 11tt> Cambridgr ComfJa71ion to Sartrt•, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 71-77.

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The spontaneity of consciousness is placed in opposltlon to the encumbered thingness of the self as object. But Sartre does not deny the importance of the cogito and in fact admits that it is the sole avenue of investigation by which we come to understand the relation of pure consciousness to things. Sartre qualifies the cogito's position in relation to consciousness by positing a primary or "unreflected" consciousness, which is the pure transcendental consciousness, and a secondary "reflective" consciousness, which is derived from the first. In the reflective consciousness that is the consciousness of the ego (the I), consciousness takes consciousness as an object to be observed and posits it as such. Here, Sartre refutes Descartes while conserving the primacy of the cogito as the means for all investigation. For Sartre, "the consciousness that says I think is precisely not the consciousness which thinks"; rather, it is a derivation of the consciousness that thinks. In Sartre's model, the cogito is an object (the object that is me), which is observed as consciousness, but, a~ such, it loses its free spontaneity because of the opacity of its thingness. Consciousness as experienced through the cogito loses its character of pure spontaneity. Instead, in the I as ego, "consciousness is loaded down; consciousness loses that character which renders it the absolute existant by virtue of its non-existence. It is heavy and ponderable" (TE, 40). And here we arrive at the underlying influence of Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik? and, specifically, the importance of the Neant (Nothingness) in Sartre's interpretation of, and divergence from, Husserl. Sartre's transcendental consciousness has an absolute existence by virtue of its nonexistence, its nothingness. Thus, every moment of our conscious life reveals a spontaneous creation or constitution out of nothing and it is this that is the basis of our freedom. In the revelation of the impersonal nature of consciousness as nothing, Sartre also approaches the equally troubling phenomenon of the human being constituted as object. His concern with the self as object does not dissipate and in fact anticipates his later work, as well as his understanding of Heidegger's concept of Geworfenheit ( thrownness): In fact, I am plunged into the world of objects; it is they that constitute the unity of my consciousness; it is they that present themselves with values, with attractive and repellent qualities-but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. And this is not a matter of chance, due to a momentary lapse of attention, but happens because of the very structure of consciousness. (TE, 49) In Sartre 's understanding, the self does not construct the world around it; instead, this existant self finds itself, or rather constitutes its self, by a secondary act of reflection. This is to say that impersonal consciousness

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is first confronted with reality and comes to "find" its egological nature later. The ego (self, cogito, I-Sartre does not really distinguish between the terms) is not the foundation of consciousness but a derivation that renders consciousness opaque and deprives it of its freedom and spontaneity by locking it into a state of objectness. Consciousness is revealed to Sartre as translucent, as a nothingness that fulfills itself in its intentional activity. What is for Husserl an emphasis on the noematic aspect of the phenomenon becomes for Sartre a theory of consciousness where the non being of the ego (or the relation of the ego to the Nothingness that is consciousness) is the primary phenomenological datum. 22 Here again we see the proximity of Sartre's understanding of Husser! to his understanding of Heidegger's realite-humaine in its relation to Nothingness in Was ist Metaphysik 1'-3 But what kind of I is it that exists through consciousness in such way that it is always its own annihilation? Sartre does not yet answer this question, but in La transcendence de l'ego, the I is presented as an "existant" and as being; so, like Heidegger, Sartre must depart from phenomenology and move toward the ontological investigation of being. The ramifications of this movement to a "collective" prepersonal consciousness will be discussed later in relation to Sartre's notions of responsibility and freedom. 24 What is essential at this point is to see how Sartre's rereading and reinterpretation of Husserl is based on his impressionistic understanding of the themes in Was ist Metaphysik? It is the exploration of these themes that leads Sartre closer to Heidegger in his work on Husserl. This is especially apparent in Sartre's investigation into human being as the intersection between being and consciousness. While this still follows the understanding of intentionality outlined by Husserl, it shifts the emphasis to an ontological investigation of the particular human being as the nexus of pure consciousness and object. This is not to say that Husserl's influence on Sartre was not profound, but, I would argue, this influence is more substantive in terms of methodology than in terms of content.

22. Maurice Natanson, "Phenomenology and Existentialism," Modnn Sdwolman 37 (1959):

1-10. 23. See Robert C. Solomon, "Sartre on Emotions," esp. 212-13; and Phyllis Berdt Kenevan, "Self-Consciousness and the Ego," both in Schilpp, 11te Phi/().mphy ofjP.an-Paul Sarfre. 24. For Sartre, this prepersonal consciousness is "collective" in that it presupposes any individual consciousness in its objectified form. This is not to say that prepersonal consciousness is shared but that, inasmuch as consciousness equals nothingness, it does not belong to any one ego but to all. This differs from Heidegger's category of das Man, which is the prepersonal collective social nexus that is the basis of all our meanings and possibilities. See int.-oduction.

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Nausea The most striking example of Sartre's proximity to Heidegger and his movement toward ontology before he came to "seriously study" Heidegger's work can be seen in the novel Nausea written in its first form between 1931 and 1933 and then rewritten while Sartre was studying Husserl in Berlin. The final version of Nausea is quite apparently written during Sartre's phenomenological phase, when he was most heavily under Husserl's influence. This can be seen from the very beginning of the novel, when Roqucntin explains the purpose of keeping his diary: "The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly-let none of the nuances or small happenings escape though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, this street, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which have changed" (N, 1). In Nausea, Sartre relies heavily on the descriptive analysis of phenomena, which is the cornerstone of phenomenology. But in the act of keeping a diary, Sartre's concern with the derived and precarious nature of human consciousness shows his divergence from HusserI. In the diary we see a concrete example of the act of reflection that transforms consciousness int~ an object: once something is reflected on and written down, it changes; it becomes an object to be observed. Hence while the tone of the novel is Husserlian and still conserves the interest in intentionality and the observation of phenomena, the overall content is more concerned with such Heideggerian themes as Geworfenheit ("thrownness," which Sartre translates as "contingency"), being-in-the-world, and the anxiety that arises in the face of nothingness. Nausea is the story of how an individual existent, Antoine Roquentin, comes to realize that his self, his ego, is derived from a sort of nothingness. This leads him to the subsequent realization that he is trapped in the objectness of his self, yet is aware of his consciousness, which is before him. The concern of Nausea is to understand being as it is manifested in the human being, and here we see how Sartre's interpretation of Heidegger's philosophy diverges from Heidegger's own project. Sartre, like Jean Wahl, Jean Hyppolite, and many others, took Henry Corbin's translation of Dasein as realite-humaine quite literally and therefore assumed that Heidegger was investigating the human actor. 25 For Sartre, Dasein and human being are equivocal terms. This move will be explored more fully in relation to Being and Nothingness, but the important point is that Sartre always equated Dasein with human-reality. 25. On Corbin's translation of Daseirt as realitf-hmnain.e, see Denis Hollier, ed., Le Colvge de sociologie: 1937-1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 55.

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The opening of the novel also suggests that Sartre had perhaps read more Heidegger than he let on. Roquentin is writing his diary to keep track of things, a Husserlian theme, but the reason he is keeping this diary is that he has come to the realization that the world around him is totally contingent. Roquentin first experiences his nausea at the beach while holding a stone. This episode appears to be based on Husserl 's phenomenological tactic of the "epoche," where one withdraws from one's natural attitude to study and observe objects. In Roquentin's case, however, the event is more a shock of anxiety, a sudden wave of nausea with the realization of the arbitrary nature of the world he lives in. This notion of contingency is much closer to Heidegger's understanding of being-in-theworld and the two related concepts of present-at-hand ( Vorhandenheit) and ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) than to any Husserlian formulation. The key to understanding Heidegger's early influence on Sartre is to see how Heidegger's "forgotten self' relates to Sartre 's "unreflected ego." When Dasein is doing something, there is a certain transparency to the action, but this transparency becomes opaque when something goes wrong. If one is hammering and the hammer breaks or is too heavy for the job, then we become aware of the hammer as object. When this happens, the activity or equipment in question becomes present-at-hand: "The modes of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy all have the function of bringing to the fore the characteristic of presence-at-hand in what is ready-to-hand. But the ready-to-hand is not thereby just observed and stared at as something present-at-hand; the presence-at-hand which makes itself known is still bound up in the readiness to hand of equipment" (BT, 104). In the realization of the object as present-at-hand in the face of a breakdown, Heidegger leaves space for the Husserlian understanding of intentionality. Sartre parallels Heidegger in La transcendence de l'ego by limiting the consciousness of the "consciousness of ..." (which is intentionality in the Husserlian sense) to reflected consciousness, and leaving originary consciousness oblivious, thus entirely transparent and fluid, though still intentional. For Heidegger, the breakdown revealed through conspicuousness, obtn1siveness, or obstinacy does not lead to the sort of paralysis that affects Sartre's Roquentin. In Heidegger's understanding of the breakdown, the equipment in question does not become something permanently "present-at-hand" that is observed. Instead, in its capacity as a "broken hammer" or a "hammer that is too heavy for the job," it is absorbed back into the world of equipment: To the everydayness of Being-in-the-world there belongs certain modes of concern. These permit the entities with which we concern ourselves to be encountered in such a way that the worldly character

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of what is within-the-world comes to the fore. When we concern ourselves with something, the entities which are most closely ready-tohand may be met as something unusable, not properly adapted for the use we have decided upon. The tool turns out to be damaged, or the material unsuitable. In each of these cases equip11U3nt is here readyto-hand. We discover its unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the circumspection of the dealings with which we use it. (BT, 120) But this sort of breakdown can also reveal things that are unusable or missing and that make us withdraw from our concern with the ready-tohand world in a way that reveals to us the nature of the world we live in. These things reveal themselves as un-ready-to-hand: When we notice what is un-ready-to-hand, that which is ready-to-hand enters the mode of obtrusiveness. The more urgently we need what is missing, and the more authentically it is encountered in its un-readiness-to-hand, all the more obtrusive does that which is ready-to-hand become-so much so, indeed, that it seems to lose its character of readiness-to-hand. It reveals itself as something just present-at-hand and no more, which cannot be budged without the thing that is missing. The helpless way in which we stand before it is a deficient mode of concern, and as such it uncovers the Being-just-present-at-hand and no more of something ready-to-hand. . Anything which is unready-to-hand in this way is disturbing to us, and enables us to see the obstinacy of that with which we must concern ourselves in the first instance before we do anything else. (BT, 103) lfwe cannot find our hammer, in our intentional contemplation of the hammer the whole of our referential nexus is lit up in a way that reveals the nexus to us. This is disturbing to us because we are forced to consider the framework of the world into which we are thrown and which we did not create before we can attempt to make sense of anything within that framework. Because Dasein is a temporal construction (thrown, falling, projecting), it understands itself as falling by absorbing itself into projects. But in this un-ready-to-hand state, our absorption in concerned action is arrested by the contemplation of the world into which we are thrown. This leaves us in a state of ceaseless wonderment and contemplation. Sartre's Roquentin does not attempt to understand objects through detached observation, as Husserl would prescribe, but is constantly assaulted by objects in their contingency. Every thing appears to Roquentin through the lens of Heidegger's obstinacy, which leads him to realize the complete contingency of the world he lives in and forces him into a state of ceaseless contemplation, where the arbitrary nature of the objects that surround him (his self included) consume him. In this

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light, Roquentin 's diary is not so much a phenomenological study as an attempt to retain control over the objects around him. But the contingent nature of the object is beyond human control. Sartre's understanding of contingency is based on Heidegger's concept of facti city, but in the work of Sartre facticity becomes diabolical in nature. Contingency is the absurdity of the seemingly random factors that surround us: birth, death, geography, era. For Sartre, as opposed to Heidegger, it does not take a breakdown of equipment to reveal this state of contingency because it is always already there in the things themselves. "I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross, absurd being" (N, 134). For Sartre, it is the absurdity of this contingency that reveals the ungrounded nature of existence. Confronted with this groundlessness, Roquentin experiences nausea and anguish ( angoisse): "Anyhow, I was certain that I was afraid or had some other feeling of that sort" (N, 2). This fear sends Roquentin fleeing back to the comfort of a predictable anonymous human existence that avoids the confrontation with that which frightens us, as in Heidegger's account of Angst. In Heidegger, it is the confrontation with death that leads us to flee into the anonymity of das Man (the one). In Sartre, it is the disturbance he feels in the face of objects (as un-ready-to-hand) that leads him to realize the contingency of his existence. This contingency reveals to him the nothingness that is the basis of his existence. Whereas in Heidegger one flees in the face of death, in Sartre one flees in the face of nothingness. We will return to this crucial distinction between the two in our discussion of Being and Nothingness. Roquentin flees in the face of contingency. Before the senselessness of the world, he attempts to construct sense in the way scientists construct formulas. He tries to predict what will happen next and by doing so, he assures himself that the world is under his subjective control: Ten forty-five: nothing more to fear, they wpuld be here already. Unless it's the day for the man from Rouen. He comes every week. They reserve No. 2, on the second floor for him, the room with a bidet. He might still show up: he often drinks a beer at the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous" before going to bed. But he doesn't make too much noise .... Here he is now. Well, when I heard him come up the stairs, it gave me quite a thrill, it was so reassuring: what is there to fear in such a regular world? I think I am cured. (N, 3) This passage is actually a succinct description of what Heidegger terms ''inauthentic" existence, where one goes about the routine of one's life without ever questioning why one does what one does. Roquentin takes 127

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comfort in the routinization of life because it allows him to avoid his confrontation with anxiety. But once the transparency of Roquentin's everyday existence begins to turn opaque, he can no longer simply flee, since the contingency of the world is revealed even in his flight. For Sartre, the problem of being-in-the-world is expressed in terms of the conflict between the subject and the objects it encounters. Roquentin reflects: "Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts" (N, 10). The problem for Sartre extends beyond the issue of encountering objects, because he assigns thinglike status to humans as well. In Husserl, this problem is avoided through the transcendental I as the locus of pure intentionality. For Heidegger, Dasein is not mentalistic, though it cannot be said to be entirely outside the mind. In Sartre's understanding of consciousness and its relation to objects via the realiti-humaine (the human being), this issue is a foremost concern. Deviating from both Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre's understanding of existence as located in a particular human being is based on that being's relationship to contingency and by extension to nothingness. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce any thing from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingence is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. (N, 131) This notion of those who have tried to "overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary causal being" could be a reference to science or to Husserl himself. In either case, it mirrors the critique of science in Heidegger's Was ist MetajJhysik? Sartre's question is, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" which was also the starting point for Heidegger. The answer for Sartre in Nausea is that there is no reason, and the conclusions Sartre draws, while more Husserlian than Heideggerian, are based on his work in La transcendence de l'ego. Roquentin concludes: Now when I say "I," it seems hollow to me. I can't manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for no one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself

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wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin ... and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out. (N, 170) Here consciousness exists in its non being, but is always brought back to the human existant by virtue of the secondary reflection that constitutes consciousness of"the consciousness of ... "Antoine Roquentin's nausea is a direct result of his confrontation with the nothingness that is consciousness. Furthermore, for Roquentin to see himself as something instead of nothing, he would have to be an object in its absurd contingency. There is a definitive separation between things and consciousness in Nausea, which is the product of Sartre's reinterpretation of Husserl. The object (which will later be given the name en-soz) is an existence unto itself, it is self-contained, it is pure being and thus it is opaque. Consciousness, conversely, is in fact a nonbeing, a nothingness, which is why it is transparent. The difficulty for Sartre comes in understanding the human actor who is the site of unreflected pure consciousness and of derivative self-constituted reflective consciousness, with its objectlike characteristics. In the end, Sartre believed that Husserl had been unable to move past the "thinglike" (chosiste) conception of consciousness and that Husserl's work, with its transcendental ego, could not address the issue of nothingness, which is essential to an understanding of consciousness and, by extension, freedom. In Nausea, as in La transcendence de l'ego, Sartre was trying to rework Husserl so as to address the issues most important to him. But in his reworking of Husserl, Sartre found himself coming back to the themes he had absorbed from Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik?

Existentialism After Nausea was published in 1938, its success made Sartre a literary name. It was probably because of this success that L'imaginaire was published in 1940. 26 The 1930s brought enormous intellectual development for Sartre both as a novelist and a philosopher, but like the other members of the generation of 1933, his development was entirely intellectual and not political. Sartre's lack of interest in politics in the 1930s would become a recurring theme in interviews. 27 It was also the subject of serious reflection in his War Diaries, written as a soldier in the French army 26. While working on Nausea, Sartre also kept up his philosophical production in the form of two works, I!imag;ina.ti.on ( 1936), and L'imag;inairf' (1940). Originally intended as one piece based on his thesis from the ENS, the second half (L'imaginaire) was rejected by Alcan in 1936, leading to a four-year delay in its publication. This is of note because between 1936 and 1940 Sartre shifted his emphasis from Husser) to Heidegger. 2'7. Interview with Sartre in SariTf' par b.ti-miuw: lln film, directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Con tat.

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and as a prisoner of war during World War II. This discussion of political inactivity is couched in a reflection on his intellectual development and his turn toward Heidegger as an attempt to find a philosopher who could lead him from the world of "ideas" to the world of "action." The War Diaries also served as a testing ground for Sartre to "work out" his philosophy of action in preparation for writing Being and Nothingness. Thus, to understand Sartre's philosophical and literary work in its postwar incarnation, we must look to Sartre's diaries and the influences he cites in the 1930s that led him to Husser! and Heidegger-namely, Jean Wahl, Raymond Aron, and Henry Corbin-within the framework of the influence of the war itself. Jean Wahl's Vers le concret first appeared in 1932 as an article for Recherches philosophiques and was published in book form soon after. 28 From this work, and from Wahl's later Etudes kierkegaardiennes, Sartre became acquainted with Heidegger, presented in relation to Hegel and Kierkegaard. Significantly, Wahl's analysis of the concept of the "unhappy consciousness" in Hegel would lead Sartre to his own understanding of the structure of human being as manifested in "bad faith." But the most important influence that Wahl had on Sanre was through Wahl's understanding of Heidegger's concept of angst, 29 which was derived from, and considered compatible with, Kierkegaard's concept of "anxiety." 30 Sartre accepted this compatibility between Kierkegaard and Heidegger unquestioningly. Citing Wahl as his source, he quotes Kierkegaard to demonstrate their proximity. Kierkegaard (Le Concept d'angoisse, 85): "the rapport between anguish and its object, is a thing which is nothing (and we say this in everyday language when we state that our anguish is nothing). ."The influence on Heidegger is clear; his use of the everyday phrase; "we are anguished by nothing" (it was nothing .), can be found word for word in Being and Time. But it is true that for Heidegger, anguish is anguish-in-front-of-Nothing (Neant) which is not the Nothing (Rien) but, as Wahl says, "the cosmic fact which is the detachment of existence." In Kierkegaard's case it is a psychological anguish and a nothing/ rien that is in the spirit. This "nothing" is in fact possibility. Ang·uish in the face of Nothing in Heidegger? Anguish in the face of freedom, with Kierkegaard? In my understanding they are one and the same thing because freedom is the appearance of Nothingness in the world. 31 28. See the section on jean Wahl in chap. 3. 29. An~l, translated into French as angoisse (anguish). 30. This is presented in jean Wahl's hudes kinkRganrdiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938). 31. Sartre, CarneL~ de La drole d.e I,'UeTTe, 342-43.

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Here we see the formulation derived from Sartre's work on Husser} and Heidegger, but, following \Vahl's emphasis on the relation of Heidegger to Kierkegaard, Sartre was able to present Heidegger as a philosopher of the individual. This reinforced his (and his readers') understanding of Dasein as realiti-humaine (a particular human being). We have already seen the influence that Raymond Aron had on Sartre in the early 1930s and his role in Sartre's decision to study in Berlin. In the late 1930s, the publication of Aron's Introduction a la philosophie de l'histoire led Sartre to Heidegger's section on historicality in Being and Time but also to a nascent appreciation of history in the Hegelian sense. 32 Sartre's discussion of Aron in his War Diaries also shows the fascination with history that consumed the generation of 1933 in the years before World War II. Aron led Sartre to consider Heidegger's concept of history, but through the lens of Alexandre Kojeve's Hegel seminar. Maurice MerleauPonty also played an important role in Sartre's development. While Sartre, playing the role of Aron, led Merleau-Ponty to the study of Husserl and phenomenology in 1933, Merleau-Ponty led Sartre to an articulated understanding of Hegel and Marxism after the war. In the late 1930s it was enough that Sartre came to see the importance of Hegel's work as a philosophical methodology that could engage the particular problems philosophy encountered through phenomenological investigation. This compatibility between phenomenology and Hegel was derived from Sanre's contact with Aron and Merleau-Ponty and is the direct result of their participation in Kojeve's seminar on Hegel at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. But the most important factor in Sartre's understanding of Heidegger is Henry Corbin's translation of Heidegger's work. Corbin's translation of Was ist Metaphysik? appeared in 1931 and was republished, along with translations of Vom We5en des Grundes and two sections of Being and Time, in 1938. 33 Sartre describes the event of this translation in terms of the contingency of circumstance and history. It is probably best to consider it in this light, rather than assign it the position of a specific "influence." Corbin's translation of Heidegger appeared to Sartre's "situation, his generation, his epoque" just when it "had to": It was for us that Corbin made the translation. It stirred our first interest in Heidegger's philosophy but we were not ready for it. It took 12 32. For an analysis of this work in relation to Aron's participation in Kojeve's Hegel seminar, see chap. 3. 33. Despite reports to the contrary, Heidegger had seen and approved all of Corbin's translations. The fundamental problem with Corbin's translation of Da.~t'in as rralifi.. h1lmaine may not have seemed as egregious before Sartre's popularization of the term in his existentialist philosophy. See the section on Corbin in chap. 2.

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or 15 years for Heidegger's thought to arrive in France. It came little by little through the translations in Bifur ( 1930) and Recherches Philosophiques (1933) until finally it came to tmly organize itself and to reclaim its teachings. More profound still is that this enthusiastic interest was complicitly responsible for, and led to, the production of such works as Vtm le conCTl!t by Jean Wahl which had its source in the antiquated state of French philosophy and the desire we felt to rejuvenate it. 34 The language of this passage is especially important in light of my claim that it was the impression that Heidegger's work had on Sartre in 1931 that coded his whole project in a way that led him back to Heidegger in the late 1930s. Indeed, Sartre's language implies a return to something that was already there, and here we have a key to understanding the domestication of Heidegger in France. By the time Sartre and his contemporaries were "ready" to encounter Heidegger, on the eve of World War II, Heidegger's work had already been in France for over a decade. Through translation, it had been made French, and in the works of Wahl, Kojeve, and their students, it had taken on many attributes of French philosophy. In Wahl and Kojeve's use of Heidegger we see the conservation of the Cartesian cogito, the emphasis on the individual, and the incorporation of Heidegger's work into a teleological structure. What was strange in Heidegger's philosophy had become familiar, what had been unheimlich was now heimisch. Sartre's generation was ready to understand Heidegger's philosophy precisely because it had become understandable. Sartre poses the question, "Why Heidegger?"-as opposed to Husserl or any other philosopher-and claims that his generation's identification with Heidegger at the time of World War II was based largely on their identification with his language of resoluteness, being-towards-death, thrownness, and authenticity. Sartre was not unaware of the proximity of that language to the language of fascism: There is no doubt that there was a vague nostalgia for fascism. And I recognized that in my own thought there was a hint of fascism (historicity, Being-in-the-world, all that tied man to his era, all that bound man to his roots in the earth, in his situation). But I hated fascism and the relation of these terms to fascism served like a pinch of salt that one puts on a tart just to make it appear all the sweeter by contrast. 35 In Heidegger's philosophy, there is an antiestablishment element that is not based on a specific political alliance. Being and Time's critique of science, of the leveling nature of popular culture, and of the ossified nature of academic philosophy was equally appealing to conservatives 34. Sanre, Carmi.\ riP In drole de guPYTe, 407. 35. Ibid., 361.

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such as Carl Schmitt and Ernstjiinger as it was with Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre. 36 We have briefly discussed the implications of Corbin's translation of Dasein as realiti-humaine, which led to the inference that Heidegger was a "humanist" and that his was primarily an investigation into humanbeing. By this logic, Heidegger's concern was with the freedom of the il)dividual. This might explain why Sartre felt he could employ Heidegger's work against fascist totalitarianism. Corbin translated Geworfenheit (thrownness) as sa dereliction (one's abandonment), which also gave the work a more subjective tone~ Sartre seized on this and modified the translation to dilaissement, which added the connotation of helplessness, of being without recourse to aid, and intensified the identification with a specific abandoned subject finding its way in the world. This translation shows the generation of 1933's need to represent being as a being, to fix a specific representable site for being. Corbin's translation of eigentlich and uneigentlich as "authentic" and "inauthentic" also had serious ramifications for Sartre's work, especially when coupled with his understanding of the concept of "bad faith." But here we have already moved into a discussion of Being and Nothingness, which is the product of this melange of philosophical currents and events and which led to the popularization of Heidegger as an existentialist thinker after World War II.

Being and Nothingness Being and Nothingness is far more than a long footnote to Being and Time. It is Sartre's confrontation with Heidegger,just as La transcendence de l'egowas Sartre's confrontation with Husserl. The difficulty in approaching Being and Nothingness lies in Sartre's newfound philosophical style, which relishes wordplay and seemingly paradoxical statements that imply the stmcture of the phenomenon Sartre is describing: "Being is what it is not and is not what it is." Furthermore, Sartre's habit of shifting from term to term without rigorous definitions seems to be at its worst. While already in the previous work there appeared to be almost no distinction between such terms as "cogito," "ego," "I," and "human reality," in Being and Nothingness

36. This position is contested in works such as Richard Wolin, Tlze Politi.c.s of RPing: The Political Thought of Martin lleideggf'r (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Tom Rockmore, On 1/PidPgg"'s Nazism and Philo.wphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., The J-leidegger Ca.re: On Philosophy a11rl Polit;cs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). My point is not that Heidegger's early philosophical work was antithetical to National Socialism but that its antiestablishment critique of contemporary philosophy could be used by philosophers from a wide range of political perspectives.

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there is a fluidity of shifting terms that evolve as new pieces of the puzzle are revealed, but without ever concretizing the moments of change. Thus when "freedom" turns out to be "nothingness," it is not distinguished from the consciousness from which it is derived, which has previously been defined as "nothingness." This shifting vocabulary seems to revolve around the relation of being to nothingness, and can thus be unpacked by understanding the work as the logical extension of the ideas Sartre had been working on since 1931. 37 Sartre begins by establishing the two categories of being he is going to investigate, except that now he employs the language of Hegel in his definitions. 38 The first category is the en-soi (in-itselO, which is being-initself, the object, totally self-sufficient. The second category is the pour-soi (for-itself), which is the consciousness of the reflected ego, the cogito. The en-soi is described as self-sufficient being and as such is always an object in its opacity. The en-soi "is what it is and as such has no secret." This is to say that there is nothing more to the en-soi than what it is. The massive and opaque qualities of objects that were so terrifying in Nausea are in fact the simple properties of the en-soi, which is impervious to all becoming, transforming, changing, or temporality. The en-soi is simply an object in all its contingency. The en-soi has no reason for being, it simply is, in the sense that a rock has no concern for its own being but is simply a rock. The en-soi thus cannot be seen as either possible or impossible because "the possible is the structure of the pour-soi, this is to say that it [the pour-soi] exists in the other region of Being [ etre.pour-soi] . Being-initself [etre-en-soi] is neither possible nor impossible, it is" (EN, 34). In the simplest formulation, the en-soi is an object and as such it exists in complete self-sufficiency with no cares or regard. It is without intentionality. The en-soi, as being, can therefore be reduced to this formula: "Being is. Being is in-itself [en-soi]. Being is what it is" (EN, 34). The "other region of Being" is the pour-soi or being-for-itself which is in fact the mode of human being. The pour-soi is the free subject that continually creates its own existence. This formula is familiar because what Sartre now calls the pour-soi is in fact the precarious position of the realite-humaine (human being) constituted as the opaque object of the reflective consciousness

37. But see also Joseph S. Catalano, A Commrntary onJean-Paul Sartrr! l "Bfing and Nothingne5S" (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1980). 38. In "Sartre et Ia conscience malheureuse," Magazine {;t/Rrairr!, no. 293 (November 1991): 59-61, Juliette Simont claims that Sartre had not read Hegel's Plumom.l"TTology of Spiril when he wrote Being and Notltinr;rvs.5. In Sarfre and llegel: The Varintiom of an Enirr;ma irt "/,'Etre rt fp Neanl" (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), Christopher Fry contends that Sartre did not seriously study Hegel (3). But see also "From Hegel to Sartre," in Judith Butler, Subjn:ts of Desirr! (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

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(ego) and the nothingness of pure consciousness. 39 This leads us to the third key element in Sartre's work, which is nothingness. Transparent consciousness in its nonbeing is the opening for nothingness. In Being and Nothingness, this theme is enunciated through the investigation into the relationship between the two terms d1at compose the title. Being in its fullest state is me en-so~ and nomingness is the consciousness mat manifests itself in its non being. The relationship between these two concepts is actually the human condition as being-for-itself ( etw-pour-soz), where the human being exists both as o~ectttnd as consciousness. We exist as beings with objective qualities, but as Sartre demonstrated in his investigation of me imagination, the non being of consciousness is also petpetually present in us and it is this void that "perpetually haunts Being" (EN, 47). Here it is instructive to take a step back and see how Sartre differs from Heidegger in two key aspects. Sartre was able to move past the problem of subject-object dualism by placing consciousness outside the body, and here he loosely followed Heidegger's model in Being and Time (although Heidegger did not locate consciousness outside the body); in Being and Nothingness, Sartre makes it clear that he sees no distinction between Heidegger's Dasein and his own understanding of human consciousness and claims that his own formulation opens being to more extensive analysis: "Certainly we could apply to consciousness the definition which Heidegger reserves for Dasein and say that it is a being for whom, in its being, its being is in question. But it would be necessary to complete this definition and formulate it more' like this: consciousness is a being for whom, in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself' (EN, 29). Sartre's modification is· reminiscent of Hegel's understanding of selfconsciousness, but also explains Sartre's understanding of Hegel through the formula he derived to move past Husserl by using Heidegger. Sartre's use of Hegel is therefore quite particular and primarily shores up his own construction. Sartre does not follow Hegel but uses Hegel to modify Heidegger. "Hegel's failure has shown us that the only possible departure is from the Cartesian cogito" (EN, 308). Sartre does not distinguish between Dasein and human consciousness; therefore the sole starting place for his investigation is the ego cogito. "This is a sufficient condition, for my being consciousness of being consciousness of that table suffices in fact for me to be conscious of it. That is of course not sufficient to permit me to affirm that the table exists in-itself [en-soi]-but rather that it exists for me [pour moz] " (EN, 18). The pour-soi always implies a negation in its relation to a being that is not itself but is understood through the structure of reflective consciousness. 39. This was the conclusion of L'imagi1wire.

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This leads us to the second point: in his formulation of the concept of nothingness, Sartre intentionally sought to engage and move beyond Heidegger through his investigation into human being. Taking Heidegger's H'Gs ist Metaphysik? as his starting point, he attempts to show that nothingness is not, as Heidegger contended, a means by which one comes to understand being, but instead being's diametrical opposite. The nothing that is manifested in (and turns out to be) free consciousness is actually the great threat to being and not merely a means of investigation, as it was for Heidegger. Thus Sartre's project, as opposed to Heidegger's, is to explore the fundamentally contentious relationship between being and nothingness: How does one maintain the opaque resistance of things and the subjectivity of thought at the same time? This, for Sartre, is the fundamental problem of ontology. This conflict betw·een being and nothingness has Hegelian overtones, but the relationship cannot be seen as dialectical. This is because nothingness has a need for being, but being (en-sot) has no need for nothingness. There is no reciprocity, no resolution, and this is why Sartre does not present nothingness in opposition to being but in correlation to being, despite their fundamentally contentious relationship. "Nothingness can be nihilated only on the foundation of Being; if nothingness can be given, it is neither before nor after Being, nor in a general way outside of Being. Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of Being like a worm" (EN, 57). Sartre attempts to explain this relationship through the pour-soi of the human being who embodies tpis conflict. Thus the definition of the pour-soi as that which "is what it is not and is not what it is" becomes more clear when human being is defined as the locus where nothingness emerges into being. But to demystify this seemingly paradoxical claim, we must proceed to an investigation into Sartre's understanding of the relation between nothingness and the structure of consciousness. A full exploration of this relationship is conducted in the first section of Being and Nothingness. Sartre follows Heidegger's model from Being and Time and begins his investigation by exploring the questioning behavior of consciousness. 40 As in his earlier works, consciousness in this questioning mode turns out to be the opening from which the nothingness emerges. But Sartre moves further away from Heidegger as he expands his understanding of nothingness, derived from the negative. He develops this notion based on his work on the imagination and concludes 40. Here, the slippage from Dasrin to human consciousness has occurred. Furthermore, because Sartre presented our only starting point for investigation into consciousness as the cogito (this is based on Husserl), these tenns seem to have been conflated as wen, though Sartre does distinguish between reflective and pure consciousness when it serves his purpose.

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that the negative is the fundamental mode of consciousness. For Sartre, consciousness is the opening for nothingness, and without consciousness there would be no place for nothingness in the world of being (en-soi), which is its own self.·sufficient totality. Nothingness originates with and constantly accompanies human being (realite-humaine) and thus manifests itself in the many negations of everyday life by which we make sense of the world we live in. 41 It is through the nothingness that we constntct ourselves and the world, hence it is by virtue of nothingness that we are free. This was Sartre's point in L'imaginaire. The realization by the reflective consciousness that this freedom is nothingness also leads the hurn.1n being to anxiety or anguish: Anguish then is the reflective apprehension of freedom by itself. In this sense it is mediation, for although it is immediate consciousness of itself, it arises from the negation of the appeals of the world. It appears at the moment when I disengage myself from the world where I had been engaged-in order to apprehend myself as a consciousness which possesses a pre-ontological comprehension of its essence and a prejudicature sense of its possibilities. (EN, 77) This formulation seems to mirror the concept of breakdown in Heidegger's understanding of being-in-the-world, where the transparent coping of being-ready-to-hand (zuhanden) is interrupted and made opaque as the intentional reflection of being-present-at-hand ( vorhanden). For Heidegger, this reveals the constructed character of the world. For Sartre, it relates to the untethered ego that finds itself as self-constitutive and confronted with the nothingness that is the basis of its constitution. For Sartre, this angoisse leads to the realization that the individual is solely responsible for all aspects of its existence as they are constituted on the basis of nothing: I emerge alone and in anguish confronting the unique and original project which constitutes my being; all the barriers, all the guard rails collapse, annihilated by the consciousness of my freedom. I do not have nor can I have recourse to any value against the fact that it is I who sustain values in being. Nothing can ensure me against myself, cut off from the world and from my essence by this nothingness which I am. I have to realize the meaning of the world and of my essence: I decide, alone, without justification and without excuse. (EN, 77) Sartre's understanding of anguish owes more to Kierkegaard than it does to Heidegger, but, as we have seen, Sartre was inclined to see the two as fundamentally compatible. 41. Herbert Marcuse, "Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre's Lelre d le neant," and Pil.enomenowgical Resmdt 8, no. 3 (March 1948): 309-15.

Phil~siJflhy

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In Hcidegger's Being and Time, Angst is the reaction to the realization of the possibility of no longer being possible, as manifested in one's confrontation with death. Similarly, Sartre's angoisse can be provoked by a confrontation with death but is really a confrontation with the nothingness of freedom. For Sartre, this is a crucial distinction because it moves the fundamental investigation of being away from the relation of beingtowards-death to the relation of being and freedom. Sartre understood angoisse as the fear of the nothingness of freedom, not the fear of death; thus he claimed to have moved beyond the issue of death and beyond Heidegger. Sartre's construction mirrored Heidegger's model in Being and Time (where Dasein flees from the confrontation with death to the everydayness of inauthentic existence), but here too Sartre's understanding was as Kierkegaardian as it was Heideggerian. For Sartre, the flight from anguish is a lie because it attempts to ignore the disquietude of total and complete responsibility; even when fleeing from anguish we are still acknowledging it: "In a word, I flee to avoid the anguish but I cannot avoid [the fact] that I am fleeing and this flight from anguish is thus a mode of having consciousness of anguish" (EN, 82). This flight in the face of anguish, and ultimately in the face of responsibility, is what Sartre calls "bad faith." If one does not experience anguish, it is not because one does not have it but because one has fled from it in bad faith. Even in this form, anguish still manifests itself as that from which you have run. This too mirrors Heidegger and his understanding of uneigentlich (inauthentic) existence in Being and Time. For Heidegger, inauthentic existence is produced in the flight from Dasein confrontation with its finite structure. This confrontation with Dasein's ultimate possibility, the possibility of no longer being possible, is what Heidegger calls being-towardsdeath. When confronted with being-towards-death, Dasein's immediate response is to flee into the everyday concerns that can occupy Dasein and distract it from the angst that being-towards-death produces. This state of inauthentic existence is categorized by Heidegger as Verfallen (falling) and is the realm of our everyday existence. In Sartre's schema, the flight is not from our own finitude but from our responsibility and freedom. This flight from responsibility becomes "the source for an infinite number of excuses for our weaknesses and failures" (EN, 97). But-and here Sartre makes the same claim as Heidegger in reference to the distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence-this flight from responsibility and the subsequent refuge in bad faith should not be seen in a normative sense because, according to Sartre, bad faith is inherent in the pour-soi's structure. The pour-soi in its negative capacity cannot be what it is (unlike the en-soi, which is what it is) because of the internal condition of negativity that lies at the heart of it. Even if in good faith the pour-soi

s

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sought to be what it is, it would still be that which it is not. As a result, it would find itself in bad faith. Good faith seeks to flee the inner disintegration of my being in the direction of the in-itself (en-soi), which it should be and is not. Bad faith seeks to flee the in-itself (en-soi) by means of the inner disintegration of my being. But it denies this very disintegration as it denies that it is itself bad faith. (EN, Ill) Bad faith is trying to be what you are not. Good faith is being what you are. The stn1cture of the pour-soi in good faith is to be "that which it is not" by virtue of its negativity, and therefore it is alwayi in bad faith even in good faith. The structure of the pour-soi makes good faith an impossibility and the attempt to achieve it bad faith. The escape from this paradox leads to something like Heidegger's category of authentic existence, and Sartre makes this explicit in a footnote: "It is indifferent whether one is in good or bad faith, because bad faith re-apprehends good faith and slides to the very origin of the project of good faith; this does not mean that we cannot radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of Being which was previously corrupted. This selfrecovery we shall call authenticity, the description of which has no place here" (EN, Ill). That description never occurs, and the circular nature of the dilemma as manifested in the very structure of the pour-soi makes any radical escape from bad faith seem impossible, or at least unfathomable, based on Sartre's work to this point. Furthermore, this paradoxical situation, presented without means of reconciliation, eliminates the possibility of a dialectical understanding of being and instead presents what Merleau-Ponty described as a truncated dialectic, but which appears to be more like a perpetual circle: The Being of human reality ( realite-humaine) is suffering because it rises in Being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it, precisely because it could not attain the initself (en-soi) without losing itself as for-itself (pour-soz). Human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state. (EN, 134) The proximity of Sartre's language to Hegel's is attributable to the influence of Jean Wahl. This passage also foreshadows the second section of Being and Nothingness, which seeks to investigate the immediate structures of the pour-soi and the related phenomena of temporality and transcendence. In this section Sartre is closest to Heidegger, but there are deliberate shifts of emphasis related largely to his understanding of realite-humaine.

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What Sartre calls the facticity of human reality is the application of Heidegger's term from Being and Time to his own understanding of contingency. Whereas Heidegger assigns the term to the situation that Dasein finds itself in, Sartre attaches the term to human consciousness and understands facticity as the contingency of a particular fact or set of facts that might as well not have been. Sartre's emphasis is on the absurdity of the situation we find ourselves in as realite-humaine. It is mere happenstance that the pour-soi "is in so far as it appears in a condition it has not chosen, as Pierre is a French bourgeois in 1942, as Schmitt was a Berlin worker in 1870; it is in so far as it is thrown [jeter/ werfen] into a world and abandoned [sa dereliction/ Geworfenheit] in a "situation"; it is as pure contingency in that for it [the pour-soiJ, as for other things in the world like this wall, this tree, this cup, the original question can be posited: 'Why is this being exactly such and not otherwise?'" (EN, 122). The pour-soi finds itself in the absurd position of being "something of which it is not the foundation" and which can only come to make sense of the world via the reflective cogito. For Sartre, our reaction to the facticity of being-in-theworld is manifest through the positing of a reflexive cogito that "makes sense" of the contingent world we live in. This move is a combination of Husserl's concept of intentionality, where we understand the world based on the theoretical intuition of an individual ego, with Heidegger's understanding of being-in-the-world as thrownness ( Geworfenheit). But Sartre's construct threatens the integrity of both systems because it redefines Husserl 's understanding of facticity in terms of Heidegger and forces Heidegger's philosophy back toward the intellectualism of the primacy of theory that it sought to escape. Sartre shifts the conditions of facticity and Geworfenheit to address the particular anguish of the individual human being as abandoned in the world. This allows Sartre to expand his investigation into the pour-soi as the being who is not sufficient unto itself by it'i contingency: But this apprehension of Being as a lack of Being in the face of Being is first a comprehension on the part of the cogito of its own contingency. I think therefore I am. What am I? A being which is not its own foundation, which qua Being, could be other than it is to the extent that it does not account for its being. This is the first intuition of our own contingency which Heidegger gives as the first motivation for the passage from the inauthentic to the authentic. The cogito, and the Cartesian cogito no less, becomes the basis for Heidegger's "call of conscience" (Ruf des Gewissens). Sartre goes on to chastise Heidegger for not following this line of investigation into the field of ethics: "Heidegger's description shows all too clearly his anxiety to establish an ontological foundation for an ethics, with which he claims

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not to be concerned, as also to reconcile his humanism with the religious sense of the transcendent" (EN, 122). How exactly Sartre understands Heidegger's "humanism" is unclear. What is clear is that Sartre maintains Heidegger's basic structure while distancing himself from Heidegger's conclusions. For Sartre, the basis for anything like an authentic existence is the choices we make in the face of the contingency of our existence. The pour-soi is revealed as a lack, a totality that can never be total. Facticity is not then a substance of which the pour-soi would be the atlribute and which would produce thought without exhausting itself in that very production. It simply resides in the pour-soi as a memory of Being, as its unjustifiable presence in the world. Being-in'!itself [en-soi] can found its Nothingness but not its Being. In its decompression it annihilates itself as pour-soi and this becomes its foundation as poursoi, but its contingency as en-soi remains out of reach. (EN, 127) Facticity is what remains of the en-soi (pure being) in the pour-soi, and as such it is the basis on which reflective consciousness is founded, but it cannot return the pour-soi to the position of en-soi. Instead, it simply indicates the pour-soz"'s relation to pure being through memory. What the pour-soi lacks is not any thing or object in particular but being itself. The pour-soi does not find itself as being in relation t.o the nothingness that is its freedom. "The pour-soi, as the foundation of itself, is the surge of negation. The pour-soi founds itself in as much as it denies itself a certain Being or manner of Being" (EN, 131). The being that the pour-soi denies itself is the being of the en-soi. In its negating capacity, the pour-soi cannot be simply what "it is" without losing this freedom and becoming a mere thing. To better understand this structure of the pour-soi, which is the structure of human being, Sartre turns his attention to the nature of temporality. Sartre uses the categories provided by Heidegger in Being and Time (where Heidegger defines the temporal nature of Dasein as ek-stasis, outstanding), but Sartre also uses temporality to explain the nature of the pour-soi as continuous negation. For Heidegger, time is the main property of being and thus constitutes being's horizon. Sartre uses the term to show that the past is what was and therefore is no longer. This negation of the present transforms it into something that has the properties of an object via memory. The past is not an object but has all the properties of an object because it no longer is. "If already I am no longer what I was, it is still necessary that I have to be so in the unity of an annihilating synthesis which I myself sustain in Being; otherwise I would have no relation of any sort with what I am no longer, and my full positivity would be exclusive of the non-being essential to becoming" (EN, 161).

1 Ht r"ltf:S I ntAUING

Sartre interprets Hegel's Wesen ist was Gewesen ist to fit his own negating system. Here one's past constitutes one's being in that it is what one was, but in the present one faces what one will become. It is precisely in the present that realiti-humaine is continually in contact with being and nothingness: I confront what I am, which, by the time I reflect on it, is no longer what I am but what I was: "The present is precisely this negation of Being, this flight from Being inasmuch as Being is there as that which one evades. The pour-soi is present to Being in the form of flight; the present is a perpetual flight in the face of Being. Thus we have precisely defined the fundamental meaning of the Present: the Present is not" (EN, 167-68). The present is the manifestation of the negative character of the pour-soi. For Sartre, the key property of the pour-soi in its temporality is its negating capacity as that which is always oriented toward the future. The pour-soi is constantly constituting and reconstituting itself through its free acts, which are always future-oriented. "In this sense the pour-soi has to be its future because it can be the foundation of what it is only before itself and beyond its Being. It is the very nature of the pour-soi that it must be an always future hollow" (EN, 172). Sartre's temporal stnicture implies a profound shift in emphasis between Sartre and Heidegger. In his temporal structure, Sartre relies almost entirely on the Aristotelian understanding of time and thus uses the categories of past, present, and future with little or no reflection on those categories. By contrast, part of Heidegger's project in Being and Time was to red1ink Aristotle's concept of time and to provide a new understanding that corresponds to Dasein's own temporal structure as being-in-the-world. Sartre adopted Heidegger's categories and his basic structure but did not take the departure from Aristotle seriously because he was more interested in defining the negating nature of the pour-soi (which he does using the traditional categories of past, present, and future). Heidegger's understanding of time conserves the Aristotelian model as what he calls "public" or "now" time. This is time as measurement. This move is similar to the one he uses to redefine human being's primary mode of being-in-the-world as nonreflective coping (ready-to-hand), while at the same time conserving Husserl's concept of intentionality in the contemplation of things (present-at-hand). In his understanding of time Heidegger wants to show a similar formula wherein Aristotelian (public) time is understood in terms of that which is present-at-hand and thus detached from our everyday existence. An authentic understanding of time conserves the aspect of public "now time" but also requires an understanding of time in relation to Dasein's temporal structure and must take into account the categories of "darability" (Datierbmkeit) and "significance" (Bedeutsamkeit). "The ordinary

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interpretation of world-time as now time never avails itself of the horizon by which such things as world, significance, and datability can be made accessible. These structures necessarily remain covered up, all the more so because this covering-up is reinforced by the way in which the ordinary interpretation develops its characterization of time conceptually" (BT, 475). But how exactly do we avail ourselves of the horizon by which such things as world, significance, and datability can be made accessible? Heidegger does not tell us exactly, but suggests that this availability can be accessed through the threefold structure of care (Sorge) as thrown ( Geworfenheit), falling (Verfallen), and projecting (entwerfen). But this requires an understanding of what Heidegger means by "care" and how this relates to his conception of time. At the beginning of chapter 6 of Being and Time, "Care as the Being of Dasein," Heidegger writes that being-in-theworld is a structural whole but is phenomenally so manifold that it is difficult (and perhaps even impossible) to grasp it as unified. Thus the way Dasein exists in its everyday mode of being is equally manifold and equally difficult to grasp as unified. In order to investigate this totality that is so diverse as to defy a unified definition, Heidegger instead seeks to demonstrate how Dasein reveals its being as care. This is necessarily ambiguous and problematic because Heidegger is not providing a definition of Dasein nor of being. Rather, he is explaining a fundamental mode, "care," by which Dasein reveals the way it is. If we think of the term "care" in the most literal sense, concern, interest, oversight, even worry, we can get to the heart of what Heidegger is trying to say. To "take car< of something or someone is to be concerned with that entity's well-being and at some level with its future. The caretaking takes place in the present but is done with an eye to the future. When Heidegger says that "Dasein is an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue," he is claiming that we are beings who care about the issue of being and thus are concerned about it (BT, 236). In the sense that we care about our being, we are concen1ed with what Heidegger calls our "owmnost potentiality for Being." This is essential for Heidegger's understanding of time as it implies that in "care" Dasein is always projecting itself forward toward the possibility of its "ownmost potentiality for Being," but also toward death. In this sense one aspect of care, projecting ( entwerfen), is essentially futural. But as we have seen, we are also creatures who exist as being-in-the-world, and as su.ch we live in a world of possibilities that are already given to us. We have been thrown into a world that gives us the possibilities that we can project forward. Thus the aspect of care, thrownness ( Geworfenheit), that gives us our possibilities for the future seems to be based on the past. This world of possibilities implies the shared cultural context of das Man and the realm of everyday 143

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existence. Because our possibilities for the future are based on a collective cultural nexus, the present is a falling ( Verfallen) into "the way things have been interpreted by das Man" (BT, 239). This leads Heidegger to the existential crisis, when Dasein will either project itself into the safe harbor of inauthentic existence or own up to an authentic relationship "'ith its ownmost potentiality for being. In either case, Dasein follows the structure of care, which is the basis of everything we do. Simply put, everything we do, we do with care. Dasein's concern with the world it lives in manifests itself in the threefold structure of care and through this category Heidegger leads us to an understanding of time that is not simply detached observation of the phenomena as manifested on a clock. For Heidegger, the theoretical, limited, and necessarily compartmentalized categories of past, present, and future are inadequate to understand the kind of beings we are who exist in a concerned and care-ful relationship with the world. Heidegger therefore offers an alternative structure wherein our primary mode of existence in the world is neither compartmentalized nor theoretical. Indeed, Heidegger's use of time in the structure of care seems to straddle the categories of past, present, and future. In the case of "caring" Heidegger shows that "the being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-beingalready-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-theworld). This being fills in the signification of the term 'care' [Sorge], which is used in a purely ontologico-existential manner" (BT, 237). Dasein is "already in," "ahead of itself," and "amidst." Heidegger describes temporality as the sense of care (Sorge), and the gerund best describes this relational movement, which is not merely a flux of "nows" nor the denial of the present in anticipation of the future but the ekstatic (out-standing) temporal structure of Dasein. Heidegger does not privilege the future in terms of specific constructions to be finished at a later date (as Sartre supposes) nor does he rely on a series of "nows" in flux (like Bergson). In Aristotelian language, we work on projects that are future-oriented but our involvement with the future is conditioned by our relational position in the present. In fact, for Heidegger, having too much concern for the future, as in Hegel's teleological stntcture, is a way to avoid our finitude by placing something in front of us that we must conclude, which allows us to avoid the possibility that we ourselves could "conclude" at any moment. This overemphasis on the future, which exists in the structure of care as falling ( Verfallen), is the realm of inauthentic existence, of das Man, and as such can be seen in relation to Dasein's flight in the face of death. For Sartre, conversely, the future presents the promise of freedom. It is what we are not yet and thus, in Sartre's construction of the pour-soi as self-constitutive, the future is the realm of pure possibility where we can reconstitute 144

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ourselves in whatever manner we choose. This freedom is not freedom as traditionally conceived; instead, it is freedom as a structural necessity. In opposition to the past, which is what I was, the Being of the Future which I have to be, on the contrary, is such that I can only be it; for my freedom gnaws at its Being from below. This means that the Future constitutes the meaning of my present pour-soi as the project of its possibility, but that in no way predetermines my pour-soi which is to come. Since the pour-soi is always abandoned [dilaisse1 to the annihilating obligation of being the foundation of its Nothingness. (EN, 156) ' Sartre sees the "not yet being" of the future as the site where the pour-soi constitutes itself, not because it wants to but because it has to. "It stands on the horizon to announce to me what I am from the standpoint of what I shall Be." Thus the p~esent and even the past are coded by the future, which is the site of freedom. Sartre criticizes Heidegger for placing too much emphasis on the future and claims that one should instead emphasize the present. His criticism is misplaced, however, since he makes no distinction between Heidegger and Aristotle, seeing Heidegger's program as a privileging of one aspect of time and not as a restructuring of the concept. This criticism is based partly on Sartre's philosophical training, partly on his particular understanding of Heidegger, and partly on Sartre's desire to emphasize the present as the continual meeting point of being and nothingness. But as we will see when we discuss Sartre's understanding of "responsibility," the success of his own existential project and notion of freedom can be achieved only through an emphasis on the future. It is through Sartre's discussion of "transcendence" that we come to understand how the temporal nature of the structure of the pour-soi relates back to the en-soi. Here we might want to take quick note of the distinctions between Sartre's understanding of transcendence and the understandings of Husser! and Heidegger. 42 Transcendence for Husserl refers principally to the intentional object. He uses the example of a cube, which is constituted by the intentional interpretation of immanent content. The cube has immanent content as cube but I as the observer can only observe one, two, or at most three sides of the cube at a time. By means of transcendence, I perceive the cube as cube despite the limited nature of my perception. Transcendent objects are thus the main field of application 42. For a discussion of the phenomenological use of the term trmt.~cendrorl' in Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, see Spiegelberg, The Plumomenolof!;ical Mm,1'111ent, 511-13. Sec also Hazel E. Barnes, "Sanre's Ontology: The Revealing and Making of Being" in Howell, 17Je Camln'idge Compo11ion to Sartrl'.

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for the transcendental reduction, by which they are removed from the real world and bracketed for descriptive observation and reflection. This reveals the ego, which is the source of all phenomenological investigation. Sartre differed from Husserl on the issue ofhyletic sense data and the constitution of a transcendental ego. For Heidegger, transcendence applies to a fundamental property of Da.sein that is the basis of intentional acts and that thus makes it possible for Dasein to refer to objects beyond its acts. Heidegger's transcendence is therefore unrelated to the static property of objects in Husserl's immanent sphere and denies the primacy of theory and reflection. Instead, transcendence can be understood as the present participle of the verb "to transcend" and characterizes the way human beings relate to the world and the way beings relate to being. Sartre was well acquainted with both these models, but his concept of transcendence seems to relate to the flight in the face of anguish that the pour-soi experiences when faced with the nothingness that constitutes freedom. For Sartre, transcendence is the consequence of the fact that the pour-soi is always a lack. It is an expression of the pour-soi's incompleteness. The pour-soi wants to be the en-soi; what the pour-soi lacks is precisely an en-soi. This is in fact the revelation of the pour-soi in its totality. Sartre uses Descartes's second proof to show how the pour-soi in its "imperfect Being surges past itself toward the perfect Being" (EN, 133). The being that is founded on nothing but its own nothingness (the pour-soi) surges toward the being that is founded on its own being (the en-soi). But if the pour-soi actually became the en-soi it would lose its character as pour-soi, and thus the pour-soi is always a "detotalized-totality which temporalizes itself in a perpetual incompleteness" (EN, 229). The notion of the poursoi as detotalized-totalization became the basis for Sartre's understanding of Hegel's dialectic. The pour-soi is transcendence because it is never satisfied with itself and always passes beyond its present to its future, negating the present that it passes. Because Sartre employs Corbin's translation (of Heidegger's section on transcendence), which uses the verb se dipasser (to pass beyond), one might infer that the structure of Sartre's concept of transcendence is closer to Heidegger's than to Husserl's. Yet curiously, Sartre's "transcendence" seems to be closer to Heidegger's term Verfallen, the realm of inauthentic existence (of das Man) where Dasein flees in the face of anxiety. For Sartre, the flight into the future that negates the past is not the construction of an inauthentic existence but the structure of transcendence itself (EN, 243). In the final section of Being and Nothingness, Sartre attempts to come to an understanding of the concept of freedom for the rialit6-humaine based on the conclusions of the previous chapters. This is also where the work becomes most explicitly a "confrontation with Heidegger." In

Jean-Paul Sartre

opposition to Heidegger, who claims to limit his existential analysis to pure ontology, Sartre attempts to provide a doctrine of action by which one can live one's life. Thus he embarks on an elucidation of an "existentialist" doctrine based on his conception of human freedom. This doctrine is Sartre's understanding of the ontological structure of the pour-sot'43 as it coincides with actual experience: "Man is free because he is not merely himself but presence to himself. The Being which merely is what it is cannot be free. Freedom is, actually, the void which is already at the heart of man and which forces the realiti-humaine to create itself rather than to be" (EN, 516). We are what we choose to be. Every moment of our life is based on these choices, as Sartre points out, and even not choosing turns out to be a choice not to choose. This shows the dangerous nature of Sartre's concept of freedom. In Sartre's existentialist philosophy we are free to choose anything except not to choose. This is to say that we can choose to be anything except to not be free, "we are condemned to freedom." Our freedom is not based on the choice to be free but on the fact that we must choose. By Sartre's definition freedom is the basis of our self-constitutive nature and thus an essential part of our makeup. Although we have a past and a given contingent situation, by virtue of our "freedom" we always change our situation via the choices we make. When "we choose we annihilate ourselves, this is to say that we make the future tell us who we are by conferring a meaning to our past" (EN, 543). According to Sartre, we define the past based on the future; this is the meaning of "we are what we are not and we are not what we are." Here we arrive at one of the most troubling aspects of Sartre's formulation of freedom. According to Sartre, we are free even in the face of contingency. This is to say that because we are free to change our situation there is no essential difference between a quotidian choice, buying a loaf of bread, and an extreme situation, living interned in a prisoner of war camp. If a worker in a steel plant, one can always choose not to be one. Sartre contends that even under the most adverse conditions, such as torture or anti-Semitic persecution (two examples Sartre presents side by side), the realiti-humaine retains its structure as freedom. But what kind of freedom is this? How does one choose not to be the object of anti-Semitic persecution or not to be tortured? Sartre never makes this clear. 44

43. It is important to note that Sartre has equated the pour-roiwith the cogito, the ego, the self, the I, and rinlit.i-humaine. While the terms seem to have slightly different meanings at different points of the book, they all refer to human being. 44. For an excellent critique of Sartre's Bei11g and Nothir1g1U'ss based on these issues, see Marcuse, "Existentialism," 309-46. See also Natanson, A CritiquR of jmn-Paul Snrtre's Ontol.ogy.

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Sartre's doctrine is based entirely on the choice that the pour-soi makes in the face of its own radical contingency. This leads the pour-soi to realize its own freedom as it emerges from, and actually is, the nothingness, which causes it to flee in the face of the anxiety that the nothingness produces. Thus if anything like an authentic understanding of existence can occur it must be in confronting the realization that the pour-soi is self-constitution based on nothing. The assertion mirrors Heidegger's understanding that authentic existence can be derived only from the confrontation with death, which is the realization of the possibility of no longer having possibilities. Thus Sartre must engage Heidegger to prove that death does not hold this privileged position but that instead freedom does. For Sartre, death is just another example of contingency, such as birth or life circumstances. Sartre claimed that Heidegger acted in bad faith because he took the cognitive reflection on death to be the personalization of death based on his understanding that Heidegger's interest was the cogito as the locus of beingtowards-death: "It is my subjectivity, defined by the pre-reflexive cogito, that makes my death an irreplaceable subject and not death that gives the irreplaceable ipseite ofmy pour-sot' (EN, 619). According to Sartre, death is no more my ownmost possibility than love or hate. For him, Heidegger's emphasis on death focuses on personal finitude and avoids the larger issue of the nothingness that constitutes all realite-humaine as well as our freedom. Thus Heidegger's use of death avoids the confrontation with and explanation of the understanding of authenticity in the act of free choice and self-constitution. Sartre dismisses Heidegger's emphasis on death in favor of his own emphasis on choice and reconstructs the confrontation one faces in anguish as a confrontation with freedom and responsibility. In his 1945 play No Exit, Sartre placed his characters in hell, denying them the possibility of death. They have already died and their confrontation with death has not altered their existence; therefore it is only in the face of others (who limit the freedom of the pour-soi) that they ,can come to achieve freedom in the act of re-creating themselves. If the conclusion of No Exit is any indication, the possibility of achieving an authentic understanding of being is bleak. Being and Nothingness ends on a similar note; the promise of freedom appears to man as a sentence, a condemnation, and not a right. Being and Nothingness shows a pronounced debt to Husserl, Hegel, and especially Heidegger, but cannot be said to agree with any of them. It was written at a point when Sartre was moving away from the influence of Heidegger and closer to Hegel and Marx. But in 1943, Sartre's understanding of Hegel was not very sophisticated and his knowledge of Marx was limited to the rhetoric of the French Comrnu-

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nist Party. 45 Therefore the primary concern of the work as a whole lies in the assimilation of, and confrontation with, the works of Heidegger. This movement was based on Sartre's particular understanding of Heidegger's philosophical project, which ultimately led to his reformulations of Heidegger's philosophical constructions.

Sartre the Celebrity: The Popularization of Heidegger When it was published in 1943, Being and Nothingness did not sell especially well and, despite its popularity among a small number of intellectuals, most of them Sartre's friends, it cannot be said to have been the main factor in the popularization of Heidegger in France. 46 Instead it was through the fundamentally Cartesian presentation of Heidegger's philosophy in Sartre's literature, theatrical pieces, and articles that a wider public became acquainted with the name Martin Heidegger. By the end of World War II, Sartre was a celebrity. The success of Nausea had made him a literary name, and the appearance of The Age of Reason and Le Sursis in 1944 reinforced this success. The impact of his "Resistance" play, The Flies, first performed on june 6, 1942, made Sartre a force in the theater as well. The Flies was not a box office hit, but his next play, No Exit, was, and with the success of No Exit, existentialism came into vogue and Sartre gained international renown. The war also marked a shift in Sartre's immediate philosophical concenls. The war and the Occupation led Sartre to an emphasis on choice, engagement, and activity. This was a departure from the paralysis of the 1930s manifested in Nausea. Vladimir Jankelevitch described Sartre's shift toward political engagement as a "kind of unhealthy compensation, a remorse, a quest for the danger he did not want to run during the war." 47 This may be true, but Sartre's transition from a project of philosophical contemplation in the 1930s to political engagement during, but mostly after, World War II follows a larger trend among intellectuals of the generation of 1933.Jankelevitch is essentially describing the guilt that the generation of 1933 felt for not having acted politically in the 1930s, a guilt that led them to compensate for this shortcoming through engagement in political life in the 1940s and 1950s. 45. For the influence of Hegel and Marx on Sartre, see above, n. 10; see also the section on Merleau-Ponty in chap. 3. 46. It should not be surprising that a seven-hundred-page philosophical treatise did not sell well, especially given the economic conditions in France in 1943 under the German Occupation. What is surprising is that the book was published, given the paper shortage and the "restricted" selection of texts under German control. See Henri Michel, "L'activite culturelle: Evasion ou soumission," in Paris Allemand (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981). 47. Interview in Liheration,]une 8-9 and 10, 1985, published posthumously.

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The experience of the war led Sartre to his understanding of freedom, and the myth of the Resistance led him to a sense of collectivity tbat inspired an optimism still lacking in Being and Nothingness. 48 During his "Resistance" period, working with the group Socialisme et Liberte, Sartre came under the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who led him away from individualistic philosophy and toward a philosophy of action and political engagement. 49 Merleau-Ponty also imparted the sophisticated understanding of Hegel and Marx that he had acquired through his involvement in Kojeve's seminar and his work in phenomenology. 50 In 1943 Sartre encountered several other members of Kojeve's seminar in the context of his theatrical career. He became close to Raymond Queneau and, through Queneau, met Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan. Sartre's shift toward Hegel and Marxism was developed through his contact with these individuals who, by the 1940s, had all moved closer to Heidegger and were interested in Sartre's understanding of Heideggetian philosophy. The inverse trajectories of these intellectuals (from Hegel to Heidegger for Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, and Lacan; and from Heidegger to Hegel for Sartre) intersected at the site of a common feeling of solidarity based on the "myth of resistance." Sartre's movement toward political engagement based on this newfound sense of collectivity led him to found the journal Les temps modemes in 1944. But he also realized that to reach a larger public-a "total public" as he called it in his Cahiers pour une morale--he would have to reformulate his ideas in a manner that would make them accessible. The forum for this clarification or "popularization" of Sartre's philosophy came in the form of a refutation of the attacks on his philosophy from religious thinkers and the French Communist Party. Both the left and the right assailed Sartre's philosophy as a decadent form of "nihilistic individualism." Sartre refuted these ~ttacks in the article "A propos de l'existentialisme: Mise au point"51 for the review Action on December 29, 1944 (republished June 8, 1945), and in the lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" presented in Brussels and then at the Club Maintenant in Paris in 1945. Both served to simplifY his philosophical works and made them accessible in the interest of his political agenda. 48. The extent of Sartre's Resistance activities is a subject of debate. What is clear is that regardless of his actual participation, the "feeling" of collective activity he found in the idea of Resistance was exhilarating to him. For the myth of Resistance, see Rousso, Thr Vir:hv Syndrome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). See also Gilbertjoseph, l!nr s£ douce or:r.upatiott: Simor1r dr Bemwoir et jrm1-Paul Sartre, 1940-1944 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991); Tony Judt, PasllrnperjPct (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and CohenSola I, "Un ecrivain qui resistait," in Sartre, 1905-1980,337-58. 49. Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty vivant," 324-25. 50. See chap. 3. 51. We will explore this article in relation to the first Heidegger Affair· in the next chapter.

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Sartre's lecture at the Club Maintenant confirmed his position as phiThe auditorium was packed and women fainted. In the ambiguous atmosphere of the Liberation, Sartre provided a philosophy of optimism and responsibility that looked to the future as the basis by which we can always reconstitute ourselves as individuals or as a nation. The dissemination of Sartre's philosophy through his novels, plays, and articles presented Heidegger as an integral part of his work and brought Heidegger to center stage in France. Whereas the question for the generation of 1933 (and perhaps all of France) had been phrased in terms of the Hegelian teleology as "Where are we going?" during the 1930s, after World War II this question was no longer palatable or even applicable. A teleological understanding of historical progress was incompatible with the catastrophe of World War II. After the war a new question was needed that could allow philosophy and society to take stock of recent events and address the uncertain future. Mter World War II the question became, "Who are we?" or even, "Who am I?" At issue was no longer "history" but "ontology," especially difficult to face in the wake of defeat and collaboration. In "Existentialism Is a Humanism," Sartre sought to answer this question in a way that would engage the collective guilt that was the legacy of World War II and provide an ontological basis for a cultural and political regeneration. Sartre's new interpretation of his philosophy was phrased in the language of hope and progress; his interpretation of Heidegger remained at the center of this project. Sartre presented Heidegger's philosophy as coterminous with his brand of existentialism. He claimed that it was a prime example of "atheistic existentialism" and defined the essential component of Heidegger's thought in the formula "existence precedes essence." Sartre cites Heidegger frequently throughout the lecture and takes little time to distinguish between his ideas and Heidegger's or to establish any differences between the two. Sartre presents Heidegger's Dasfrin as realiti-humaine and thus reiterates his incorporation of Dasfrin into the cogito. Sartre's reduction of Heidegger's philosophy into the phrase "existence precedes essence" is an inversion of Descartes's formula. In place of"l think, therefore I am," Sartre postulates "I am, therefore I think" (EH, 64). This inversion c;:onserves the Cartesian cogito and places it at the center of Heidegger's philosophy, reformulated by Sartre in the image of the French philosophical tradition. This is the domestication of Heidegger's philosophy in France. While the shift to a fundamentally Cartesian Heidegger made Heidegger's work more accessible in France, the popularity ofSartre's work was not the result of his use of Heidegger. Instead, it was Sartre's application of the reformulated Heidegger in understanding the human condition in a seemingly senseless world that allowed him to present his philosophy as an apologia for collapse, defeat, and collaboration. Couched in a losoph~celebrite.

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language that emphasized responsibility and freedom and guaranteed the possibility that the individual and the collective (France) could redeem themselves in the future, Sartre's presentation of the senselessness of the world was precisely the excuse the French people needed. If things do not make sense, then they are out of my control, thus they are not my fault. Sartre's existential humanism presented the senselessness of the world through a language of responsibility that at the same time absolved the human being of all responsibility. This ambiguous but comforting message found a receptive audience in the people of France, who were trying to come to terms with their own actions during World War II. Sartre's program in "Existentialism Is a Humanism" drew on the themes in Being. and Nothingness. His explanation of the human condition as thrown into being (so that we must choose what we are) implied responsibility and, furthermore, Sartre wrote that "when we choose we choose for all of humanity." For Sartre, this choice implies a "universality of man" that "is not given but is created" (EH, 70). Sartre presents this collective move toward freedom and responsibility in tenns of the "man of good faith," who is conspicuously absent from Being and Nothingness: "The acts of man in 'good faith' have the ultimate signification of the search for freedom in what it is .... Certainly this freedom, which is the definition of man, does not depend on the Other but on engagement" (EH, 82-83).52 Good faith is based entirely on engagement. What one engages in, however, does not seem to matter: "The only thing that counts is to know if the invention (the act) that you choose is made in the name of freedom. We can choose anything under the plan of engaged freedom" (EH, 86). This strange and seemingly contradictory understanding of freedom and responsibility is best expressed in Sartre's 1944 essay "La Republique du silence": "Never have we been more free than under German occupation. . The very question of freedom was posed, and we were at the verge of the most profound knowledge which man can have about himself. . This total responsibility in total solitude, wasn't this the revelation of freedom?" 5 3 We are left to wonder what kind of freedom this is. What does freedom mean when you are as free while enduring Occupation, torture, or extermination as you are while enjoying total autonomy? The nature of Sartre's responsibility is exposed in his notion of freedom. We do not 52. Frede1ick Olafson points out that Sartre's contention that one cannot consistently desire one's own freedom without desiring that of others is very Kantian and in "flagrant conflict" with the line of thought developed in BPing and NolhingnPss and elsewhere. See Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and tltf' Ground '!f Ethirs: A Study of the Mitsein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 53.Jean-Paul Sartre, "La Republique du silence," Les !eftTf's Jranr;a.ises, no. 20 (September 9, 1944): 1.

Jean-Paul Sartr1

choose our situation but react t
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the project of freedom and progress, which had its roots in the work of Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire. In a move that resembles Freud's return of the repressed or Heidegger's concept of the unheimlich, the strangeness, unfamiliarity, and foreignness ofHeidegger's philosophy returned to France in Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" to Jean Beaufret, in which the German philosopher confronted Sartre's philosophical appropriation of him. This letter arrived on the heels of the first Heidegger Affair and revealed Heidegger's philosophy as something other than what it was supposed to be, disturbing the niche that Sartre had carved out for it. This disturbance, which questioned the primacy of the Cartesian cogito as well as the metaphysical tradition, returned Heidegger's philosophy to France with as much force and originality as when it gripped Levinas, Kojeve, or Sartre. But Heidegger's emphasis had changed during the twenty years between the publication of Being and Time and the "Letter on Humanism." The investigation into being via the particular being-which was the project of Being and Time and the basis of the first reading of Heidegger in France-was replaced by an emphasis on the history of being and the relation of being to language, which defines the second reading of Heidegger in France. This second reading centers on the relationship between Heidegger and Jean Beaufret. Thus we must turn to Jean Beaufret in the milieu immediately following World War II to understand the confrontation between the two readings.

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CHAPTER

5 ·Jean Beaufret, the First Heidegger Affair, and the "letter on Humanism"

Sartre's popularity and the subsequent popularity of existentialism had myriad effects on the reading of Heidegger in France. The most significant are directly related to Sartre's domestication of Heidegger's philosophy, the "realization" of Heidegger's affiliation with the National Socialist Party in the 1930s, and the return of his philosophy to challenge the primacy of this first reading (already in question because of Heidegger's political activities). To untangle the relations among these events we must explore the two related phenomena of the first "Heidegger Mfair" and Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," written to Jean Beaufret in 1946 and published in 1947. In the case of the first "Heidegger Affair," the news of the philosopher's association with National Socialism was spread largely through articles attacking existentialism. In the case of the "Letter on Humanism," it represented a rpovement of French intellectuals-who found Heidegger through the works of Sartre-away from Sartre and toward Heidegger. The two phenomena are structurally linked by the popularity of Sartre and by the activities of the French army in its investigation into Heidegger's political past. In a curious twist of fate, the officer in charge of cultural affairs for the region that included Freiburg was interested in existentialism, specifically in the work of Sartre, and thus took particular interest in the case of Martin Heidegger. He sent a young military attache named Frederic de Towarnicki to find the German philosopher. Towamicki was acquainted with his philosophy through the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and through an article on existentialism by a lesser known philosopher named Jean Beaufret. On finding Heidegger, Towarnicki brought him texts from France, opening the first direct communication between Heidegger and the French intellectuals who had used his work since Henry Corbin's visits in 1936. In his official capacity as a soldier in the French army, Towamicki

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facilitated the first direct contact between Heidegger and Sartre as well as between Heidegger and Beaufret. Towarnicki's visits to Heidegger changed the French understanding of Heidegger in two ways. First, Towarnicki's article on Heidegger in the pages of Les temps modemes led directly to the first Heidegger Affair, placing Heidegger's philosophy in question and forcing many left-wing existentialists (the champions of freedom, individualism, and responsibility) to reconsider the first reading of Heidegger derived from the work of Sartre, Wahl, Kojeve, and others. Second, Towarnicki's visits led to a new understanding of Heidegger in France based on the "Letter on Humanism," distancing the German thinker from the subjectivist tendencies of French existentialism.

Jean Beaufret The origins of this second reading of Heidegger in France and its relation to the first are the keys to understanding the recurring Heidegger Mfairs. This second reading of Heidegger can be dated to the "Letter on Humanism" in 1947. Thus we must explorejean Beaufret's role in the acquisition and dissemination of Heidegger's thought in France and its opposition to the existential understanding of the first reading presented by Kojeve, Wahl, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Merleau-Ponty, which was the dominant reading of Heidegger at the time. Jean Beaufret is instructive both as an example of the second wave of scholars who came to Heidegger via Sartre-the reigning maitre apenser in France-but also as the porteparole, the mouthpiece, through which Heidegger was able to communicate with the French intellectuals who were so fascinated with his work. Beaufret was born on May 22, 1907, in Auzances, Creuse. He was technically of the same generation as Sartre, Aron, and Merleau-Ponty and he did exhibit some of the characteristics of the generation of 1933, such as a lack of political engagement in the 1930s, followed by a period of active participation during the war and immediately following it. But unlike the other members of that generation we have discussed, Beaufret h~d no interest in challenging the established borders of French philosophy during his years at preparatory school, the ENS, or immediately thereafter. Beaufret's interest in Heidegger came after his turn to existentialism, which was inspired by the widespread popularity of Sartre. By all accounts, Beaufret was an excellent teacher and a good writer with an impressive ability to grasp and explain the most difficult philosophical constructs, but he was not an original thinker. He did not seek to create a new philosophy or push the limits of the old as Aron, Merleau-Ponty,

Jean Beaufret

and Sartre were doing. Instead, Beaufret was content to follow in the footsteps of others and explore the philosophical fields cleared for him. Beaufret grew up in the small rural village of Auzances, the only son of two grade school teachers. He did not share the same experiences of World War I that affected Sartre, Aron, and Merleau-Ponty. World War I passed without directly affecting him, his family, or his immediate circumstances. He moved to Paris in 1925, where he enrolled in a preparatory class for the ENS at Louis-le-Grand. In 1928 he entered the Ecole Normale Superieure. While at the ENS, Beaufret worked under the direction of Leon Brunschvicg. His academic formation in Paris was very similar to that of Aron, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, but unlike the three elder normaliens, Beaufret remained entirely within the fold of Brunschvicg's neo-Kantian rationalism and centered his studies on Descartes. 1 While at the ENS, he met Merleau-Ponty, who was two years ahead of him, but they did not become close until much later. Beaufret spent a year at the Institut Franc,;ais in Berlin in 1930-1931, but he was not interested in phenomenology or the work of Husser! or Heidegger. He spent his time working on the philosophy of Fichte in preparation for his thesis. On returning to France, Beaufret did his military service and after completing it took and passed the agregation. Beaufret's first teaching post was at the Lycee de Gueret in Creuse, not far from his parents' house. In 1937 he took a post in Auxerre, and from 1937 to 1939 taught at a French lycee in Alexandria. Beaufret was away from Paris throughout the 1930s and he did not produce any philosophical texts until well into the 1940s. He did not have the opportunity to attend any of Kojeve's seminars nor did he strike out on his own as Sartre did in Le Havre. Instead, Beaufret became a perfect product of the ENS: a teacher of traditional philosophy. "In 1937, when I was at the lycee in Alexandria, I taught philosophy in the most academic fashion, like all the other instructors at the time. There wasn't the slightest trace of phenomenology. "2 Beaufret's turn to phenomenology, which led him to Heidegger, is bound up with the events of World War II. In 1939, when he was called to active duty, he ran into Merleau-Ponty at the military training center known as the Ecole d'Etat-Major in Vincennes. During their conversation, Merleau-Ponty told Beaufret about phenomenology and showed him a text by Husser!. By 1939, Beaufret had become bored with the abstract and purely theoretical nature of the neo-Kantian model and had 1. Jacques Havet, 'Jean Beaufret," Associati,Qn Arnical.e des Anciem Elives de l'Er.ol.e Narrnnl.e Supeneure (1984): 82-94. 2. Roger Kempf, "En ecoutant Jean Beaufret," in Jean Beaufret, De lleidPgger (Paris:J. Vrin, 1986), 9.

l'nti.\ln1.tinli.~rnP

a

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come to the conclusion that Brunschwicg's neo-Kantian rationalism was helpful for understanding "the work of Descartes, Leibnitz and Kant, but lacked the essential component of the investigation into the foundation of things. "3 Beaufret felt he had all the tools to teach philosophy satisfactorily, but he was not satisfied with philosophy. Merleau-Ponty sympathized with Beaufret's concerns and suggested Beaufret read Sartre's L'imaginaire. Beaufret did not have the time to act on Merleau-Ponty's suggestion; soon after their meeting, his unit was sent into battle and he was captured by the Germans. In September 1940, Beaufret escaped from the transport train that was taking him to Germany. He fled to the unoccupied zone and in November of the same year he took a post teaching at the Lycee Champollion in Grenoble. There Beaufret came across Sartre's article "Une idee fondamentale de la phenomenologie de Husserl," which appeared in the Nouvelle revue fran~aise in 1940. Beaufret knew he wanted to study phenomenology after his meeting with Merleau-Ponty, but he had not decided whether he would turn to Husser! or Hegel. Mter reading Sartre's article, he made a clear choice: he would begin with Husserl. 4 Beaufret began serious work on Husserl and phenomenology in 1941. He started with Husserl but soon turned to Sartre's L'imaginaire, and this work in turn led Beaufret to Heidegger. While teaching in Grenoble, he began to read Heidegger's Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The work went slowly. Restricted by his limited knowledge of German, Beaufret focused on the sections translated by Corbin in 1938. He had only started his investigation when, in October 1942 he was offered a post in Lyons at the Lycee Ampere. Beaufret's project took a turn for the better when through mutual friends he met Joseph Rovan, who was also interested in studying Heidegger, and the two soon began work together on Heidegger's Being and Time. 5 Rovan was Jewish; hiding out in Lyons, he could not officially enroll at the university or take courses. Rovan's knowledge of German was excellent, but his philosophical background was not extensive. Beaufret, conversely, had a good philosophical background but struggled with Heidegger's German. The two met each night to translate and interpret passages from Being and Time; they had both heard rumors about Heidegger's political activities but at the time they were mesmerized by his philosophy. 6

3. Jean Beaufret, Entreliens avec frf.dh-ir d.e 1(Jwarnir.ki (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), 6. 4. Ibid., 4-5. 5. Joseph Rovan translated the "Letter on Humanism" into French for the review Fontaine. 6.Joseph Rovan, Mm1lhnoignagesur llridegwr, 1-e Mo11dt>, December 8, 1987,2.

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Rovan and Beaufret's relationship went beyond the world of philosophy. Rovan was involved with the Resistance group Pericles; his knowledge of German made him a master forger of documents. Through Rovan, Beaufret came to join the Resistance. When the Nazis occupied Lyons and imposed a curfew, Rovan forged papers for himself so that he could continue his nightly visits to Beaufret's house. 7 Beaufret and Rovan worked together, on Heidegger and for the Resistance, until February 1944, when Rovan was arrested by the Gestapo. Beaufret escaped, thanks to a warning from Rovan, but Rovan was sent to Dachau, where he remained until the end of the war. Beaufret U~ft Lyons soon after and returned to Paris, where he found a job at the Lycee Saint-Louis. Beaufret continued the philosophical work he had started with Rovan; according to his own testimony, it was on June 6, 1944-amidst all the intensity and excitement of the Allied invasion at Normandy-that "I finally had the sensation that I had begun to understand Heidegger. "8 This comment by Beaufret is strategic and manipulative. It is an anecdote that Beaufret told to Frederic de Towarnicki in the late 1970s and that he has repeated in multiple interviews. Beaufret's intention is to create a link between Heidegger, the liberation of France, and Beaufret's participation in the Resistance that will distance Heidegger from his affiliation with the Nazi Party. I will discuss the efficacy of this strategy later in the chapter. For now I will simply comment that by June 1944 Beaufret had come to have what he considered a fundamental grasp of Heidegger's philosophy as presented in Being and Time. In 1945 Beaufret took a post at the Lycee Decor in Paris and in 1946 he was given a position at the Lycee Henri IV. This was one of the main feeder schools for the ENS, and Beaufret's position as an instructor at this prestigious preparatory school became an important factor in disseminating Heidegger's philosophy to the students who ~ould become the next generation of teachers and philosophers. Between March and September 1945, Beaufret composed an article on existentialism for the journal Confluences, which was published in serial format under the title "A propos de l' existentialisme." Towarnicki brought several sections of this article to Heidegger during his first visit to with him. Thus it was through Beaufret's article on existentialism that Heidegger became acquainted with the modern French philosophical scene, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the French understanding of his own philosophical project. This article also shows the extent to which Beaufret, as of 1945, was still in Sartre's shadow and indebted to the translations of Henry Corbin in his understanding of Heidegger. 7. Ibid., 2. 8. Beaufret,

l~nlretiRns

aller Fredmr de Townrnicki, 4.

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That year,just before the first Heidegger Mfair, Beaufret's position was heavily indebted to the first reading of Heidegger in France and mirrors the work of the scholars we have investigated so far. In this sense Beaufret is indicative of a larger trend among French intellectuals who came to Heidegger in the 1940s through the work of Sartre and the popularity of existentialism. It was not until after Beaufret's contact with Heidegger and after the "Letter on Humanism" that Beaufret came to understand the difference between Heidegger's own presentation of his philosophical pr~ject and the understanding of Heidegger in the work of Sartre and other French existentialists.9 But before we begin our investigation of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," let us first return to Frederic de Towarnicki to better understand how the phenomenon of the "Letter" is inextricably linked to the activities of the French army and the first Heidegger Affair.

Frederic de Towarnicki Towarnicki had not studied philosophy formally. His interests were literature and poetry, and he was acquainted with the philosophy of Heidegger through the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean Beaufret. Towarnicki had co~e to existentialism during its wave of popularity in France after World War II. His mission to visit Heidegger was like an im·itation to visit a celebrity. Towarnicki was starstruck in Heidegger's presence, and it shows in his articles and in his reflections on his visits to the Black Forest. Towamicki was still serving in the French army immediately following World War II when he was assigned to the service social for the Rhine and Danube area, which included Freiburg. The officer in charge was a lieutenant named Fleurquin, whom everyone in the company called "Captain." 10 Towarnicki was part of a detachment that included Marcel Marceau and Alain Resnais. Their mission was to set up a cultural center to get in touch \vith German writers, artists, and intellectuals and reestablish dialogue between France and Germany. Part of this entailed ascertaining the extent 9. I disagree with Anson Rabinbach's assertion in "Heidegger's 'Letter of Humanism' as Text and Event," in In the Shadow of Cala,\lrofJhe: GPrman lrt/elleclua/.s !xlween Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), that Beaufret's article was a challenge to Sartre. While I agree that Beaufret attempts to distinguish between Sartre and Heidegger in this article, I would argue he was still too indebted to the first reading to seriously challenge Sartre, who provides both the vocabulary and commentarY that inform his reading of Heidegger at that time. For a full treatment of the 1945 article in Co11jluPnc.Ps, see Ethan Kleinberg, "The Reception of Martin Heidegger's Philosophy in France: 1927-1961 ," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1998, chap. 6. 10. Towarnicki does not explain the reason for this, but all references to Fleurquin in his memoirs and in lette1·s are to "Captain Fleurquin."

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to which any of these writers, artists, and intellectuals had been aligned with National Socialism and to report this information through the appropriate channels.U Fleurquin was especially interested in existentialism and wanted to stage an international debate at their cultural center. Towamicki was given the mission of establishing contact with the necessary people: "Captain Fleurquin dreamed of organizing a great philosophical debate on existentialism. According to him this was also the desire of many officers in General Arnaud's press service ... but Sartre was impossible to find in Paris, I did not yet know Beaufret, and nobody knew the exact whereabouts of Heidegger. "12 While doing preliminary legwork for the debate, Towarnicki came across accusations that Heidegger had been a high-ranking Nazi. In the summer of 1945 he was officially ordered by Fleurquin to conduct an investigation into Heidegger's political past but only so as to make a recommendation concerning the debate on existentialism. Towamicki read the army's dossier, but at that point there was no conclusive proof of participation other than his service as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933. At the end of summer 1945, Towamicki made his first attempt to see Heidegger. It was only partially successful, since Heidegger was not at his home in Freiburg but at his cabin in Todtnauberg. Towan1icki did see Heidegger's wife, told her of the planned debate, and gave her two issues of Conflumces. The two issues contained installments of Beaufret's article on existentialism, the first, on Kierkegaard and his relation to Heidegger, and the fifth, which included the discussion of Sartre, Descartes's cogito, and the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger via the concept of intentionality. In September 1945, Lieutenant Fleurquin, Alain Resnais, and Towarnicki went to see Heidegger and this time found him home. Given the precarious position of Heidegger's circumstances, both professional and personal, he was pleased to discover that these representatives of the French army were interested in his philosophical work and not his politics. Heidegger was also eager to discuss the state of philosophy in France. He had been invited by Emile Brehier and Jean Wahl to participate in a conference on Descartes in 1936, but according to Heidegger relations between the two countries broke down soon after and the conference never took place. 13 Based on that invitation and the visit of Henry Corbin that same year, 14 Heidegger knew there was some French interest in his work but he had no idea what had happened in the last decade. Heidegger was especially interested in the work of jean-Paul Sartre. Beaufret's article 11. Frederic de Towarnicki, A /.a renconlre de 1-JPidegger (Paris: Arcades Gallimard, 1993), 18-21. 12. Ibid., 20. 13. Ibid., 31-32. According to Brehier, Heidegger never wrote back. 14. Henry Corbin, llenry Corbin: V.s Cnltiers dR l'llerne (Paris: Editions de L'Heme, 1981), 17.

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was the first time he had heard mention of this young philosopherI novelist/playwright. Towarnicki attempted to explain Sartre's philosophical program as best he could, but in the end he offered to bring Heidegger some samples of Sartre's work. Heidegger in turn gave Towarnicki a copy of his article on Descartes composed for the conference in 1936. Heidegger hoped it might clarify some of his positions that were presented in an "overly Cartesian fashion" in Beaufret's article. 15 Before they left, Resnais photographed Heidegger with Towarnicki and Fleurquin. Between September and December 1945, Towarnicki spent all his time traveling between Paris and Freiburg in his attempt to organize the conference on existentialism. In this capacity, Towarnicki opened a direct line of communication between Heidegger and the French philosophers who had been using his work. Through this line of communication, Heidegger's own philosophical texts made their way to France, as did his defense of his political choices and actions. Mter his first visit to Heidegger, Towarnicki returned to Paris in the hope of finding jean-Paul Sartre and enlisting him in the debate on existentialism. Sartre had recently departed for America, so Towarnicki could only leave him a note. Towarnicki went next to the Sorbonne to contact Emile Brehier to see if he still wanted Heidegger to come lecture on Descartes. Brehier was of the opinion that Heidegger had answered his letter eight years too late. He no longer wanted to deal with Heidegger, whose questionable political past was now known among intellectuals in Paris. 16 Brchier was also concerned about the negative effects of the influence of this "typically German philosophy" on the youth of France, especially as presented in Sartre's work. Towarnicki was no closer to organizing the debate than before. He picked up several texts that he felt marked the influence of Heidegger in France and prepared to return to Freiburg. During this second visit, Towarnicki brought Heidegger copies of Sartre 's Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and Raymond Queneau's Obstacle et valeur} 7 On returning to Paris, Towarnicki had given up all hope of finding Sartre, only to run into him on the rue Jacob, not far from the Cafe de Flore. Sartre was excited to finally see Towarnicki and, more important, to hear the news about Heidegger. Sartre invited Towarnicki to join him for a drink at the Cafe Deux Magots and began to fire question after question at him. Of the utmost importance to Sartre were two issues: the state ofHeidegger's work now and his account of his activities during the Nazi regime. ·while 15. Towarnicki, A la rnu:ontre dP HPidegger, 31-32. 16. Ibid., 36-37. 17. Two of these three texts were written by pat ticipants in Kojeve's st'minar and we have seen the indirect influence of the seminar on the third.

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Sartre was visiting the United States he heard a number of rumors about Heidegger and National Socialism, among them that he had ordered book burnings and d1at he had locked Husserl out of the school library. Sartre listened attentively as Towarnicki told him Heidegger's account of the event~ of the 1930s. Sartre told Towarnicki that he believed Heidegger's shortcoming was that he had not addressed the issue of ethics and that Heidegger's philosophy lacked a concrete motal synthesis of the historical and universal.18 Sartre's analysis was based on his concept of engagement as presented in "Existentialism Is a Humanism." While sitting at the Deux Magots, Sartre proposed that Towarnicki write an article on Heidegger for Les temps mod£rnes in which Towarnicki could present Heidegger's side of the case as Towarnicki understood it. Towarnicki agreed; that decision would become the basis for the first Heidegger Affair in France. The topic of conversation then turned to Heidegger's current work in philosophy. Towarnicki told Sartre that Heidegger was in the process of reading Being and Nothingness; Sartre could not wait to hear Heidegger's comments. Towarnicki promised to report Heidegger's assessment of the work back to Sartre and tried to establish a specific date for the debate on existentialism. Sartre's time was in high demand, so in the end they decided to get together after Towarnicki returned from his next visit to the Black Forest. While Towamicki was in Paris, Heidegger read Being and Nothingness. He was impressed with Sartre's use of phenomenological description, and in reading Sartre's philosophical opus Heidegger came to understand the association between his philosophical work and French existentialism. To Heidegger, Sartre's emphasis on d1e human actor and the conservation of the Cartesian ego cogito was a misreading of his work. As a result, he was impatient to meet Sartre and discuss the discrepancies between their philosophical programs. When Towarnicki returned from Paris, Heidegger set out to instruct him about the fundamental differences between his philosophical project and Sartre's existentialism. Heidegger explained to Towarnicki that, unlike Sartre in Being and Nothingness, he in Being and Time had been interested solely in the question of being. "And that question was not an anthropological interrogation of human experience or the foundations for an ethics, but the question into the truth of Being in itsclf." 19 During this visit, Heidegger also tried to explain what he saw as the problems with the French presentation of Dasein: 18. Towarnicki, A la rencontre de Hri.degger, 57-59. 19. Ibid., 63. One must be suspicious of the revisionist nature of Heidegger's presentation of his 1927 project. Both Anson Rabinbach and Tom Rockmore suggest that Heidegger's representation of his philosophy is a calculated attempt to both distance himself from his Nazi past and to reinvent himself for French consumption. See Rabinbach, "Heidegger's 'Letter of Humanism' as Text and Event"; and Tom Rockmort>, 1/ri.dPggPT and FrPnch PhilosojJity: /Iuman ism, A~ttihumanism, and Being (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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Heidegger smiled with a perplexed air, then he started to laugh: "You philosophize on the ground like the Greeks." No. Dasein is not the cogito, the world is not inside of consciousness. Dasein does not mean "There I am"; it is more like "there." Heidegger pointed to a grove of magnolias at the edge of the park. He explained to me that Dasein is (Being) in the world. 20 Heidegger's presentation of his philosophy was nothing like the first reading of his work in France; Heidegger's concerns were separate from those of Sartre's existentialism. Towarnicki returned to Paris ready to spread this information. In Paris, Towarnicki had become Sartre's ambassador to Heidegger. At his hotel, he received a letter from Sartre asking him to join Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Cafe de Flore the next morning so they could discuss a trip to Strasbourg and then to Freiburg to meet Heidegger. 21 At their meeting the next day, Towarnicki tried to explain to Sartre what Heidegger had told him, but Sartre was unclear on Heidegger's point and felt that a move of this nature would make it impossible to construct an ethics of engagement. Sartre told Towamicki that Heidegger needed to look more closely into the works of Marx, and the three set about making travel arrangements so that Sartre could discuss this in person with Heidegger. In the time between Towarnicki's first visit to Heidegger and his meeting with Sartre, an article had appeared in the short-lived journal Terres des hommes. It was accompanied by the picture Resnais had taken of Heidegger, Fleurquin, and Towarnicki. It was through this article that Jean Beaufret learned Heidegger was still alive and could be reached. One day, while Beaufret was at his local cafe, the Coq d'Or, not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, he ran into Towamicki, whom he recognized from the photo. The fact that Towarnicki was wearing the same military uniform as in the picture surely helped. Towarnicki told Beaufret about his meetings with Heidegger and that he had brought Heidegger Beaufret's article from Confluences. Beaufret did not come into contact with Heidegger directly through Towarnicki. As it turned out, a friend of Beaufret's named Jean-Michel Palmier was serving in the air force and was preparing to leave Paris on a mission to Freiburg. Beaufret ran into Palmier at the Coq d'Or on the day he was to leave and asked Palmier if he could deliver a letter to Heidegger for him. Palmier agreed and Beaufret scribbled a note by hand while sitting at the cafe. 22 Heidegger received this letter from Beaufret and wrote 20. Ibid., 70. 21. This letter is reproduced in its entirety in Towarnicki, A Ia reriC(mfre dR 1/eidegger, 79-80. 22. Palmier gives his account of the reception of Heidegger in France in "Wege und

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back an epistle dated November 23, 1945. In this letter, which Beaufret would attach as an appendix to the published version of "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger began to engage the French reading of his work. Beaufret formulated a number of questions for Heidegger based on this letter and sent it to him. Heidegger's response to these questions was the "Letter on Humanism. "23 Towarnicki was far more interested in facilitating a meeting between Heidegger and Sartre than a meeting between Heidegger and Beaufret. Towarnicki spent most of his time in Paris trying to arrange the necessary paperwork and passes to coordinate the meeting, which he hoped would lead to the debate on existentialism. The paperwork did not go through, the passes were not acquired. Sartre and de Beauvoir were far too busy to waste time waiting for visas that might not come, and the meeting had to be postponed. When Towarnicki returned to Freiburg and told Heidegger that Sartre would not be coming, Heidegger was deeply disappointed. He immediately had Towarnicki help him draft a letter to Sartre. Towarnicki reproduced and kept a copy of this letter. 24 The letter sheds light both on Heidegger's interest in the phenomenological work being done in France and on his own precarious and desperate position in Germany. Heidegger had been forbidden to teach, and his work was impeached by his association with National Socialism. 25 He was a man of great pride and perhaps even greater ego. As a philosopher, he was in desperate need of an audience interested in the philosophy he had to offer. From what he had read of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger believed that the most interesting work in phenomenology was being done in France, but that this work was falling into the same errors as Husserl's phenomenology. The French variant of phenomenology was simply repeating the old strategies of Cartesianism and idealism and thus could not approach the essential problem of being, despite the originality of the philosophers attempting this inqniry. Heidegger saw it as imperative, both personally and professionally, to establish contact

Wirken Heideggers in Frankreich," DiP HeiriRggp,r Kot~trm•erse, ed. Jltrg Altwegg (Frankfurt am Main: Atheniium, 1988). For Palmier's investigations into the relation between politics and philosophy in the work of Heidegger, see Jean-Michel Palmier, /,es P.crits poliliquPS de 1/eidegger (Paris: L'Herne, 1968); and idem, "Heidegger et le national-socialisme," Calti.ers tk l'Her'fll!: Heidegger, ed. Michel Haar (Paris: Editions de !'Herne, 1983). For his most current views on the subject, see Pahnier's~postface to Hugo Ott, Martin HeidRgger: £lb11R11ls pour 1.t111! biographie (Paris: Payot, 1990), 379-413. . 23. Interview of Jean Beaufret by Frederic de Towarnicki, published in Towamicki, A la rnteontre tk 1-/rideggn; 264. 24. Towamicki, A Ia rencontre de Jfeidegger, 83. 25. For a succinct presentation of the German context ofHeidegger's "Letter on Humanism," see Rabinbach, "Heidegger's 'Letter of Humanism' as Text and Event," 104-18.

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with France and present his work as he intended it so as to commence a truly fruitful and important philosophical dialogue. Heidegger and Sartre did not meet until 1952, by which time they had both altered their projects and changed course considerably: Sartre had moved toward the political in his investigation of Marx, and Heidegger had turned toward poetry in his investigation of language and the critique of technology. By contrast with the fall of 1945, when they held similar but diverging theories about the investigation of being, in 1952 they had very little to talk about. By mid-December 1945, Lieutenant Fleurquin had been reassigned and the cultural center was being dismantled. The great debate on existentialism was never to occur, at least not in Rhote-Lache. Towarnicki paid one last official visit to Heidegger and then prepared to return to Paris permanently. In Paris, Towarnicki discovered that he was considered an authority on Heidegger. At a conference at the Hotel Port Royal, he was interrogated by Jean Wahl and Emmanuel Levinas, who wanted to hear Heidegger's story but were also eager to know the state of Heidegger's philosophical work since Being and Time. Levinas's reflection on Towarnicki is most perceptive, as it captures the tone ofTowarnicki's writing and stalwart defense of Heidegger: "You arrived in Freiburg in uniform, a courageous young man, and you were spellbound. And with good reason: you had seen the pyramids." 26 Levinas's comment attests to the charismatic power of Heidegger and the seductive capacity of his ideas. As we will see, Towarnicki was not the only one to be "spellbound" by Hcidegger. 27 On January 1, 1946, Towarnicki's article on Heidegger appeared in Les temps modernes and with it the first Heidegger Affair officially began.

The Heidegger Affair The first Heidegger Affair began as a result of Sartre's popularity, which led to a series of attacks on existentialism from both the left and the center right. 28 The attacks on the left came from the Communist Party (the PC), who saw the popularity of existentialism as a direct threat to the party itself, especially in the seductive power it had on French youth. According to figures such as Henri Lefebvre, existentialism, with its 26. Ibid., 117. 27. Although not addressed in this work, the case of Hannah Arendt comes immediately to mind. See Richard Wolin, IIPideggPT:r Childwn: Hannah Arrodt, Karl Liiwith, /Ians jo11m, a11d J/f'Thprt MamL~f' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 28. See Annie Cohen-sotal, Snrlrt', 1905-1980 (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 426-27. In the aftermath of Vichy, the extreme right had been discredited and temporarily silenced. See Henry Rousso, Thf' Virlty Syndrome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991 ).

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emphasis on radical individualism, was just an extension of bourgeois capitalist values. 29 The attacks from the center right came largely from the Church, which felt that existentialism was an atheist doctrine corrupting the moral fiber of France. Other center right attacks came from conservative educators who felt that existentialism was "overly German" and thus a threat to traditional French philosophy. A common thread in all these attacks was the strategy to discredit existentialism by exploiting Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism. Thus the initial presentation of Heidegger's political activities in the French press and in various journals was not in the setv'ice of establishing the extent of Heidegger's culpability. The French reading public was confronted with Heidegger's National Socialist past in the form of attacks on existentialism, and the existentialists had to seek a defensive strategy to defend their philosophical, as well as political, positions. In certain academic circles, the "news" of Heidegger's relationship to National Socialism was not news at all. Alexandre Koyre visited Freiburg in 1934 and returned to tell Levinas and Kojeve that Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party and was serving as rector of the University of Freiburg. 30 Henry Corbin had visited Heidegger in 1936 to discuss his translations and thus must have known something about Heidegger's politics. Furthermore, ifSartre had had any interest in the political happenings in Germany while he was studying phenomenology in Berlin in 1933, he too could have found out. But the French attitudes toward National Socialism were different before the war. In 1936, Emile Brehier saw no problem ~th inviting Heidegger, by then a member of the Nazi Party for three years, to lecture at the Sorbonne. In 1945 this was absolutely unacceptable. Guilt about their lack of political activity in the 1930s, followed by defeat, led to a heightened sensitivity among French intellectuals regarding their role in World War II. Furthermore, attacks on German intellectuals such as Heidegger diverted attention away from the activities of the French during the war. To this end, the case of Heidegger was strategically perfect because it allowed for an attack on a rival French philosophy/political system through an attack on a German (read National Socialist) philosopher. The German was guilty; the other French philosophers were simply wrong.

29. Henri Lefebvre's critique of Sartre was placed within his chapter on Heidegger in L'existentialisme (Paris: Le Saggitaire, 1946). Henri Lefebvre, was ultimately expelled from the French Communist Party. Other attacks came from communists such as jean Kanapa in his L'exirtentialisme 11 'est fJas 1.m huma11i.wne (Paris: Editions sociales, 1947) and Armand Cuvillier in Lrs i11fiftralu.ms germaniqw.1 dans Ia pmsie fraru;ai.\1' (Paris: Editions Universe lies, 1945). 30. Emmanuel Levinas, "Comme un consentment a I'horrible," I.e nouvrl ob.wnmleur, January 22-28, 1988.

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Sartre found himself under attack and began to craft a defense, but in doing so he actually precipitated the Heidegger AffairY In his defense of existentialism, "Existentialisme: Mise au point," for the review Action, Sartre attempted to distinguish between Heidegger the man and Heidegger the philosopher: Heidegger was a philosopher well before becoming a Nazi. His adherence to Hitlerism, caused by fear, perhaps opportunism, and surely conformism, is not pretty, I must agree. But is this sufficient to confinn the reasoning that "since Heidegger is a member of the National Socialist Party then his philosophy must be a Nazi philosophy?" This is not the case. Heidegger has no character and that is the simple truth. Would one dare say that his philosophy is an apology for cowardice? Don't you know what happens to men who cannot live up to the level of their work?:~ 2 In this article, written before Sartre had any contact with Heidegger the man, Sartre attempted to distance himself from Heidegger while at the same time keeping what is important in Heidegger's philosophy as Sartre understands it. 33 Sartre's strategy elicited responses that sought to defend Heidegger as "naive," as well as further attacks from the communists and the center right. In a certain sense, the Heidegger Affair had already begun, although only in the margins of a larger attack on existentialism. Thus part of the complexity of the Heidegger Affair is that it began as a component of a larger debate about existentialism but with much greater stakes. These attacks also led Sartre to assign Towarnicki and another French philosopher, Maurice de Gandillac, to write articles on Heidegger for Les temps modernes. These articles would "present the facts" as each author saw them and let the "reader decide for himself." Over the course of the next two years this first Heidegger Mfair ran its course. The first articles by Towarnicki and Gandillac appeared on January 1, 1946. These were followed by an article in November 1946 that Karl Lowith, a Germanjew and former student of Heidegger, had written while in exile in 1939 but had updated to respond to the articles by Towarnicki and Gandillac. Two more articles appeared in july 1947, both in response to Lowith's article, one by Eric Weil and the other by Alphonse de Waehlens. The debate concluded with an exchange of letters between Lowith and Waehlens in which each reiterated their points but neither yielded any ground. 31. For an account of the backlash against Sartre, see John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Jlat.Pd Conscience of /lis Century: Pmte.sl.arll or Protester? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 32. Sartre, "A propos de l'existentialisme: Mise au point," Action, December 29, 1944. 33. This foreshadows what will be developed as the "contingency theory" in the Heidegger debates, where either Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism is dismissed as an aberration or, as in the case of this article, his political activities are dismissed as inconsequential to his philosophy.

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But to understand the nature of this first debate and its subsequent permutations, one must remember it took place before the publication of the "Letter on Humanism" and thus must be seen entirely in the light of the first reading of Heidegger in France. At stake is Heidegger's credibility as an existentialist thinker whose primary focus is ontology, but ontology as the investigation into human being with all the humanistic trappings that accompany this reading. The result is that the defense of Heidegger's philosophy in this first Heidegger Mfair is based on the subjectivist understanding of his philosophy that characterizes the first reading of Heidegger in France. The irony is that these defense strategies remain virtually unchanged to this day. The first Heidegger Affair can be divided into two components. The first is a ''presentation of the facts" based entirely on the allegations against Heidegger in the Allied dossier and Heidegger's own version of the facts as told to Towarnicki and Gandillac. The second component focuses on the extent to which Heidegger's philosophy is National Socialist. In this first debate, the two components are related but this relation is not necessary, since it is possible (though not necessarily satisfactory) to reach a conclusion about one component without recourse to the other. The first articles by Gandillac and Towarnicki deal entirely with the first component, but their "presentation of the facts" as related to them by Heidegger lead to a conclusion on the second. A more complex strategy is demonstrated in a preface to the two articles by Towamicki and Gandillac that was written by the editor of Les temps modemes, either Merleau-Ponty or, more likely, Sartre. In this preface, the editor introduces the two pieces on Heidegger as two distinct accounts: one written by a Heidegger enthusiast (Towarnicki) and the other by a "visitor with some reservations" (Gandillac). With implied objectivity as the mediator between these two positions, both substantially similar, the editor makes a plea for the careful study of Heidegger's philosophy in relation to his political actions. Mirroring the position Sartre took in his article for Action, the editor presents a comparison between Hegel and Heidegger in order to illustrate his point. The analogy between Hegel and Heidegger suggests that, as in the case of Hegel (and here the author claims that Hegel's later philosophy was related to his support of the Prussian state), Heidegger "the philosopher showed his infidelity to his best philosophy when it came to his political decisions. "34 Furthermore, the editor concludes that on careful consideration of the "essentials of Hegelianism," the dialectic, one discovers that despite Hegel's later tum, the essentials of his philosophy are

34. Preface to "Deux documents sur Heidegger," Les temps rrwdemrs, no. 4 (January 1, 1946): 713.

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"above suspicion." The reader is to draw the conclusion that the same holds true for the work of Heidegger. The preface defuses the issue as to the actual relation of Heidegger to National Socialism by removing it from the equation. The point is conceded, and thus the extent of Heidegger's involvement is removed from investigation. This concession allows the editor to avoid the issue of Heidegger the man and to concentrate on Heidegger's philosophy. But here too a concession is made in the allusion to Hegel. The argument claims that a philosopher's betrayal of his own thought does not prove that that thought is discredited. Thus Heidegger's turn to National Socialism does not mean that the essence of his thought is invalid. In Les temps modernes, the editor presents an argument that allows him to distance himself from the Heidegger of National Socialism while retaining the essential component of Heidegger's philosophy, the pre-Nazi Being and Time. 35 The articles by Gandillac and Towarnicki are far less concerned with the implications of National Socialism on Heidegger's philosophy than they are with establishing the "facts" about his activities in the 1930s and 1940s. In an attempt to clarify the situation, these articles ask Heidegger to respond to the general accusations against him. These accusations are based on Heidegger's position as rector at Freiburg, reports from the dossier collected by military intelligence, the rumors and innuendo presented in the French press in the attacks on existentialism, and the testimony of emigres and survivors. 36 At the time these articles were written, very little had been concretely established, there was no paper trail, and the French army was still soliciting testimony from Heidegger's colleagues. The official position of the French army in its evaluation of Heidegger's wartime activities would not be established until December 1947. Thus the first Heidegger Affair is a case of sweeping accusations 35. It is interesting to note that this argument is the opposite of that presented in the 1960s and 1980s using the "Letter on Humanism." In these later strategies, Heidegger's defenders distance themselves from the Heidegger of National Socialism on the grounds that the problem lies with everything written bifore Heidegger's turn away from metaphysics in the "Letter on Humanism." They thus conserve what they consider to be the essential component in Heidegger's thought. In Of Spirit: 1/eideggl'T attd tiiP QuRslion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), itself a critical reading of Heidegger's work and his relation to the metaphysical tradition, Jacques Derrida manages to take this strategy one step further. Using his inquiry into the term "spirit" {(;eisl], he brackets a phase in Heidegger's work that corresponds to his association with National Socialism and thus opens the possibility of salvaging Heidegger's early and later work. One mu~t note that Derrida puts Heidegger's entire project into question as well. For a discussion of these strategies in relation to the "Letter on Humanism," see Rockmore, 1/ridR{fgl'T and Frrodt Philosoph_v, 157-58. 36. The issue is clouded by the fact that Heidegger was able to deny certain rumors that were untrue and thus falsely appeared to be denying his association with National Socialism generally.

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and strategic denials, which in the end required a certain amount of "good faith" granted the testimony of one side or the other. For both Towarnicki and Gandillac, that "good faith" seems to have been placed in Heidegger. Maurice de Gandillac was the first French philosopher to establish contact with Heidegger after the war. He had attended the 1928 conference in Davos for the Cassirer-Heidegger debate and had learned about Heidegger from Emmanuel Levin as. 37 His article is certainly less supportive of Heidegger and significantly less enthusiastic than Towarnicki's, but it still paints a flattering picture of Heidegger. This picture is based largely on Gandillac's recollections of Heidegger at Davos, who "at that time did not hesitate to shake the hand of Cassirer, who was Jewish, after their long discussions on Kant." 38 Thus we come to Gandillac's narrative with a certain amount of sympathy for Heidegger. Gandillac presents two reasons for Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism. The first is Heidegger's own conclusion and the second is deduced from Heidegger's testimony. Heidegger claimed that "Hitlerism was, in a sense, the historical explosion of a structural malady that afflicts all mankind." 39 This is a succinct formulation of the argument Heidegger had been developing as early as 1936 in his lectures on Nietzsche and which is also a prevalent theme in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). This argument sees National Socialism in its historic manifestation as the logical conclusion of technology run amok. In this sense, National Socialism is the monstrous fruition of the Western metaphysical tradition. Gandillac points out that in making this argument, Heidegger in no way implicates himself or the German people in National Socialism. Gandillac then deduces the second argument for Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism from Heidegger's testimony. Gandillac's conclusion is that Heidegger was "seduced like a child by the most external aspects of the enthusiasm for Hitler. "40 Gandillac does not consider the problematic nature of one of Europe's foremost philosophers being "seduced like a child" by the "most external trappings" of National Socialism. The language shows Gandillac's desire to keep Heidegger's philosophy separate from his politics. Gandillac presents Heidegger as beguiled by the most peripheral 37. See chap. 1. 38. "Deux documents sur Heidegger," 714. Both Toni Cassirer and Hendrik Pos contest this report and claim that Heidegger in fact snubbed Cassirer by refusing to shake his hand. See Toni Cassirer Ml'in Leben rn.i.l Emsl Caslirrr (Hildesheim: Gersten berg, 1981); and Hendrik Pos, "Recollections of Ernst Cassirer," in The Philo.wfJity oj E.rnsl Carsirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1949). 39. Ibid., 715. 40. Ibid., 716.

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aspects of National Socialism, implying that he had never considered the phenomenon seriously. On the one hand, this frees Gandillac to maintain that Heidegger's philosophy is separate from National Socialism, but, on the other, it avoids the most essential question: What in National Socialism was so attractive to Heidegger and how does this manifest itself in his philosophy? I would argue that Gandillac could not approach this question because his understanding of Heidegger's philosophy-as fundamentally concerned with the human subject, freedom, and responsibility-led him to the conclusion that Heidegger's work was incompatible with the program of National Socialism. As an example of the first reading of Heidegger in France, Gandillac's assessment of Heidegger was necessarily limited. Towarnicki's article is a more strident defense ofHeidegger and represents the model that defenders of Heidegger would continue to employ through the subsequent Heidegger Mfairs. This strategy is based on the faithful reproduction of Heidegger's own testimony regarding the series of events that befell him and how he reacted to them. Towarnicki's article is quite similar to Heidegger's interview in Der Spiegel (published posthumously in 1976) and also to the short piece "Facts and Thoughts." Towarnicki's article relies entirely on the "good faith" he has in the integrity of Heidegger's testimony and his uncritical acceptance of it. 41 Towarnicki's article is presented more or less as an interview based on the numerous visits he made to Heidegger between September and December 1945, which allows Heidegger to tell his side of the story. In Heidegger's account, he took the rectorship in Freiburg only at the specific request of the former rector, von Mollendorf, who hoped that "my personality as a professor would help to preserve the faculty from political slavery."42 Even so, Heidegger claims that he only took the rectorship after much deliberation. Soon after he took the post, Heidegger continues, "A

41. In fact it is the "bad faith" that Heidegger showed in his equivocations, denials, and misrepresentations of events that led to the escalation in the intensity of the accusations and denials in the debates of the 1960s and 1980s. As more and more evidence relating to the extent of Heidegger's involvement became available, his testimony was shown to be faulty at best, and many of the intellectuals who had believed Heidegger in the 1940s found that they had been duped. The embarrassing nature of this position caused some to reevaluate but others to dig deeper and search for alternative strategies to defend the position in which they had invested their time and energy. In a domino effect, this led others to heighten their attacks, drawing on the increasing amount of evidence against Heidegger, and so on. 42. These are Heidegger's actual words to Towarnicki, published in "Deux documents sur Heidegger," 717. Based on the investigation into Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism, presented in the work of Hugo Ott and others, Heidegger's assertion cannot be considered truthful.

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party official arrived at my office at the university; he insisted in the name of the minister that I enlist in the Nazi Party.... Mter a long deliberation I decided that I was ready to accept that formality in the interest of the university, but only on the condition that I would not, during my time as rector nor after, have to have personal relations with the National Socialist Party."43 Heidegger attempted to separate his position from that of National Socialism by stating his opposition to biologism, especially the theories of Alfred Baumler and Alfred Rosenberg. How opposed to Nazi racial theory Heidegger actually was is open to debate. For us the essential point is that in Towarnicki's article Heidegger's claim is used to decode his rectorial address as well as his activities in the party, and to judge them fundamentally opposed to National Socialism. Heidegger presented himself as a reluctant Nazi who joined the party only to work against it in the interest of the university and through his opposition to racial ideologues such as Baumler and Rosenberg. 44 Furthermore, he implied that this opposition to biologism was also an opposition to the Nazi Party's antiSemitic policies. 45 Even if this were true, it would only be insofar as those policies were framed in biological terms. Finally, Heidegger claimed that he broke with National Socialism after the Rohm putsch of 1934, when he "realized what the Nazis were," but that he was unable to resign from the party because it could not be done without dire repercussions. Heidegger then cites a litany of attacks leveled against him by various Nazi officials as proof of his own anti-Nazi conduct. Heidegger mixes equivocations with outright lies. He presents us with statements (some true) that lead to faulty conclusions, such as that his antibiologism constituted anti-Nazism, or that attacks by other Nazis absolved him of being a Nazi himself. The effect of Towarnicki's article, at a time when very few facts were known and when Heidegger's thought was associated with such thinkers a~ Sartre, Aron, and Merleau-Ponty, was to render Heidegger's claims plausible. If in fact Heidegger had been asked to take the position as rector by his colleagues and was forced to join the party as a result, then it would make sense that his philosophy would not reflect any of the values of National Socialism. His purported opposition to biological racism and the attacks on his character and philosophy by other members of the Nazi Party seemed to corroborate his account. If one believed Heidegger's story as told to Towarnicki, then one believed that Heidegger was never really a Nazi but joined only because of the circumstances; therefore his philosophy is absolved of any 43. Ibid., 718. 44. See Rabin bach, "Heidegger's 'Letter of Humanism' as Text and Event," 45. "Deux documents sur Heidegger," 719.

105~.

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contamination. This argument, of course, hinges on readers taking Heideg;ger at his word, as Towarnicki does. Heidegger's story was called into question in a response to Gandillac's and Towarnicki's articles written by Karl Lowith and published in the November 1946 issue of Les temps modernes. Lowith had been a pupil of Heidegger's but had been forced to leave Germany because he was a Jew. He fled to Rome and then spent four years in Japan before taking up residence in the United States. The piece LOwith submitted to Les temps modemes was written in 1939 in Japan and then reworked to address the articles by Gandillac and Towarnicki. Lowith 's article did not focus on Heidegger's activities in association with the Nazi Party (this it assumes), but on Heidegger's philosophy itself and the extent to which it is inherently National Socialist. Thus Lowith's article represents the second component of the Heidegger Affair. Lowith was convinced that Heidegger's turn to National Socialism was "the immediate political implication of the Heideggerian notion of Existence."46 Lowith's argument is based on a comment Heidegger made to him during their meeting in Rome in 1936. Lowith was living in Rome at the time, having fled Germany with his wife after losing his post in Marburg in 1933. Heidegger had come to Rome with his wife and two children to deliver a lecture on Holderlin. Since Lowith and Heidegger had been close in Freiburg, Lowith and his wife planned an excursion to Frascati and Tusculum for Heidegger and his family. The day started off on a disturbing note, as Lowith recalls, because "even on this occasion, Heidegger did not remove the party insignia from his lapel. He wore it during his entire stay in Rome, and it had obviously not occurred to him that the swastika was out of place while he was spending the day with me." 47 This not so subtle reminder of Heidegger's political allegiance prompted Lowith to ask Heidegger several questions about the situation in Germany. In the course of their conversation, Lowith told Heidegger that he believed that "his [Heidegger's] partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy." Heidegger's response to this question forms the basis of Lowith's article and of his understanding of the links between Heidegger's philosophy and his political allegiance to National Socialism. "Heidegger agreed with me without reservation, and 46. Karl Lowith, "Les implications politiques de Ia philosophie de )'existence chez Heirlegger," LPs ternps rnodrrrtes, no. 14 (November 1946): 343. Lowith's thesis corresponds to what Tom Rockmore has labeled the "neccesitarian" argument, which concludes that Heidegger's political action is a direct result of his philosophy. In opposition to this stands the "contingent" reading, where Heidegger's National Socialist episode is seen as an aberration and thus is not directly related to his philosophy. 47. Karl Lowith, M)' Last MPeling with IIPideggPr in Hm'lll', I 936, in The JlridPggpr Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 141.

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added that his concept of "historicality' [ Geschichtlichkeit] was the basis of his political 'engagement."' 48 The piece on Lowith's last meeting with Heidegger and the article that appeared in Les temps modernes were written at the same time and can be seen as reflections on the same questions. LOwith's article showed that, contrary to the article presented bv Gandillac (which separated Heidegger's philosophy from his politic~! actions), Heidegger's philosophy, specifically the project of Being and Time-is "a theory of historical existence" and that the practical application of this project to an actual historical situation is only possible insofar as Being and Time already contains a relation to contemporary reality. It is this practical-political application in terms of an actual commitment to a determinate decision that in truth justifies or condemns the philosophical theory that serves as the basis of this commitment. What is true or false in theory is also so in practice, above all when the theory itself originates in conscious fashion from a supreme fact, historical existence, and when its path leads it back to this. 49 LOwith's strategy was to use an analysis of Heidegger's political texts to show that his philosophy led directly to his affiliation with National Socialism. To make this correlation, Lowith quotes paragraph 74 of Being and Time: ''Only a being which is essentially ... futural so that it is free for its death and can let itself be thrown back upon its factical 'there' by shattering itself against death, is able to take over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision 'for its time."' 50 Lowith contends that Heidegger's language in Being and Time and the language of National Socialism are very close, and that it did not take much prodding for Heidegger to shift the focus of his project from the investigation of individual being to a more collective understanding of being that wants to "take over its own thrownness" by subscribing to National Socialism, which was "the moment of vision for its time." Whoever, on the basis of these remarks, reflects on Heidegger's later support in favor of Hitler, will find in this first formulation of the idea of historical "existence" the constituents that are the basis of his later political decision. One need only abandon the still quasi-religious isolation of authentic existence, "always particular to each individual" and apply the "duty" [Milsen] that follows therefrom to "specifically 48. Ibid., 142. 49. Karl Lowith, "Les implications politiques de Ia philosophie de l'existence chez Heidegger," Les temfJ5 modernes, no. 14 (November 1946): 344. 50. Ibid., 344-45. I have translated the passage as Lowith presents it and not as it appears in Being a11d Time.

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German existence" and its historical destiny in order thereby to introduce into the general movement of German existence the wave of energetic but ultimately vain categories of existence ("to decide for oneself'; "to found oneself in the face of nothing"; "to want one's ownmost destiny"; "to take responsibility for oneself') and to proceed from here to destruction on the terrain of politics. 5 1 According to Lowith, the pieces were all in place for Heidegger's political decision; all that was needed was the shift in emphasis from the individual to the collective. The nature of this shift is perhaps not sufficiently explored by Lowith, but it allows him to draw a causal link between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics. But the shift in emphasis in Heidegger's philosophy that Lowith alluded to was unknown in France, and the understanding ofHeidegger's work was profoundly different in the two countries. The philosophy of Heidegger understood by Gandillac and Towarnicki read Heidegger's paragraph 74 in terms of Raymond Aron's Introduction to the Philosophy of History, not in terms of radical conservatism. There is a passage in Lowith's article that is especially interesting when read in the light of the different understandings of Heidegger in Germany and France: "It is probable that none of Heidegger's students would have imagined in 1927, at the time of the appearance of Being and Time, that the concept of death ('always authentic and particular,' radically individual) which is a central category in the analysis of Dasein, would be travestied six years later to celebrate the glory of a National Socialist 'Hero. "' 52 Lowith's reference is to Heidegger's speech on Albert Leo Schlageter,53 where Heidegger uses the language from his analysis of death in Being and Time to praise the resolute action of Schlageter when confronting his own death. Lowith employs this quotation to demonstrate the shift in Heidegger's work from the emphasis on the "particular and individual" to a general (read German) Dasein. But references to Schlageter and to Heidegger's political texts were lost on the French audience. 54 In this light, Lowith's comment that none of Heidegger's pupils would have imagined, based on his work in 1927, what was to come in 1933 51. Ibid., 348. 52. Ibid., 354. 53. Schlageter was a veteran of World War I and a member of a radical nationalist volunteer corps, which was attacking French and Belgian Occupation troops in the Rhineland. He was caught attempting to sabotage train tracks, tried, and sentenced to death in 1923. In 1933, Schlageter was declared the first National Socialist German soldier and became a symbol of National Socialism. See Victor Farias, Ileidl'gger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 87-95. 54. The first French work that examined Heidegger's political writings was Palmier's l~mts politiques dP 1/eidegger ( 1968).

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is especially instructive. The French reading of Heidegger was based entirely on Being and Time and the texts that Henry Corbin had translated, and this reading was coded by what we have called the first reading of Heidegger in France. When we consider the lack of concrete evidence about Heidegger's activities in the 1930s and 1940s, not to mention an ignorance of Heidegger's current work, the parameters of the first Hcidegger Affair begin to become clear. Lowith was arguing about the philosophy and politics of the Heidegger of 1936. The French were arguing about the philosophy of Heidegger in 1927, as understood in France through the lens of existentialism, and the politics of Heidegger based on Heidegger's testimony in 1947. Lowith's position as an outsider to French philosophical concerns was exacerbated by the particular French understanding of Heidegger's philosophy, which saw it as antithetical to National Socialism. In July 1947, two articles appeared in Les temps modernes in response to Lowith's piece. Both attempted to defend Heidegger's philosophy against Lowith's claim that it was inherently National Socialist; both demonstrated variations on the contingency argument. But what is specific to these two articles, as opposed to later variations of the contingency argument, is that in both cases the defense of Heidegger is more a defense of existentialism. For Waehlens and for Weil, as for Towarnicki and Gandillac, the defense of Heidegger is based on their particular understanding of his philosophy, but in these two articles the terms of the debate have shifted in response to Lowith's claim that Heidegger's philosophy was the basis for his political decisions. Alphonse de Waehlens, the author of the first response, was Belgian, but as a scholar of phenomenology and the author of a book on MerleauPonty he was much closer to the French reading of phenomenology than to the phenomenology of Husser!. His understanding of Heidegger is also heavily indebted to the work of Merleau-Ponty. Waehlens's argument has two parts. The first argument will be repeated throughout all the Heidegger debates. Waehlens contends that Heidegger as an individual actor is of no importance and that the only factor that should count is whether Heidegger's philosophy is tainted by National Socialism: "It is only important for us to know if Heidegger's philosophy is intrinsically National Socialist or if it was simply led to National Socialism by the abstract facts of the personal reactions (good or bad; just or unjust; coherent or incoherent; heroic, cowardly, or criminal) of a private person."55 This opening statement relieves the author of the burden of determining Heidegger's guilt or innocence in relation to his political 55. Alphonse de Waehlens, "La philosophie de Heidegger et le Nazisme," Les temps modernes, no. 22 Quly 1947): 115.

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choices. For Waehlens, the entire burden of proof lies in demonstrating that Heidegger's philosophy is not National Socialist; only it matters. Over the next forty years, this strategy would take on greater significance as more and more information about the extent of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism was revealed. But more pertinent is the means by which Waehlens sought to prove that Heidegger's philosophy was not National Socialist. Through his argument, Waehlens articulates the French understanding of Heidegger's philosophy in France as manifested in the first reading. Waehlens's basic claim is that Heidegger's "existential phenomenology"-a term Heidegger never used to describe his own work-is fundamentally opposed to fascism and antithetical to National Socialism. Therefore, Waehlens concludes the fault does not lie with Heidegger the philosopher but with Heidegger the man, who betrayed his philosophy. 56 Waehlens's argument privileges a reading of Heidegger as an existentialist in the French sense of the term and presents Heidegger as a fellow combatant against what the "French existentialists call the 'serious spirit' (pessimism)" as well as an opponent of "heroism and the will to power." In this light, "the lucidity of Heidegger condemns the 'seriousness' of the fascist masses and is equally severe in its condemnation of the will to power and 'activist' nihilism of their leaders."57 Waehlens's reading focuses on drawing the themes of individuality, responsibility, and freedom out of Being and Time, and specifically out of the section on historicality (paragraph 74). These themes were all central to the works of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Aron, and Waehlens uses them to present an existentialist interpretation of Being and Time that is fundamentally incompatible with fascism and by extension National Socialism. Waehlens's defense of Heidegger never departs from the French parameters in which it was set. He demonstrates the incompatibility of Heidegger's philosophy with fascism by means of Raymond Aron 's definition of fascism and a discussion of Heidegger's historicality that relies heavily on Aron 's Introduction to the Philosophy of History. The article ends with a blanket refutation of Lowith 's piece based on a dismissal ofLowith's reading of Being and Time. This tactic is ultimately counterproductive. But to dismiss Waehlens's reading of Being and Time would also be counterproductive. Neither reading is wrong, but both are skewed. Lowith expands a specific connection, which is in need of 56. Ibid., 119. Attached to this claim is a more petty argument that any conclusion that leads to the connection between Ileidegger's philosophy and National Socialism must be based on a misreading of Heidegger's work. Again this argument would be taken up by defenders of Heidegger in later debates, but it is particularly ironic in this case, given the misinformed nature of the first reading of Heidegger in France. 57. Ibid., 122.

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detailed exploration, into a wholesale dismissal read backward into Being and Time. Waehlens's understanding of Heidegger relies on the first reading of Heidegger as an existentialist whose emphasis is the human subject, individualism, freedom, and responsibility. All these themes are present in Being and Time but none are the specific focus of the book. The unfortunate consequence of these two positions is that each interpretation structurally cut off the possibility of dialogue with the other. The final article in the first Heidegger Affair was written by Eric Weil. Weil, who was Jewish and originally from Germany, had been a student of Ernst Cassirer's but emigrated to Paris where he became an active participant in Kojeve's seminar. Weil's understanding of Heidegger was based on his work in France and not on his work in Germany. Weil's argument added a new twist to the contingency argument by condemning and defending Heidegger at the same time. The tone ofWeil's article is betrayal: Heidegger had somehow betrayed his own thought and thus betrayed those who had followed his thought. A more plausible scenario is that Heidegger's political activities betrayed Weil's (and the French) conception of Heidegger's thought. It is clear from the beginning ofWeil's article, "The Heidegger Case," that Weil has already passed sentence on Heidegger the man. He dismissed Heidegger's claim that he opposed the Nazis because he opposed biologism on the grounds that this does not make Heidegger antiNazism but simply antibiologism. Weil attacked Towarnicki's defense of Heidegger (a case of one variant of the Heidegger defense attacking another), contending that Towamicki let Heidegger off the hook and did not force him to take responsibility for his actions. It would have been an excellent defense if he had stated that he (Heidegger), the philosopher of decision, had decided in complete responsibility on that which he took to be destiny. And if after, he had come to understand that that destiny was nothing but a bloody farce, a betrayal of all authenticity, a contemptible subterfuge of the will to primitive power, and by the same token a negation of all "being-itself' [etre soi-mbne].58 This critique is written in Heideggerian language but is imbued with Sartrean meaning. There is a normative sense to all the terms Weil uses that is very distant from the way Heidegger employs them but very close to Sartre's project in its ethical dimension. Despite Weil's Sartrean criticisms of Heidegger's lack of responsibility, Weil does not agree with Lowith that one can "deduce the German 'tnuh' from Being and Time." Instead, Weil asserts that "the existentialism of Heidegger (we will avoid the question as to the measure in which 58. Eric Weil, "Le cas Heidegger," Les tnnps modnTu•.s, no. 22 (July 1947): 131-32.

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this applies to all existentialism) is a philosophy of reflection which like all philosophies of reflection deals with the individual as it relates to Being."59 Weil argued that as a philosopher of reflection whose concern was the relation of the individual to being, Heidegger was necessarily concerned with the individual and thus could not be a philosopher of the collective. This argument assumes that Heidegger is a philosopher of reflection like Husser] and Sartre. Again we see that in the French reading, Heidegger is assumed to be following Husserl's model of intentionality with its intellectual emphasis on reflection and thought. This was not the case. Heidegger is not a philosopher of reflection. Weil's argument is based on the alliance he establishes between Heidegger "the existentialist" and other existentialists such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Furthermore, Weil reads Heidegger's project as fundamentally compatible with these other "antifascist" existentialisms, which in France were associated with left-wing politics, thus concluding that Heidegger's philosophy was also antifascist. This conclusion is reached by examining Heidegger's philosophy understood through Sartrean definitions. Weil found Heidegger's fault not in his philosophy per se but in the fact that Heidegger does not go far enough in establishing a specific decision based on his philosophy. Here Sartre's philosophy is the model for worldly decision making based on philosophy. While Heidegger's investigation posed the question of being "with a vigor that philosophy has only at crucial times in history," his question did not lead him to any specific answer. For Weil, this fault would not have mattered if "the author had been an individual of political conviction. But this is inadmissible as he has shown us only the most revolting and grotesque attitudes which would prevent anyone from taking his philosophy seriously." 60 In other words, if Heidegger had been a man of "political conviction" in Weil's sense of the term, he would have reached a political decision worthy of his philosophy. But because his philosophy lacks the crucial component that would provide a specific political or historical decision and not just a decision about one's own being, his weak character led him into the fold of National Socialism. "The fault in Heidegger's existentialism is that if one asks his philosophy to lead one to a specific historical or political decision, it cannot, precisely because it is only concerned with the decision. "61 For Weil it is inconceivable that Heidegger was a man of "political conviction" and that the decision he made could be the logical outcome of his philosophical work, as Lowith contended. Weil simply could not 59. Ibid., 133-34. 60. Ibid., 137. 61. Ibid., 135.

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reconcile his understanding of Heidegger's philosophy with Heidegger's political acts. Indeed, ifWeil·was looking for an existential philosophy of decision, the work of Sartre would have suited him much better, but, as we have seen, Weil, like many of his contemporaries, saw Sartre and Heidegger as fundamentally compatible. The final phase of the first Heidegger Affair was an exchange of letters between Lowith and Waehlens in August 1948, which centered on the second aspect of the affair, whether Heidegger's philosophy was inherently National Socialist. The positions were reiterated, but Lowith and Waehlens continued to argue past each other based on their different interpretations of the philosophy of Heidegger. The two sides made no ground in understanding Heidegger's relation to National Socialism, but that is because the debate centered on the question of whether Heidegger's philosophy is or is not National Socialist. With such narrow parameters there are only two sides to be taken: one is either for Heidegger or against him. This issue was further exacerbated by the impressionistic nature of the first aspect of the affair, which dealt exclusively with Heidegger the individual and his affiliation with National Socialism. At the time, there was no established truth about Heidegger's activities. As a result, the articles by Towarnicki, Gandillac, and Lowith all relied heavily on their own impressions of their meetings with Heidegger and their faith in his testimony, given their own understanding of what had occurred. 62 The deciding factor was whom you chose to believe, and this would lead one to a decision on the second component. For our purposes, the essential issue in this first debate is the emphasis that the French (I include Weiland Waehlens) placed on their understanding ofHeidegger as an existential thinker, in the same way that Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Gabriel Marcel were considered existential thinkers. This implied a certain allegiance to humanism, individuality, freedom, and responsibility that owed more to the legacy of the Enlightenment project than to the work of Heidegger. In the "Letter on Humanism," Heidegger refuted the claim that he was an existentialist, which clouded the issue even further and created a divide between Heidegger and the strategy used to defend him in this first affair. What is surprising, given the way that the understanding of Heidegger would change in France over the next decade, is that the strategies adopted in the· first Heidegger Affair, both for and against Heidegger, remained virtually the same in the following two affairs. 62. Traditionally, the articles from Les temps modernes have been viewed in the light of the historical evidence we now have of Heidegger's National Socialism, which often leads to anachronistic conclusions. What is lacking in the voluminous publications on the Heidegger Affair is a historiographical investigation that focuses on the release of that information and the im111ediate effects it had on both sides of the issue.

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The "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger wrote the "Letter on Humanism" to Jean Beaufret in fall 1946 but it was not published in France until 1947.63 By the time it was published, the battle lines for the first Heidegger Affair had been drawn; but the "Letter on Humanism" led to a further development because it created a schism between the first reading of Heidegger in France popularized by the generation of 1933 and the second reading, based on the direct influence ofHeidegger through jean Beaufret, which was adopted by the younger postwar generation of intellectuals. The domesticated version of Heidegger's work had caught the interest of these younger intellectuals and led them to Heidegger himself and to a reading that was antithetical to the humanist existentialism with which Heidegger had been previously associated. In his letter to Beaufret, Heidegger destroys the entire interpretation of his work as it had come to be read in France. The cherished values of humanism, progress, and freedom (even the concept of values themselves), which had been assumed to be the basis of Heidegger's project in a fundamentally Cartesian sense, were now placed under scrutiny by Heidegger, who called for a more "essential" understanding of philosophy, which he said had been the basis of his project all along. In the "Letter on Humanism," it became clear that Heidegger was not what he had been assumed to be in France. Everything that is unsettling and unheimlich about Heidegger's work, and everything that led the generation of 1933 to Heidegger in the first place, returned to topple the domesticated reading of Heidegger in France. For younger French students, a Heidegger arrived that appeared more radical than even Sartre because he completely detached the ego cogito from philosophical investigation and thus se\·ered philosophy from the Cartesian tradition. The generation of 1933 was forced to rethink its understanding of Heidegger in relation to this revelation. This second reading of Heidegger, in opposition to the first reading and immediately following the Heidegger Affair, raised the stakes of the game in the subsequent affairs. In the 1960s, the issue was not only Heidegger's relation to National Socialism but also his "betrayal" of existentialism and the prominent place of his work in the newest incarnations of French philosophy. Heidegger's visits with Towarnicki had given him a fairly good understanding of the state of philosophy in France. He became acquainted with the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beaufret and had intuited that they had not yet moved beyond the shadow of Descartes, despite 63. This partial translation was published in Fontaine, no. 63 (1947). A translation of a revised version was published in Cnhiers du sud, nos. 319-20 (1957).

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his influence and the influence of phenomenology. It was apparent in their work that they were trying to address the issues of the primacy of the subject and the relationship to being, but in his view they had not departed from the metaphysical tradition sufficiently to address the most fundamental issues. Heidegger's interest in phenomenology in France occurred at a time when he was increasingly isolated in Germany. He found himself in a desperate situation; one can feel the sense of urgency in his attempts to get in touch with Sartre and his interviews with Towarnicki. Seen in this light there is something rather calculated about the "Letter on Humanism." Given that he was on the brink of banishment from the university and had lost credibility in Germany, the letter is especially suspicious, since it was written to Beaufret only after Heidegger's attempts to contact Sartre had fallen through. 64 But it is also true that in Beaufret Heidegger found a pupil who was enthralled to hear what Heidegger had to say and whose questions allowed him to address what he believed to be the most important philosophical issues and to again take center stage in the world of philosophy. At stake in the "Letter on Humanism" is in fact the entire reading of Heidegger in France, both in relation to the initial French interpretation and in relation to National Socialism. In terms of the fom1er, we need only look at a comment made by Beaufret to Merleau-Ponty at a conference in November 1946. Mter discussing Merleau-Ponty's work with Heidegger, Beaufret reproached Merleau-Ponty (the very person who had led him to Heidegger) for not being radical enough-despite the fact that, at this same conference, Emile Brehier had said he was too radical "The phenomenological descriptions you propose right now use, in effect, the vocabulary of idealism. They are thus in the same category as a Husserlian description. But the problem is precisely to know if phenomenology pushed to its very base would not lead us to leave subjectivity and the vocabulary of subjective idealism and thus to depart from Husser} as in the work of Heidegger." 65 Here we see the fundamental difference between the first and second reading of Heidegger in France. Sartre, Wahl, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, and Marcel had started the work, but they had not gone far enough. Thus, the second reading of Heidegger was once again an attempt to push past the boundaries of contemporary French philosophy, but these boundaries had

64. Anson Rabinbach says that "the 'Letter' exemplifies Heidegger's characteristic ability to assume a position of the highest philosophical rigor while positioning himself in the most opportune political light." Rabinbach, "Heidegger's 'Letter of Humanism' as Text and Event," 97. 65. Jean Beaufret's response to Mcrleau-Ponty in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, l.P Jtrirnat dP Ia peraption (Paris: Verdier, 1996), 103.

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been expanded by the work of the generation of 1933 to include phenomenological existentialism. The letter itself was written to exploit precisely this issue, though one could not say it was written to cause a rift or schism between varying readings of Heidegger's work. Instead, Heidegger wrote the "Letter on Humanism" as a clarification of his work. He sought to set the record straight and to present his philosophy as he intended it to be read to those who were using it in France. Despite the boldness of Beaufret's comments to Merleau-Ponty, he too was still indebted to both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre for his understanding of Heidegger, and the nature of the questions he posed to Heidegger show the extent of this debt. Beaufret wanted to know how Heidegger's philosophy related to humanism and whether it was compatible with an ethics. And how could one come to "restore meaning to the word humanism"? These questions all imply the first reading of Heidegger, especially in the work of Sartre. Heidegger's response severed the ties to that reading and removed the debt. In fact, in the case of such thinkers as Wahl, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan, it inverted the relationship, since they turned to Beaufret as the porte-parole through which they would come to their later understanding of Heidegger. Heidegger's chief goal in the "Letter on Humanism" was to distance himself from the crude variant of existentialism that Sartre produced in his published lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism. It also reflected the extent to which his own work had shifted emphasis since the publication of Being and Time. This shift is generally discussed as Heidegger's "turn," and more specifically as his "turn toward language." 66 This is a shift in emphasis from the fundamental ontology of Being and Time to a meditation on the history of being; this shift coincides with Heidegger's attempt to break with the metaphysical tradition. Heidegger's work in Being and Time is cross-cultural and ahistorical (it is not apolitical, but it does not have a specific political allegiance). The basis of the suppositions he 66. On Heidegger's "tum," see Beda Allemann, Ilolderlin und Ilridf!{!gPT (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1954); Jean Grondin, I.e loumant d(J:ns ln pmsie de Martin lleubggrr (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987);Jean-Fra.nc;:ois Mattei, "Le chiasme heideggerien ou Ia mise a l'ecart de Ia philosophie," in La mitapltysi.que a Ia limiiR, ed. DominiqueJanicaud andjeanFranc;:ois Mattei (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1983); Alberto Rosales, "Zum Problem der Kehre in Denken Heideggers," Zeitschrifl Jilr philasophischt> Fursrhu11g, 38 (1984). See also Fred R. Dallmayr, "Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy," J>ofiliwl171£ory, 12, no. 2 (May 1984): 204-34. Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe both place Heidegger's turn at the center of their investigations into his politics and philosophy: Derrida, OJ Spirit: Heit!Rggn- and the QuPsti.orl,' Philippe Lacoue-Labanhe, llPidPggpr, Art, and Pofitirs: 17~e Fiction of t!IP Poluiml (New York: Blackwell, 1990). For a critique of these works, see Wolin, "French Heidegger Wars," in 111P llrideg;,IT'r Controvm-y; and Rockmore, "Heidegger's Politics and French Philosophy." in 1-leidtggt>r and Fwndt Phi!o.foplty.

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presents, specifically about human beings in relation to being, is that understanding is not in people's minds but in their everyday lives. The categories Heidegger sets up in Being and Time are applicable to this relation regardless of time or place. In the later Heidegger, after the "turn," he becomes concerned with "historical Being." His suppositions become more temporal and more concerned with the phenomenon of the history of being. Incorporated into this more specific type of investigation is an inquiry into the relation of language to being. The two most important themes in the "Letter on Humanism" as it pertains to the reception of Heidegger in France are Heidegger's emphasis on language and his dismissal of the traditional understanding of humanism as derived from the ego cog;ito. Both these themes are drawn from his attempt to break with traditional metaphysics. The two themes were also intended as instructions as to where not to follow the work of Heidegger-toward Sartre-and where to follow Heidegger-t.he investigation into language. Heidegger begins his letter by emphasizing the relation of being to language, not in the sense that language serves a particular being but in that "thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being" (LH, 217). Thus the relation between man and being is based on thinking as it comes to language. But this is not to say that the relationship between thinking, language, and being is important because it is quantifiable or produces a specific response or desired effect. "Thinking is not merely l'engagement dans l'action for and by beings in the sense of the actuality of the present situation" (LH, 218). The search for a specific response from language, from thinking, or from being is the domain of science, and Heidegger contends that philosophy's greatest error was in following the model of science and that "~uch an effort is the abandonment of the essence of thinking" (LH, 218-19). As we have seen in our investigation into Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik? the desire to find a specific answer leads one to concentrate only on what one already knows. To ask a question that expects a specific answer is to ask the wrong question, because such a question does not allow being to present itself as what it is. Philosophy is perverted by this scientific model. In opposition to science, "thinking lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the tntth of Being" (LH, 218). Thus thinking is in its very essence opposed to science. Science interrogates with the expectation it will derive an answer; thinking lets being be. Having established this preliminary distinction between the realm of science (which is the realm of metaphysics) and the realm of thinking

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(which should be the realm of philosophy), Heidegger approaches the questions put to him by Beaufret. The first and primary question Beaufret asks is, "How can we restore meaning to the word 'humanism'?" The nature of this question allows Heidegger to begin his critique of humanism, which is not an antihumanism, as is so often supposed, but a rethinking of humanism and the centrality of the human in our philosophical tradition. Here, Heidegger's postsubjectivist tendencies come to the fore and one can clearly see the difference between his earlier emphasis on the individual Dasein in Being and Time, that led to the first reading, and his later emphasis on being detached from the individual human that informs the second reading. Heidegger returns to his notion of thinking against the metaphysical tradition of philosophy, which is the basis for the term humanism. He does not believe that the metaphysical methodology is capable of investigating being because it necessarily disturbs whatever it observes or interrogates. Instead we must respect being because "Being is the enabling-favoring, the 'may-be' [ das Mog-licheJ. As the element, Being is the 'quiet power' of the favoring-enabling, that is, of the possible" (LH, 220). The problem with metaphysics, and thus with humanism, at least as understood by Sartre, is that it wants to be practical and applicable and thus does not let things be in a way that allows them to reveal the~selves; instead it forces answers from things. As a result of this misplaced emphasis, "philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes. One no longer thinks; one occupies himselfwith 'philosophy"' (LH, 221). So thinking is replaced by a proliferation of "-isms," which are based on subjectivity and which Heidegger attributes to the "peculiar dictatorship of the public realm." This is the realm of universal laws and rational principles that want to define being in the same rational manner that one defines a scientific equation. But Heidegger also attacks the flip side of this public realm, which is the emphasis on "private existence." The philosophy of private existence is especially deceptive because it pretends to offer an escape from the public realm but is actually dependent on it. Thus the philosophy of "private existence" is not really essential, that is to say free, human being. It remains an off-shoot that depends upon the public and nourishes itself by a mere withdrawal from it Hence it testifies~ against its own will~ to its subservience to the public realm. But because it stems from the predominance of subjectivity the public realm is the metaphysically conditioned establishment and authorization of the openness of individual beings in their unconditional objectification. (LH, 221) This critique brings the work of Sartre (especially in Existentialism Is a Humanism) immediately to mind~ not only because Sartre presents philosophy as prescriptive and immediately applicable but also because of

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his inversion of Descartes's formula. This inversion of Descartes, the ultimate subjective philosopher. still relies on him. According to Heidegger, language loses its meaning in the service of the philosophy of the public realm or of private existence. When confined by the metaphysical tradition, language "falls into the senice of expediting communication along routes where objectification-the uniform accessibility of everything to everyone-branches out and disregards all limits" (LH, 221). 67 In the service of metaphysics, the tn1th of being is lost to language. As a result, being is no longer accessible to man through language and instead is "concealed beneath the dominance of subjectivity that presents itself as the public realm" (LH, 222). Once language has been co-opted by metaphysics, it takes on the properties of science and becomes a technology for classification and representation. As a tool in the service of metaphysics, language is no longer the "house of the truth of Being." For philosophy to return to the realm of thinking from the world of science, we must rethink language outside the limits of comprehensibility in the subject-object meaning of the word: If man is to find his way once again to the nearness of Being he must

first learn to exist in the nameless. In the same way he must recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private. Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. Only thus will the preciousness of its essence be once more bestowed upon the word, and upon man a home for dwelling in the truth of Being. (LH, 223) For Heidegger, it is imperative that we rethink our relationship to language. The metaphysical tradition has rendered language virtually meaningless and flat by virtue of representational categories that only serve to objectify for a subject and do not let things express themselves. It is in silence, or in the possibility of silence, that these things can reveal themselves and that language can then regain its power in its relationship to being. But here Heidegger returns to the question of the relation of the human being to being through language and the place of humanism in this relation. According to Heidegger, this "letting be" should be the real concern of humanism: "For this is humanism: meditating and caring, that man must be human and not inhumane, 'inhuman,' that is, outside his essence" (LH, 224). Heidegger calls for a rethinking of humanism outside the realm of metaphysics. To make his point, he presents a number of "humanisms," from the humanism of Marx to the humanism of 67. There is definitely an antidemocratic sentiment to Heidegger's thought here, which can be traced to Kierkegaard's essay "The Present Age."

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Christianity to Sartre's variant in Existentialism Is a Humanism. Heidegger concludes that however different these forms of humanism may be in purpose and in principle, in the mode and means of their respective realizations, and in the fonn of their teaching, they nonetheless all agree in this, that the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a whole. Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to ground one. Every detennination of the essence of man that already supposes an interpretation of being \\
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investigation into the being of beings. This is the fundamental tension in the work that we explored in the introduction. According to Heidegger, the French understanding of his philosophy was based on a metaphysical understanding of Being and Time that seized on the desire to "represent beings in their Being" and posited being within the representable place of a human being. The first reading of Heidegger in France drafted an existentialism based on the Kierkegaardian subjectivist elements in Being and Time and compatible with their own Cartesian education. By contrast, the second reading followed Heidegger's current interrogation into the relation of being to beings ( etre to etant). This second reading is more compatible with the ontological antisubjectivist tendencies of Being and Time, but is based on Heidegger's presentation of these issues in his "Letter on Humanism." Heidegger goes on to present his understanding of what it is in metaphysics that keeps us from investigating the only question that he finds important. "Metaphysics closes itself to the simple essential fact that man essentially occurs only in his essence, where he is claimed by Being. Only from that claim 'has' he found that wherein his essence dwells. Only from this dwelling 'has' he 'language' as the home that preserves the ecstatic for his essence. Such standing in the clearing of Being I call the ek-sistence of man. This way of Being is proper only to man" (LH, 227-28) .68 This concept of ek-sistence is precisely what metaphysics closes itself off to and it is on the basis of this concept that Heidegger is able to expand his critique of metaphysics and distinguish himself from the "existential" definition that has been assigned to his work. What man is-or as it is called in the traditional language of metaphysics, the "essence" of man-lies in his ek-sistence. But ek-sistence thought in this way is not identical with the traditional concept of existentia, which means actuality in contrast to the meaning of essentia as possibility. In Being and Time (p. 42) this sentence is italicized: "The 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence." However, here the opposition between existentia and essentia is not under consideration, because neither of these metaphysical determinations of Being, let alone their relationship, is yet in question. (LH, 229)

68. The translator's note states: "In Bring and Tjmp 'ecstatic' (from the Greek ekstasi5) means the way Dasein 'stands out' in the va1ious moments of the temporality of care, being 'thrown' out of a past and 'projecting' itself toward a future by way of the present. The word is closely related to another Heidegger introduces now to capture the unique sense of man's Being-ek-sistence. This too means the way man 'stands out' into the truth of Being and so is exceptional among beings that are on hand only as things of nature or human production."

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Heidegger claims that his philosophy is not existentialist, and to make this point clear he takes the time to redefine Dasein so as to distinguish what he wants to say from the common French understanding based on the translation of Dasein as realite-humaine. Heidegger concludes that the translation is based on a metaphysical reading of Being and Time, which misses the real goal of the work, the internal critique of metaphysics through the investigation into being. The rift between the first and second reading of Heidegger in France turns entirely on whether Being and Time is seen as metaphysical or as a critique of metaphysics: "If we understand what Being and Time calls 'projection' as a representational positing, we take it to be an achievement of subjectivity and do not think it in the only way the 'understanding of Being' in the context of the 'existential analysis' of 'Being-in-the-world' can be thought-namely as the ecstatic relation to the clearing of Being" (LH, 231). While the existentialists of the first reading assumed Being and Time to be an "achievement of subjectivity," Heidegger claims that his philosophy cannot be understood as existentialist precisely because he is not interested in the relation of existence to essence (two metaphysical categories) but in the question of being. Heidegger further contends that the French interpretation occurred because Being and Time is an ontological investigation and as such still uses the vocabulary and categories of traditional metaphysics, and that it is necessarily limited by that language and those categories. The proponents of French existentialism were still metaphysical. It is in realizing the limits of metaphysics that Heidegger turns away from metaphysics and toward an investigation into the history of being. Heidegger's project, even at its most metaphysical, was always an attempt to move beyond metaphysics: By way of contrast, Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which from Plato's time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement is still a metaphysical statement. With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion of the tmth of Being. (LH, 232) According to Heidegger, Sartre missed the cmcial issue in Being and Time and thus his understanding of Heidegger's work is fundamentally flawed because it remains entirely within the metaphysical tradition. The "basic tenet of 'existentialism' has nothing at all in common with Being and Time" (LH, 232). Heidegger locates part of Sartre's problem in his emphasis on the relation of the subject to the object, which is a fundamentally metaphysical

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issue that always privileges the subject and places the emphasis of philosophy on the issue of representation. The consequence of such an approach is that being is passed over altogether: "Metaphysics recognizes the clearing of Being either solely as the view of what is present in 'outward appearance' (idea) or critically as what is seen as a result of categorical representation on the part of subjectivity" (LH, 235). The truth of being as that which "lights up" our world is concealed from metaphysics, which looks over or past it. The metaphysical tradition wants to understand being spatially so that it can be classified as something that "is present" or as something that can be "represented categorically." In both cases, the metaphysical investigation fails to recognize being because being cannot be understood within traditional categories of space and time: "But nearer than the nearest and at the same time for ordinary thinking farther than the farthest is nearness itself: the truth of Being" (LH, 235). According to Heidegger, traditional metaphysics (Sartre's existentialism and humanism included) attaches itself to what is perceived spatially as nearest and overlooks being, which is closest to us, because being eschews categorical representation and thus seems spatially farthest. The nearness of being occurs in language, which is itself always closest to us. The problem with metaphysics, and humanism in particular, is that it looks first to man as the measure by which to detennine its own humanity and thus looks over what is most important to humanity: the relationship between being and man that occurs in language. The question for Heidegger is whether the understanding of man in this rethought investigation into humanity still falls under the rubric of "humanism." The answer is both yes and no. According to him, the answer is no insofar as "humanism thinks metaphysically," and "certainly not if humanism is existentialism and is represented by what Sartre expresses: We are precisely in a situation where there are only human beings." But the answer is yes if we rethink humanism as principally concerned with understanding humanity in its relation to being. The issue for Heidegger is that we need to escape from an outlook that concludes there are "only human beings" and shift to one where we understand humanity as "in a situation where principally there is Being" (LH, 237). This allows Heidegger to elaborate on his claim that being should not be thought of as a possession or as something that specifically "is" because ''Being 'is' precisely not 'a being.'" Here again Heidegger exposes the trap of representational thinking that seeks to give being spatial and quantifiable attributes so that it can be placed under subjective observation. According to him, this representational approach avoids the issue of being by pretending to engage it.

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For Heidegger, humanism can only be a productive category if it is thought in terms of man's relationship to being, which is not spatial or representable. This, he claims, was the point of Being and Time: But does not Being and Time say on p. 212, where the "there is/it gives" comes to language, "Only so long as Dasein is, is there [gibt es] Being"? To be sure. It means that only so long as the clearing of Being propiates does Being convey itself to man .... But the sentence does not mean that the Dasein of man in the traditional sense of existentia, and thought in modem philosophy as the actuality of the ego cogito, is that being through which Being is first fashioned. The sentence does not say that Being is the product of man. (LH, 240) Being and Time set out to present being in relation to man, but in the French interpretation this became an investigation into being as the product of man. The first reading of Heidegger in France is a metaphysical reading of his work, which removes the problem of being by characterizing it as a product of man. According to Heidegger, this reading reveals the domineering nature of metaphysics and humanism, which attempt to define everything in relation to man as the primary subject, the measure of all things, even being. For Heidegger, the result of this domineering metaphysical tradition is that humanity has lost what is most essential to it, its relationship with being. Heidegger describes this condition in tenns of a "homelessness" (Heimatliisigkeit) that he claims is the destiny of the modern world. 69 This homelessness can be seen in the light of Heidegger's understanding of language as the house where being dwells. Cut off from his relationship with language by the metaphysical tradition, man finds himself homeless. Heidegger claims that these categories should not be thought "patriotically or nationalistically but in terms of the history of Being" (LH, 241). 70 This is a particularly troubling claim given Heidegger's past but is not difficult to unpack in relation to the statement I Ieidegger made to Gandillac about National Socialism being the explosion of a stntctural malady in all men. For Heidegger, the result of the metaphysical tradition is precisely the kind of blind nationalism and patriotism that avoids the real issue of the homelessness of being by assigning a spatial and categorical realm to it. Thus his letter also serves a strategic purpose in establishing the foundation for his

69. This is also the move by which Heidegger shifts responsibility for National Socialism fmm Germany (and himself) in particular to the West in general. See Rabinbach. "Heidegger's 'Letter of Humanism' as Text and Event"; Rockmore, "Heidegger's Politics and French Philosophy"; Wolin, "French Heidegger Wars." 70. For an in-depth investigation into the idea of JIPimat. see Celia Applewhite, A Nation of f'rrmincial1· (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

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critique of National Socialism as well as presenting him as a critic of crude nationalisms to his French audience. 71 Homelessness, as understood by Heidegger, consists in the abandonment of being by beings. This is the product of metaphysics, but, as Heidegger establishes in Being and Time, being does not disappear but lies hidden. Even "the oblivion of Being makes itself known indirectly through the fact that man always observes and handles only beings" (LH, 242). Hidden within the metaphysical tradition, being still makes itself known, but indirectly. For Heidegger, homelessness is the destiny of the world precisely because man is so concerned with beings, which are to be observed and handled (represented categorically), that the question of being is concealed and remains unthought. But even as unthought, it remains a concern. Homelessness is itself a concern with being, but thought in such a way that it "is evoked from the destiny of being in the form of metaphysics and through metaphysics is simultaneously entrenched and covered up as such" (UI, 243). Heidegger sees this as the basis for Marx's understanding of the estrangement (Entfremdung) of modem man, which Marx derived from Hegel. Heidegger believes that Marx's understanding of history in terms of estrangement intuits the problem of homelessness and the concealment of being, and in this sense is far more productive than the work of phenomenology or existentialism. Heidegger contends that Marx is still limited by his metaphysical reading of estrangement a~d history but suggests that this is the issue Sartre should consider if a "productive dialogue" between existentialism and Marxism is to become possible. This comment would have important ramifications later in France, as it led to a variant of Heideggerian Marxism as embodied in the work of Kostas Axelos. Heidegger is apparently interested in a "productive dialogue" with Marxism, but only insofar as it leads to a departure from traditional metaphysics. 72 This returns Heidegger to the issue at hand, how one is to depart from the metaphysical tradition and return to the question of being in the face of man's essential homelessness. According to him, this can only occur when man realizes that, contrary to the dominant claims of humanism as presented in the metaphysical tradition, "the essence of man 71. While the self-serving nature of this philosophical statement is obvious, it has been fruitfully employed in several legitimate critiques of modernity and thus cannot be completely discounted. 72. Heidegger's use of Marx smacks of opportunism because of the Soviet victory under Stalin, but also because Heidegger's sons were in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps and he feared that Georg Lukacs's criticisms of his work could affect them. (Rabinbach, ~Heidegger's 'Letter of Humanism' as Text and Event," 112-13). Heidegger's use of Marx also had the unintended consequence of allying him with certain members of the French Communist Resistance (such as jean Beaufret).

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consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as 'being a rational creature."' Man can discover his true human nature only in the departure from his obsession with a rationality that desires to subjugate everything to a logical and productive order. Man must relinquish his position as "the measure of all things" and accept that, far from it, "man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being" (LH, 245). For Heidegger, man loses nothing in d1is equation despite appearing to give up his mastery, because in this move he regains the truth of being. Heidegger returns to Beaufret's question about humanism and responds that his refutation of humanism in the metaphysical sense is in fact an affirmation of humanism in the extreme sense: "It is a humanism that thinks the humanity of man from nearness to Being" (LH, 245). Heidegger's brand of humanism calls for an investigation into being that disengages the ego cogito in a way far more radical than Sartre's inversion because it removes the ego cogito from the philosophical equation. Heidegger is calling for the removal of the subject as the primary means of philosophical investigation, and this is precisely what was so attractive to a later generation of French scholars looking at Heidegger through the lens of a stmcturalist program that also tried to decenter the self, but from the scientific perspective. The question for Heidegger, as presented by Beaufret, now becomes: "How do we give meaning back to humanism?" Heidegger points out that this question implies that humanism has in fact "lost" its meaning. But the subsequent question for Heidegger is whether we want to give humanism back its meaning. This is to ask whether it is valuable to retain d1e tenn "humanism." Here Heidegger presents a defense of his current philosophical program in response to several questions he asks of himself and that evoke the specter of his political activities, which remain central to his questions if not at the forefront of his thought: Because we are speaking against "humanism," people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more "logical" than that for somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity? Because we are speaking against "logic," people believe we are demanding that the rigor of thinking be renounced and in its place the arbitrariness of drives and feelings be installed and thus that "irrationalism" be proclaimed uue. For what is more "logical" than that whoever speaks against the logical is defending the alogical? Because we are speaking against "values," people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity's best qualities.

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For what is more "logical" than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? (LH, 249) 73 In the context of 1947, Heidegger was strategically distancing himself from these sorts of criticisms. His point is that the inability to critique such notions as "values," "logic," or even "humanism" is indicative of the manipulative and domineering nature of the metaphysical tradition. When "people hear talk about 'humanism,' 'logic,' 'values,' 'world,' and 'God,'" they "accept these things as positive" and anything that "disturbs the habitual somnolence of prevailing opinion is automatically registered as a despicable contradiction." Concealed in this procedure is "the refusal to subject to reflection this presupposed 'positive' in which one believes oneself saved. By continually appealing to the logical one conjures up the illusion that one is entering straightforwardly into thinking when in fact one has disavowed it"(LH, 250). "Humanism," "values," "God," "logic"-all these terms are indebted to the metaphysical tradition for their meaning, thus do not address the fundamental question of being. Furthermore, because these terms have been rendered unquestionable, one cannot reclaim the truth of being on the basis of any of them. Heidegger is not calling for the refutation of any of these terms but rather the critical reappraisal of all of them to return them to the realm of thinking. The final issue Heidegger seeks to address is that of the relation of ethics to ontology. Once again he is answering a question posed by Beaufret, but the answer is closely related to Sartre's statement about Heidegger at the end of Being and Nothingness, that an authentic understanding of human being would be inextricably linked to an ethics. Heidegger sees this "need" for an ethics as indicative of the problem of metaphysics and not the solution to it: "The desire for an ethics presses ever more ardently for fulfillment as the obvious no less than the hidden perplexity of man soars to immeasurable heights" (LH, 255). The creation of an ethics based on the tenets of metaphysics does not provide a solution to man's perplexity but only adds to it. Furthermore, Heidegger sees it as a fundamental error to believe that one can construct an ethics based on a work such as Being and Time, because the investigation itself is within the metaphysical tradition. Heidegger concedes that Being and Time itself was "bound to lead immediately and inevitably into error. For the terms and the conceptual language corresponding to them were not rethought by readers from the matter particularly to be thought; rather, the matter was conceived according to the established terminology in its customary meaning" (LH, 259). 73. These qut"stions must be taken seriously given Heidegger's past and especially since it is Heidegger who presents them.

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In France, Being and Time was understood in terms of the unquestioned categories and vocabulary of traditional metaphysics; as a result, Heidegger's work was seen as original, but compatible with the metaphysical tradition. Heidegger points out that this is precisely how his philosophy was read by French philosophers such as Sartre and asserts that this kind of prescriptive philosophy has no place in the investigation of being. Instead, he says that to come to understand our relation to being is to understand thought as it is, in its capacity to let things be and thus let them reveal themselves as what they are. This is not the strategy of humanism as constructed in the metaphysical tradition, which seeks to produce, collect, and control. Insofar as he is against this sort of domineering subjectivity, Heidegger is against humanism. What Heidegger proposes is an alternative humanism whose primary concern is not the subject man but man as he relates to being. For him, the means for accessing this new concern is language: "Thus language is at once the house of Being and the home of human beings" (LH, 262). Heidegger concludes his letter by stating: "What is strange about the thinking of Being is its simplicity. Precisely this keeps us from it." According to him, our problem is that we are beings that like to represent things; thus we form complex models that allow us to present and represent the world around us. But in this process of ordering and naming, we haYe lost track of that which is the most simple in nature: being. For us, what is simplest also seems the most complex because it is not representable or quantifiable. Thus the issue of being is unheimlich because it tests the limits of what we consider to be true. For Heidegger, only a return to what is simply before us, and not some complex philosophical construction, will lead us to being. "For this reason essential thinkers always say the Same. But this does not mean identical." Evoking Nietzsche's eternal return, Heidegger attempts to reclaim the philosophy of the early Greeks and to approach the question of being, which is the only question (even in the concealed formula of metaphysics). This attempt stands in stark contrast to the mere repetition of formulas or laws based on the memorization of identical principles. "To flee into the identical is not dangerous. To risk discord in order to say the Same is the danger" (LH, 264). Heidegger's understanding and refutation of traditional humanism is based on this precept. For humanism to be a productive category, it would have to be understood in terms of man's relation to being (this is the same question raised by all philosophy). In pursuing the Same, Heidegger sows discord by refuting the definition of humanism as understood in the metaphysical sense (which is the identical). Thus if humanism and philosophy are only understood in metaphysical terms, then Heidegger's current project and "the thinking that

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is to come is no longer philosophy, because it thinks more originally than metaphysics-a name identical to philosophy" (LH, 265). For Heidegger, if thinking identically on the basis of universal laws is philosophy, then his work is not philosophical. The "Letter on Humanism" is a complex text that combines Heidegger's philosophical project of 1946 with a refutation of Sartrean existentialism and a strategic self-rehabilitation. 74 The immediate ramifications of the "Letter on Humanism" was to move Heidegger away from Sartre and his brand of existentialism and toward the questions of language and the relation of being to beings. A subsequent consequence was that, because it had been written to Jean Beaufret, a member of the Resistance with impeccable credentials, it was seen as a sort of vote of confidence for Heidegger. Beaufret would repeatedly take advantage of his Resistance past to defend Heidegger.

The Second Reading While the first reading of Heidegger in France developed slowly over the course of two decades, culminating in Sartre's existentialism, the second reading came like a bolt from the blue, in the form of the "Letter on Humanism." 75 But the first reading is precisely what created the opening for the second. There is something peculiar about popularity that leads to a backlash. Such was the case withJean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. In .reaction to its popularity, there were a number of attacks that led Sartre to defend his position in Existentialism Is a Humanism, and this led to Heidegger's response in the "Letter on Humanism." This letter then opened the door to a new understanding of Heidegger in France that was opposed to Sartre's brand of existentialism. In the person of Jean Beaufret, many young French scholars found a direct line to Heidegger and an alternative to what they now saw as the trendy moralizing of existentialism. Beaufret's position was strengthened by his reputation as a member of the Resistance and his position as an instructor at the preparatory school Henri IV from 1946 to 1955, at the ENS after 1951, and at the preparatory school Condorcet from 1955 until his retirement in 1972. As an instructor at the ENS, but also at two of the most important feeder

74. There are those, such as Jean Henri Cousineau, who claim the text is intentionally ambiguous. See Cousineau, Hu.rnan~rn and Ethics: An Introd7lction to /leideggPT:5 Letter on Humanism with a Critir.al Biblingm.phy (Louvain: Editions Nauwelaens, 1972), 65-66. 75. This has led to statements such as the one cited in Paul Ricoeur's C.'rifiqtlll and Cormi
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schools for the ENS. Beaufret was able to bring Heidegger's philosophy into the mainstream of French higher education. The generation of 1933 had to look outside the established grounds of French academics to find a philosophy as striking and different as Heidegger's, but from 1946 on it was possible to work on Heidegger at a major khiig;ne in Paris or even at the ENS. Furthermore, Beaufret was in constant communication with Heidegger, who continued to produce original pieces of work that entranced and seduced the young students drawn to Heidegger through Beaufret's courses. 76 For six years at the Khagne Henri IV and then for seventeen years at Condorcet, not to mention my time at the ENS. I was charged with instmcting my students in preparation for the agregation. The classes I taught led quite a number of them to a real interest in the work of Heidegger. This was so especially at Condorcet where after 1955 I dealt specifically with that subject. 77 Mter the "Letter on Humanism," Beaufret found himself at the center of the Parisian intellectual world. Figures who had influenced him in the 1930s, such as Jean Wahl, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, and Alexandre Koyre now came to him to discuss Heidegger's current work. Beaufret was riding a wave that continued to grow. Heidegger's popularity increased after 1947, and between 1947 and 1955 there was a proliferation of works on or about Heidegger, including the republication of Gurvitch's Les tendences actuelles de la philosophie allemande (1953); a collection of Levinas's articles from the 1930s and 1940s titled En decouvrant l'existence avec Husser[ et Heidegger (1949); and an entire issue of the Revue de metaphysique et de morale devoted to Heidegger's work (1953). In 1946 Jean Wahl gave a course at the Sorbonne on the philosophy ofHeidegger. 78 More than this, by the 1950s students at the ENS were handing in theses on Heidegger, and there was even talk of Heidegger fanatics. 79 These young intellectuals were led to Heidegger by the popularity of Sartre, but moved from Sartre to Jean Beaufret in their desire to "get Heidegger right." In the wake of World War II and with the prospect of a rapidly industrializing world, Heidegger's critique of technology and traditional metaphysics spoke to the young intellectuals 76. This is not to say that Beaufret's allegiance to Heidegger did not have its drawbacks; Beaufret's work on Heidegger kept him from obtaining a university post. See Havet, ':Jean Beaufret," 89. 77.Jean Beaufret, Dial.ogue avn: Ileidegger: 1..~> chemin d~ Heideggn- (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), 81. 78. This course was later published as jean Wahl, lntrotluction ala pPmeP dP fleidegger (Paris: Librairie generate franc;aise, 1998). 79.Jean-Paul Aron, /,e.~ ModRrrtPs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 104-5.

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Jean Beaufre

who were seeking an alternative to existentialism with its allegiance to Cartesianism and traditional metaphysics. The same concerns that led this younger generation to Heidegger also led them to structuralism and the work of Saussure, Barthes, and Levi-Strauss. In 1955, Heidegger made his first journey to France, which was facilitated by Jean Beaufret. Beaufret, along with Maurice de Gandillac and Kostas Axelos, had arranged to present a conference on and for Heidegger at the Cultural Center at Cerisy in August of that year. The participants in the conference included Kostas Axe los, Father Gaston Fessard, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice de Gandillac, Alphonse de Waehlens, LeonPierre Quint, Lucien Goldmann, Jean Starobinski, Alexis Philonenko, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, and of course Jean Beaufret and Heidegger himself. The conference was also important because the translation of Heidegger's texts into French would enlist such young philosophers as Andre Preau, Fran(,;ois Fedier, Dominiquejanicaud, and Michel Haar. In 1955, at a time when Heidegger was still forbidden to teach in Germany, he had found a home for his work in France and had in fact become the most important living philosopher in that country. 'The effect of the "Letter on Humanism" had been to provide an alternative to Sartre and progressive humanism, which seemed outmoded by newer forms of investigation. But Heidegger and the conference in Cerisy were not without critics. Most notably, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jean Wahl refused to attend. Furthermore, an article Lucien Goldmann later published eventually led to the second Heidegger Affair in the 1960s. Thus the circumstances of the conference and of Heidegger's first trip to France also bear the imprint of the Heidegger Affair and the split between the proponents of the first and second readings. Heidegger's visit to France and the conference in Cerisy seem to have been planned to minimize public awareness of his presence. The announcement for the conference was written in the vaguest terms, giving only the title, "Qu'est-ce que Ia philosophic?" with no mention of the directors or the participants. The reflections of Walter Biemel suggest that there was reason to fear protests from "students on the left,"80 while Jean Beaufret indicates a more general "academic hostility" toward Heidcgger and his work. 81 Still, the scripted nature of Heidegger's visit also suggests that Beaufret wanted to control all access to the German philosopher during his stay in France. Thus the August date was not accidental and proved to be "the best guarantee for a successful operation," 80. "Uean] Hyppolite wanted to invite Heidegger to the Ji;co/e norma I.e but feared a negative reaction from students on the left." Interview with Walter Biemel in Dominique Janicaud, lleideggern1 Ft-anre II, entretums (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001). 42-43. 81. Beaufn:·t, Dialogue avec lleidegger; 86n. 9.

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THE SECOND READING

because when Heidegger arrived in Paris the "capital was deserted."82 Beaufret and Axelos met Heidegger and his wife, Elfride, at the Gare de l'Est and secreted them away to Beaufret's apartment on the passage Stendahl in Menilmontant. 83 The rest of the Heideggers' stay in Paris also had a "cloak-and-dagger" feel; a clandestine visit to the Louvre, another to Versailles, and a trip to the Cafe de Flore "incognito" so that Beaufret could show Heidegger the "existentialist's lair." 84 While in Paris, Beaufret arranged a dinner on the terrace of his apartment where Heidegger could meet Rene Char. 85 Kostas Axelos also attended the dinner prepared by Elfride Heidegger. Here we see a protocol Beaufret would follow throughout Heidegger's stay in France. He would coordinate meetings between Heidegger and select French intellectuals but would surround him with the cordon sanitaire of Axelos and himself. Since Heidegger would not speak French and Char did not speak German, all conversation was mediated by Beaufret and Axelos, who served as translator. The Heideggers' visit with Georges Braque at his atelier in Varengeville was coordinated in a similar fashion. 86 On the way to Cerisy, Beaufret, Axelos, and the Heideggers stopped at the summer house ofJacques Lacan. Beaufret was in analysis with Lacan at the time and Lacan had asked him to invite Heidegger to stay for a few days before the conference. Lacan had hoped to commence a dialogue with Heidegger based on what he perceived to be their mutual interests, but soon found that the two had little to discuss. Axelos, who served as translator, describes the five-day stay as "agreeable" but also notes the empty nature of the visit. "Heidegger did not know any of Lacan's works and had no interest in psychoanalysis. Lacan had an incomplete (lacunairement) knowledge of Heidegger. Thus there was no dialogue. There was no discussion at all. They spoke of banalities and everyday things. Lacan understood German but could not speak it and Heidegger refused to speak a single word in French. "87 The issue of language is essential here but one can also point to a divergence in philosophical interests between Heidegger and one of his French interlocutors that would come to dominate the second phase of 82. Dominique Janicaud, f!Pideg.f!;er nt France I (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001 ), 147. 83. See ibid., as well as the interview with Kostas Axelos in Janicaud, Ileidegger en Franu II, entrl'lieJ!s (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), 12. 84. Beau fret, /Jialogue avt'c I IPidegger, 86. 85. A brief discussion of this dinner can be found in Jean Beaufret, "En France" in F.rirmm.tng an Martin I leideggpr (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977); a philosophical reflection based on this dinner is in Jean Beaufret, "L'entretien sous le marronnier," L'Arr no. 22 (Summer 1963). 86. Beaufret, ~En France," 10. 87. Interview with Kostas Axelos injanicaud, /II'idRggl'rrn Frmu:p II, rntretims, 12.

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Jean Beaufret

the reception of Heidegger in France between 1961 and the present. The force of this disconnect and the frustration and disappointment of Lacan can be seen in an incident that occurred during the Heideggers' stay. While Axelos and Beaufret were translating Heidegger's "What Is Philosophy?" from German to French, Lacan and his wife, Sylvia BatailleLacan, took Heidegger and Elfride on a day trip to the cathedral in Chartres. Lacan was driving, Heidegger sat in the front seat, and the two women sat in the back. In the words of Elisabeth Roudinesco, "Lacan drove his car as fast as he ran his sessions" and the Heidcggers grew increasingly uncomfortable. Heidegger did not flinch but Elfride voiced her discomfort, in response to which Lacan increased his speed. The ride home from Chartres was spent in silence except for the continued protests of Elfride, which provoked Lacan to press even harder on the gas pedal. 88 Having survived their visit chez Lacan, the Heideggers were taken by Beaufret and Axelos to the conference at Cerisy. There, under Beaufret's watchful eye, they were given the finest suite in the chateau and treated like guests of honor. Axelos referred to the conference as a "festival of Heidegger"89 but we must also keep in mind that despite the celebratory feel and the significance of Heidegger's philosophical presentations, the immediate impact of the conference itself was minimal. There had been no advance publicity, no press coverage, and only those who had been informed by Beaufret or Axe los knew of the event. Jean-Paul Aron placed the number of actual participants at fifty-six. 90 Thus Dominique Janicaud is correct in suggesting that the importance of this conference lay more in its symbolic nature than in its status as an actual event. Janicaud further suggests that this symbolic value lies in the memories of the participants and perhaps more important in the wave of translations of and essays on Heidegger that followed the conference in Cerisy.91 Certainly, these observations are valuable and true, but I would suggest that the most important symbolic value lies in the way the actual events of this conference reveal the essence of the second reading ofHeidegger in France. The nine-day conference (August 27 to September 4, 1955) 'vas not a dialogue but a lecture. Kostas Axelos recalls that during the conference he and Beaufret were accused of restricting access to Heidegger. "In fact, we were the intermediaries between Heidegger and the other participants. Because everyone had something they wanted to say to Heidegger, 88. Elisabeth Roudinesco, lli.\·toire tiP la psychano/-y~e en France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986}, 309-10. See also Roudinesco,Jacques Lacan (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 301-302. 89. Interview with Kostas Axe los in Janicaud, 1/eidegger en Hance ll, entrr.tiens, 13. 90. Aron, /.es lvlodernes, 122. 9I.Janicaud, Hddeggn-en Fraru:e I, 151.

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ancl because Ileidegger was not one for rambling conversations it all went through jean Beaufret and me."92 At the end of the first day, Gabriel Marcel and Lucien Goldmann suggested that they be allowed to move away from the prescribed topics of discussion (Kant and Hegel) and toward a more general discussion of Heidegger's philosophy as a whole. In the ensuing discussion, Beaufret conceded that the agenda was a guideline for discussion that did not need to be strictly followed. Nonetheless, Marcel, Goldmann, and Walter Biemel came away from the conference with the feeling that their questions had not been answered. 93 Paul Ricoeur went so far as to say that he "took away a bad memory" of his meeting with Heidegger at Cerisy because Heidegger "was literally guarded by Axelos and Beaufret, and he behaved like a school-master. "94 Indeed, Axelos 's greatest regret about the conference was that Heidegger had not been "more forward in the discussion. "95 But as in the visits with Char and Lacan, there was no real dialogue. There was no discussion. Heidegger presented his lectures, Axelos translated, and Beaufret controlled the questions and answers. There is a discrepancy between Heidegger's repeated statement at Cerisy that there is no "Heideggerian philosophy" and Beaufret's attempts to determine the interpretation and discussion of Heidegger's work. 96 But this discrepancy captures precisely the nature of the second reading of Heidegger in France, marked by both the presence of Heidegger's new work and the Heideggerian orthodoxy of jean Beaufret. Heidegger's philosophy had returned to France in all its alterity and strangeness, only to find they were now accepted. The second reading of Heidegger's philosophy stunned the generation of 1933, who had read his work as "new" and "original" but also as fundamentally compatible with the notions of individualism, freedom, and progress that lay at the heart of their education. For the next generation, which came to Heidegger after World War II, the second reading was as "new" and "original" as the first. These younger students, who came to his philosophy through the works of Sartre, Aron, and Merleau-Ponty, were shocked and electrified to move beyond the first reading to a philosophy they saw as even more radical. But while Heidegger's philosophy had found a home 92. Interview with Kostas Axe los in Janicaud, Heirkgger 1111 Franre II, entretiRns, 13. 93.Janicaud, lleidPggrrroFrana I, 150-62. This section also provides a substantive account of the topics of discussion for each day of the conference. Janicaud relies on a transcript of Alex Philonenko's tape recording of the conference. 94. Ricoeur, Critiqur and Co-rwiclion, 20. 95. Interview with Kostas Axe los in Janicaud, 1-lridegger 1111 Franre II, rotretiPns, 19. 96. Heidegger's statement that there is no "philosophy of Heidegger" seems to be the single most consistent memory of those attending the conference at Cerisy. I have found this in my own research and throughout the interviews conducted by janicaud.

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in France, one could not say that it was at home in the world of French philosophy. Heidegger's work would not be canonized despite the efforts of a devoted following led by Jean Beaufret. In fact, Heidegger's work would have its most important influence on philosophers who saw it as a call to continue to rethin'k the established boundaries of philosophy and thought even as they pertained to Heidegger himself. 97

Afterword I must include a a few words here regarding Jean Beaufret's pathological defense of Heidegger and his letters in support of the "negationist" historian Robert Faurisson. (I follow Henry Rousso in using the term "negationist" instead of"revisionist." I feel this term is better suited to define the nature of Faurisson's work, which does not seek to seriously "revise" the historical evidence of the Holocaust but in fact to deny it.) The issue to be addressed is whether Beaufret had a "hidden agenda" in his defense of Heidegger, which is later revealed in his "covert support" of Robert Faunsson, as Richard Wolin claims in his article "French HeideggerWars" (291): "As it turns out, Beaufret seems to have had a hidden agenda: he was a covert supporter of Robert Faurisson, the French historian who denies the existence of the gas chambers specifically and the Holocaust in general." Let me be clear that what is at stake is not whether Beaufret supported Faurisson or not. Beaufret did support Faurisson in two letters, dated November 22, 1978, and January 18, 1979, which were later published in Faurisson'sjournal Annates d'histoirerevisioniste. What is at stake, however, is whether this implies that Beaufret's interest in and defense of Heidegger is part of the same agenda to deny the Holocaust and whether Beaufret's support of Faurisson necessarily impeaches his support of Heidegger. I would argue that Beaufret's support of Heidegger is not indicative of his later support of Faurisson but precisely the reverse. Beaufret's decision to support Faurisson is a direct result of his desire to protect and rehabilitate Heidegger. Beaufret had invested everything in Heidegger and his work. His place in the French academic world was a direct result of his proximity to Heidegger. As Beaufret's relationship with Heidegger developed over the years, his defensive strategies became more and more extreme. In 1945, in his article for Confluences, Beaufret dismissed Heidegger's association with National Socialism as a result of his 97. I disagree with Tom Rockmore's characterization of Jacques Derrida as "often indistinguishably similar to the orthodox form ofHeideggerianism established by Beaufret" (Rockmore, Heideggrr and French Philosophy, 120) because I see the work of Derrida, and of many of the other late Heideggerians he discusses, as indebted to the third reading of Heidegger in France. See chaps. 6 and 7.

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"naive-bourgeois character." Later, he became a proponent of the contingency theory, relying entirely on Heidegger's own testimony. As the facts came out and Heidegger's story was shown to be deficient, if not deceitful, Beaufret continued to take Heidegger's side, totally denying any commitment on Heidegger's part to National Socialism, or adopting Heidegger's own strategy, defined in the "Letter on Humanism," which showed him to be the proponent of an "internal critique" of National Socialism all along. Lacan commented on the pathological nature of Beaufret's defense of Heidegger soon after Beaufret had left analysis with him (Roudinesco,Jacques Lacan, 297-98). As more information became accessible and the extent of Heidegger's involvement became less refutable, Beaufret's position became increasingly untenable. It is at this point that Beaufret turned to the possibility of a "negationist" argument as presented by Faurisson. By denying the existence of the Nazi death camps, "the link between Heidegger and National Socialism becomes unproblematic because, in a word, Nazism was not Nazism" (Rockmore, "Heidegger's French Connection," 379). In the face of overwhelming evidence, Beaufret could no longer extricate Heidegger from Nazism, so instead he had to exorcise what was most problematic about Nazism. I do not believe Beaufret's denial of the Holocaust is the "hidden agenda" in Beaufret's defense of Heidegger. Rather, Beaufret's agenda, which is quite "open" and obvious, is to protect and defend Heidegger by all means, no matter how extreme. This calls into question Beaufret's reading and presentation of Heidegger's thought. It attests not only to the bond between Heidegger and Beaufret but to the seductive nature of Heidegger's thought in general.

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The Third Reading

CHAPTER

6 Maurice Blanchot: The Writing of Disaster

To this point we have dealt almost exclusively with intellectuals who tried to rethink the project of philosophy with or against the currents of the traditional French academics by using the philosophy of Heidegger as the basis for their projects. All these thinkers saw the malaise of the 1930s and the events ofWorld War II as central to their reworking of philosophy. This is especially true for members of the generation of 1933, such as Aron, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, whose perception of their lack of political engagement in the 1930s led to extensive political activities in the postwar period. But this turn toward politics resulted in a specific engagement with the issues of World War II, focused largely on issues of culpability and responsibility in the existentialist sense of the terms. Not addressed in the attempt to rethink philosophy immediately after World War II was the Shoah and its ramifications on the world of thought. The issue is peripheral in the work of Aron, Bataille, Beaufret, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, 1 and virtually absent in the work of Heidegger. 2 Only in the work of Levinas and Maurice Blanchot does a confrontation with the Shoah become the central focus of the project of rethinking philosophy that was fostered by Heidegger's influence in France. Blanchot is especially interesting, given his political allegiances and actions in the 1930s and1 their proximity to Heidegger's own political engagement. 3 Like Heidegger, Blanchot was absorbed with the problems 1. Even in Jean-Paul Sartre's Rijlections sur In question juivP (Paris: Morihien, 1946), the issue is dealt with in terms of his existential political program and not as an attempt to address the issue of the Shoah. 2. See Beret Lang, Hl'idRgger:~ SilerJ.e (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) ;Jean-Fram,;ois Lyotard, Heideggp and "the jews, " trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 3. On Blanchot, see Christophe Bident, Mauria Blanc/tot: Partenaire invirible (Paris: Champ Vall on, 1996); Philippe Mesnard, Maurice Blanrltot, lR sujet de l'engagt'f1U"ffl (Paris: L'Harmauan, 1996); Thomas Wall, Radical Passivity: Le1.1inas, Blanclwt, and Agmnben (New

209

of the decline and danger of the modern world. Both thinkers were suspicious and frightened by the effects of rapid industrialization, which they saw as linked to the twin dangers of Soviet communism and American capitalism and as a harbinger of the final decline of the West. Blanchot, like Heidegger, turned to a conservative nationalism as the solution to this decline. But for Blanchot, this nationalism did not take the form of a search for an "essential" understanding of the Dasein of the Volk as exemplified in a national construct. Instead, Blanchot looked to the nation as the positing of the supreme subject that would be the measure by which all was defined. Blanchot's nationalism took the form of an extreme Cartesianism in which the nation became the cogito. He defined this national "I'' in opposition to the concept of the other, which sought to displace its supremacy and put it in question. In this sense, Blanchot's understanding of nationalism was philosophically very far removed from Heidegger's, though politically it remained incredibly close. 4 Blanchot began his writing career as a journalist, and his relation to the right wing seems to be entirely linked to his career as ajournalist. 5 In the early 1930s he began writing for several Catholic nationalist journals such as Reaction and La revue du siecle. He also did a column of literary criticism for the Journal des debats. In 1933 Blanchot began writing for Paul Levy's Le rempart, and this seems to be the start of his most extreme nationalist period, which culminated in his work for Combat beginning in 1936 and for L'insurgebeginning in 1937. Blanchot's political position was based on what he saw as the decline of France and the disaster to come. Hitler's rise to power in Germany and the events of the Spanish Civil War exposed the weakness of the Third Republic, and the rise of Leon Blum's Popular Front seemed to confinn Blanchot's suspicions. As a result, Blanchot saw France's greatest threat as coming from within. These sentiments took their ugliest tum in his writing for Combat and L'insurge between 1936 and 1938.

York: State University of New York Press, 1999); Gerald L. Bruns. Maurice Blaru:hot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 4. An investigation into the nation as the supreme subject in the work ofHeidegger might prove interesting. It might expose some of the most traditional aspects of Heidegger's thought. It is indeed a possibility that, like Blanchot, Heidegger's tum toward the nation was in fact a flight from what was most unfamiliar in his work and toward what is in a sense most familiar (the "same" as the nation presents it). This would also support Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's contention in lleideggn; Art, and Politirs (New York: Blackwell, 1990) that during Heidegger's National Socialist period his work was the closest it would ever be to traditional metaphysical philosophy. 5. For a discussion of Blanchot's politics in relation to his philosophy, see Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extrem.e (~mtempr;rary (New York: Routledge, 1997); Deborah M. Hess, Politir..s and hleralu,re: The Case of Maurice Bl.nnr:Jwt (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).

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Blanchot's political pos1uon was firmly anti-Hitlerian but the antiBlum sentiment in his articles also highlighted the domestic danger. Following a larger trend in right-wing nationalism, Blanchot saw the "true" threat to France as coming from the stranger within who appears to be like the rest but is totally other and thus destroys what is pure and true by tainting it with otherness. In the France of the 1930s, this rhetoric, with its emphasis on the stranger, always led directly to the Jewish question. In Blanchot's criticisms of Blum in an article for L'insurge on January 27, 1937, he wrote that "[Blum] represents exactly what is contemptible to the nation he seeks to address. His is a backward ideology, an antiquated mentality, a foreign race." That single statement stands alone as an egregious example of anti-Semitism; but because the article appeared with other more virulent strains of anti-Semitism in the same journals, by association Blanchot's work takes on a more extreme character. The issue is clouded by Blanchot's friendship with Levinas as well as his relation to Paul Levy. Levy's right-wing nationalism was absolved from the taint of collaboration with the most vinilent anti-Semitic groups precisely because he was aJ~w. Furthermore, Blanchot's work with and continuous support of Paul Levy demonstrates that his particular brand of nationalism was not fundamentally antagonistic toward d1e Jews. Blanchot never succumbed to the crudest forms of anti-Semitism nor did he overtly support fascism, the Vichy regime, or National Socialism. Indeed, after the defeat and the German Occupation, Blanchot suspended all his political activities. He did participate in the Vichy-financed ]eune France as director of literature from 1940 till 1941 and continued his work for Debats. 6 Mter Debats was placed under Vichy control, Blanchot gave up his position on the editorial board and contented himself with a small column of literary criticism that he submitted from Occupied France. He was also refused a position at the Nouvelle revue Jran~aise, largely because of his antagonistic relationship with Robert Brasillach. 7 Despite 6. Mesnard, Maurice Blanch,ot, lR sujet fk l'engagpnent, 46. See also Jeffrey Mehlman, I .egruies of in Fraru-.1' (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), chap. 1: "Bianchot at Combat" ; Stephen Ungar, Scandal and Afo'reffect: Blanclwt at1d Frana since I 930 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Biden t, MauriCP B/anchot: Partenaire irmisih!R. 7. In a letter to Diane Rubinstein of August 20, 1983, Blanchot writes: "I remember little about Combat. I do recall however that, as I was utterly opposed to Brasillach, who was completely committed to Fascism and anti-Semitism, I made it a condition of my participation on the journal that there was no possibility that he would also be a contributor. Moreover, things were reciprocal. Brasillach detested Cornbot because I had been involved with it. Opposition to Brasillach and what he represented was a constant for me at that time" (Diane Rubinstein, t.v.'tats LPfl? [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990], 187n. 72). Brasillach's sentiments toward Combat are made quite explicit in Notre avant-g'lutrre: "On Cornhat there were one or two liberal intellectuals whose presence spoilt things in my view, and soon we were obliged to cease our involvement with an organ Anti~itism

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THE THIRD READING

Blanchot's nationalist sympathies, his work with Levy and his opposition to anti-Semitic policy revealed his incapacity to grasp fully the essential "ethnic" issue, a necessity under the Vichy regime. In the 1930s, Blanchot sought a response to what he perceived as a crisis within France, which had been revealed by the mounting pressure without, by positing the nation as the supreme subject. Blanchot saw the national subject as inherently threatened from within. This threat was leading to a destabilization of the nation as subject that would produce the downfall of France. France as the ultimate "I" was threatened by the other, which had made itself at home within France and thus had placed the primacy of the national "I" in question. In response to pressure from without, in response to Hitler's Germany, to Soviet communism, to American capitalism and liberal democracy, France therefore had to strengthen itself to preserve its own identity. For Blanchot, this meant that France had to eliminate the danger within so as to protect the national "1." As a result, the jew was inextricably linked to all the dangers from without. As Blanchot wrote for L'insurge on April 4, 1936: "We have nothing to do with the perfidious propaganda of national honor made by suspicious foreigners who reside in the offices of the quai d'Orsay and precipitate young Frenchmen into conflict in the name of Moscow or in the name of Israel." In another article he would define the French government as a conglomerate of Soviet, jewish, and capitalist interests. 8 All this was tied to Blanchot's premonition that disaster lay around the corner; but the disaster that would alter Blanchot's understanding of the "I" and the other was not the collapse of France, as he imagined in the 1930s, but something beyond his or anyone else's imagination. The disaster that was to come was the Shoah, and Blanchot would continue to work through the ramifications of this disaster for the rest of his career. Blanchot's nationalism was a reaction to his work (and friendship) with Emmanuel Levinas, influenced by Heidegger's work. At its foundation was the issue of calling the primacy of the subject into question. In the face of the other, as friend but also as philosophical concept, Blanchot was treading on unstable ground. The instability of this philosophical ground was exacerbated by the crisis of modernity. Thus, in the 1930s, like the other members of the generation of 1933, Blanchot made political choices dictated by primarily philosophical concerns. Mistaking cause for effect, he fled from the other, which he perceived (correctly) as a threat to the self, and turned instead toward the ultimate controlling subject, the nation. that openly condemned some of the positions that we had defended elsewhere" (Robert Brasillach, Notre lWOTII-guP-rre [Paris: Livre de Poche, 1973]. 240). 8. Maurice Blanchot, L'fnsurge,]uly 7, 1936. See also Mesnard, Mauri.ct' Rlanchot, le sujet de l'engagnnnrt, 36.

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But both Blanchot and Heidegger came to see that what they thought was the solution to the crisis of modernity was in fact its fruition. Rather than revealing what was essential, nationalism led to a dominance of the same, to the leveling of difference, and to the covering over of the essen~ tial. In response to this realization, they both sought to break with the metaphysical tradition that led them to their false conclusions. For Heidegger, this was the movement away from ontology (which itself was still indebted to the metaphysical tradition) and toward the history of being. For Blanchot it was the movement away from the Cartesian subject and toward the investigation into the possibility of the other. But here the parallel between Heidegger and Blanchot breaks down, because while Blanchot saw himself as somehow complicitous in the decline of the West, even while he sought to avoid that complicity, Heidegger never saw his position as errant. It was not Heidegger's understanding of National Socialism that was the false path but rather the "historical manifestation" of National Socialism, which "had nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)."9 Heidegger could never confront the issues of forgiveness fhat Blanchot attempted to address, precisely ,because he never saw his actions as culpable. He never admitted any error in his own thinking, only in his allegiance to a certain National Socialism that had nothing to do with his understanding of the move~ ment. Heidegger could only account for his relation to National Socialism as a "big mistake," a "grosse Dummheit, " and nothing more. For Blanchot, any attempt to rethink philosophy hinges precisely on this issue of culpability and responsibility and is necessarily centered on the confrontation with and attempt to think the Shoah and its place in relation to philosophy, literature, history, and understanding. 10

9. Martin Heidegger, An lntrodu
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Thinking Disaster Blanchot came to the work of Heidegger through his friendship with Levinas, and Blanchot's own work reflects a constant influence and tension in relation to Levinas's philosophical transitions. This is especially true in their use of Heidegger to rethink the issues of being, the position of the subject in relation to being, and the related issue of representability, marked by the ambiguous position of language. Levinas and Blanchot used Heidegger's critique of the Cartesian subject and the philosophical tradition as the basis for their own investigation into the understanding of being and of particular being in relation to the other. For Blanchot, the key concern is the relation of the absolutely singular (the unrepresentable) to the common (the representable). Language is the means by which the singular is made common and as such is the opening to the other. But any attempt to represent the unrepresentable is dangerous because, in the move from the singular to the common, what is singular is destroyed in its singularity. Just as the realization of the other threatens to displace the individual, the understanding of language also places what it names in question through this act of negation. In the 1930s, the attempt to investigate the other side of being, the moment of unrepresentability that displaces the subject, which is representation incarnate, led Blanchot to intuit a "crisis" of the modern world. The moment of negation that Heidegger posited in Was ist Metaphysik? and that Levinas seized on in De /'existence a l'existant led Blanchot to a kind of schizophrenia that manifested itself in the conflicting tendencies of his political journalism and literary investigations. While hoping to conserve the supreme subject through his nationalist rhetoric, he was also at the same time denying the subject its primary position in his fiction such as Thomas l'obscur, which he began writing in 1932. One can view this schizophrenia as a denial or questioning of the primacy of the subject in that this splitting already implied a break or fragmentation of the subject, the "I" distanced from itself. Blanchot's fiction was obsessed with the relation of the self to the other that displaced/ destroyed the self, and the paradoxical nature of the impossibility of communication that led to the seemingly endless encounter with annihilation. The flight from annihilation manifested itself in the political realm, where Blanchot's journalism sought to reinforce the subject by conserving the supreme "I'' of the nation. In his work he was obsessed with a fear of the fall of France, and he thought the end of the nation was the disaster to come. It is important to note that Blanchot's split is between the realm of the real (the political) and the imaginary (fiction). While the answers he found were radically different in each realm, both cases responded to the same perception of annihilation and impending disaster that guided Blanchot's work. Furthermore, 214

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like other members of the generation of 1933 in the 1930s, Blanchot's political actions were guided by his philosophical concerns. Blanchot had been exploring this theme for six years by the time France actually fell in 1940. But as it turned out, the disaster he had been trying to escape in his politics and to work through in Thomas l'obscurand Le demier mot could not compare to the reality of the disaster that was to come. The disaster he anticipated was not the disaster he imagined precisely because the disaster was beyond the human capacity to imagine it. The Shoah was the disaster beyond disaster, beyond representation, beyond language, and beyond the realm of the "1." It was in the face of the disaster that Blanchot came to realize that what he thought was the solution in the realm of the real was in fact complicitous with the disaster itself. In this light, the supreme "I" of nationalism, which guards the "I" (the same) against the danger of the other and that must protect itself against the other at all costs, was the fruition of the crisis of modernity that culminated in the Shoah. For Blanchot, this was the very end but also the beginning. The irony, or the horror, is that it was only after the end that Blanchot found his voice. He was able to address the issue and find the opening to the other, but only after it was too late. Like the character Henri Sorge in his novel Le Tres haut, who finds the power to speak only after he dies, Blanchot finds his power to speak only after the disaster has occurred. In Le Tres haut, published in 1948, it is only on the last line of the last page of the book that Sorge finds the power of his voice: "Now, it is now that I speak." But the novel is over and it is too late. Similarly, in his novel Aminadab, named after Levinas's youngest brother, who was a victim of the Final Solution, Aminadab is the first and last word of the novel. It is the title, but then does not appear again until it is too late, until it is all over. The word is both the beginning and the end, or perhaps the end is what allows us to understand the beginning. In Blanchot's work the position of history is put in question precisely because of the privileged position he gives to the Shoah as the moment by which all moments must now be defined. Here we see the paradoxical nature of a project that both acknowledges the historical manifestation of the Shoah as a result of the project of modernity and privileges the Shoah as fundamentally singular, ahistorical, and unrepresentable. Here the Shoah mimics the model of death that Blanchot came to understand in his work on Heidegger. For Blanchot, following Heidegger, death is the limit of representability because it is the possibility of the impossible. But, as the limit, it also allows for the possibility of meaning as the limit against which all is defined. Death is ultimately ambiguous, as the moment that gives all meaning and at the same time takes all meaning away. Death is the finite moment that is fixed in time but is also infinite, 215

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the moment that is always yet to come and always ahead. In this sense, death is the infinity that provides the finite because it is the basis of understanding what has come, but on the basis of a not yet that eschews any sort of narrative or teleology (BT, 2.48.285-90). For Blanchot, the Shoah, which is the disaster beyond human scale and thus beyond representation, mimics that moment of death, which gives meaning while at the same time taking it away. This is a profoundly dangerous moment, because when the disaster speaks, or gives meaning, it destroys its prior meaning, which is beyond representation, the singular phenomenon that cannot be expressed and yet defines expression. For Blanchot, language is the sphere of representation and speaks only in relation to death. It destroys that to which it gives meaning. The danger of this move is that language always risks reducing that which is named to the level of banality, a merely categorized object to be possessed and controlled (which is precisely the crisis of modernization and the Western metaphysical tradition). Thus the Shoah as the limit beyond all limits must be communicated precisely because it is the sole possibility of giving meaning to the modern world. But when it is expressed through representation, it is always in peril of losing its singularity as the limit beyond limits and being reduced to a banality. The Shoah, like death, exists in language as infinitely ambiguous and permanently in peril. The Shoah must be placed within history to be communicated as the moment that gives meaning to all other moments; yet it is profoundly ahistorical as the source of meaning by which any history can be presented. The Shoah stands outside history in its singularity but must be placed historically in order to be communicated. Thus it is always in peril of being reduced to a mere historical moment. The nature of such a claim places in question all history and representation as the site of understanding, which is replaced by "a passivity without measure: disaster understood, under-understood not as an event in the past but as the immemorial past [ le Tres Haut] that returns dispersed by the return of the present where it can be lived as relived" (ED, 34). Here a notion of repetition is also invoked. It has its source in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche but arrives in the work of Blanchot through the section of Being and Time on historicality.

Language and the Work of Literature The moment of disaster, which has occurred and yet exists as always to come, also opens the possibility of communication; indeed it is the possibility of communication that always risks being covered up as that possibility. Like death, the disaster is the ultimate n1pture with the traditional understartding of representation/historyI narrative/language, and this 216

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rupture creates the opening for another type of understanding. "It is the darkness of disaster that brings the light" (ED, 17). And this understanding is not accessible through the traditional models of representation but only by that which places representation in question and thus does not lose access to the singular even as it attempts to make it common. For Blanchot, this is the opening for literature, fiction, and poetry: "We must tum to a language that has never been written but is always to be prescribed so that the incomprehensible word can be understood in the heaviness of disaster and invites us to turn towards the disaster without understanding or supporting it" (ED, 47). Blanchot sees this impossible task as that ofliterature, which exists both as the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, both real and unreal, an ultimately ambiguous form that presents the possibility of the unrepresentable precisely because it allows access to what is not real (fiction) via what is real but rendered ultimately ambiguous (language). Literature conserves the moment of singularity, or unrepresentability, within a form that is pure representation and as such is the liaison between comprehension and the incomprehensible that allows us to turn toward disaster without "understanding or supporting it." Blanchot's understanding of the role of literarure relies heavily on his notion of language, which is based largely on Levinas's philosophical work from the late 1930s and 1940s.U Blanchot, like Levinas, sees language as a double-edged sword that opens the possibility of encountering the other but is always in danger of reducing the other to the position of an object through the banal categorization entailed in mere representation. language exposes the ambiguous, precarious, and unsettling relationship between the self and the other and, in so doing, it calls both into question. In its most banal form, all meaning is lost in language, which becomes mere classification without any reference to that which it is classifYing. In this sense, that which is named is deprived of its very being and reduced to an o~ect in a larger system of objective knowledge. For Blanchot as for Levinas, this is the inherent poverty of idealism in its neo-Kantian but also spiritualist incarnations, where the understanding of being is sacrificed for a system of categorical objectification and representation via the scientific model or in the form of a pure consciousness that traps and identifies everything within its sphere. Blanchot wanted to get to the moment prior to the positing of the self, the

11. Blanchot's understanding of the role of language is equally indebted to the work of Mallarme, and in this respect is part of a larger French dialogue on the subject that goes well beyond the influence of Heidegger. For the purposes of this project I will focus on what is immediately pertinent to the reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France. See Ulrich Hass and William Large: Maurit-e Blanclwt (New York: Routledge, 2001), chap. 2, "Language and Literature."

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basis for both subjective and objective analysis, by looking toward language for the moment prior to that positing. The unsettling nature of language as a deposition (in the sense that a king is deposed) as well as a position is a focal point of his literary work throughout the 1930s and especially in Thomas l'obscur. But this moment prior gives no comfon or security, unlike the Canesian positing, which allows one to come to grips with oneself in the most banal sense. Instead, the investigation into language reveals its destructive nature, and the investigation into death exposes the other side of being, which is revealed through annihilation. This is what Levinas described as the il y a, which is not the nothingness that Sartre saw as the opposite of being but the realization that even in annihilation being remains. The moment of destruction is not the destruction of being but rather the realization that being is always already there, "impersonal and anonymous." As Levinas states in De I'existence a l'existant, "lbe il y a is the anonymous and impersonal current of Being that precedes all being, the Being that is at the heart of the disappearance is already present, that is the basis of all annihilation returns again to Being, Being that is like the fatality of Being, the nothingness as existence: when there is nothing there is [ il y a] Being." 12 This is the realization that there is a something beyond finitude, namely, the anonymity of infinite being. This philosophical move supposes that the self, the "1," is in no way prior to the other and that the other is necessarily an equal: both the self and the other stand on this side of being, which is always prior and in fact gives meaning to both. It is not the "I" as ego cogito that gives meaning to the world, as Husserl supposed and Sartre sought to elaborate and modifY; nor does the self define itself in conflict with the other as in Kojeve's uaderstanding of Hegel. Instead, meaning is derived from the moment before and beyond. Far from a breakthrough revelation, the construction of this understanding was a slow realization for Blanchot. Furthermore, that realization was unsettling to Blanchot because it involved the impossibility of escaping the impersonal being that is both the source and annihilation of the self. It was precisely this unsettled feeling that led Blanchot to construct the self as nation in an attempt to escape from his philosophical revelation. Mter World War II, Blanchot turned away from philosophy, and specifically the politics of the self, because he realized that his attempt to avoid the moment beyond the self could never escape the il y a. 13 Furthermore, 12. This formulation is actually a paraphrase of Levinas by Maurice Blanchot in "La Littfrature et le droit a Ia mort," in I ..a Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 320n. 1. I will explore Levin as's use of this term in the next chapter. 13. It is of interest to note that twenty years Iate1; in 1958, Blanchot returned to politics, but in support of the far left. Here one might speculate on the relationship between a radical notion of collectivity and Blanchot's politics. See Michel Surya, "Un bonheur politique," Mngaz.ine litteraire no. 424 (October 2003): 38-40.

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after the Shoah, Blanchot came to see the politics of the self as even more horrific (in its resolve to remove the other to protect the same) than the it y a, which, despite its strangeness and unfamiliarity, conserves a place for the other in the moment of creation. Thomas l'obscurembodies the conflict Blanchot experienced while trying to work through these philosophical issues in the 1930s. In Thomas there is a constant tension in the character of Thomas himself, who cannot come to grips with his self because he realizes he is also radically other. Thomas is the moment of strangeness but also of horror when one realizes oneself as other or, rather, realizes that there is nothing primary in one's self and that there is something prior to it. Thomas is constantly assaulted by the contradiction between identity and strangeness. Thomas's desire to name, to catalog, to control, is repeatedly thwarted by the unheimlich nature of existence, which is beyond his control. Thomas's very existence is not his own and defies his own understanding. In chapter 5 Thomas finds that he has turned into a cat, and in this state everything seems unfamiliar, strange, outside him. He is not the subject, or rather his subjectivity is in question. He cannot control his self, his being, or his perception, and he is removed from himself as the site of these perceptions: This head, my head doesn't see me because I am annihilated. It is me that looks at me but cannot distinguish that it is me. Oh superior cat that I have become this instant to discover my decease (demise), I will disappear now for the good of all. At first I ceased to be a man. I became a little cat, cold and uninhabitable, sprawled out on the floor. I rally one more time. I throw a last look at the valley that shuts me in and I see a man who is also a superior cat. I hear him scratch on the ground, probably with his claws. That which is called the beyond is finished for me. (TO, 37-38) The very issue of positionality is entirely ambiguous both for Thomas and for the reader. What is striking in this passage is that while Thomas is struggling with the displacement of his self and the realization of a moment prior to his being that is both the creation and destruction of representable presence, this move is not isolated. There is another ambiguous subject. Perhaps it is another man who has become a superior cat or Thomas himself who has become the other man. The language is vague, and this leads to another confrontation in the narrative. This is the realization that the moment prior to the self and the other is accessible through language and that the relation of the self to the other occurs in language. Everyday language rarely reflects on this relation, but in literature it is exposed. There, the limits of representation come to the fore, because in everyday language things are made opaque 219

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while in literature they remain ambiguous. Thomas l'obscur thus exists on two levels, as both the fiction ofBlanchot and the real world ofThomas. In chapter 4, Thomas realizes that he does not control the words that are the basis of representation and definition, but that they control him. 14 Words arc the means by which Thomas defines himself and others, the way he establishes the limit of where he stops and others begin. But as such they are prior to his self. Language already exists, and thus it too places his self in question. Thomas is confronted with the possibility that he is not the center of meaning as he had supposed, but that in fact meaning is outside him, beyond him. This can be seen as an extreme reading of Hcidegger's ek-stasis, but Blanchot wants to go further than Heidegger. While reading, Thomas is overwhelmed by the sentiment that it is not he who reads the words but the words that read him. He perceived all the strangeness of having been observed by a word as though it were a living being. And this was not just one word but all words. . . He did not push away this well defended text but used all his force to grasp it, he refused to look away and believed that he could come to an even more profound reading when he realized that the words had already taken possession of him and begun to read him. (TO, 28) The words are not his to use but instead use him. Language is definition, which presupposes Thomas, presupposes the self that arises from a nothingness that is prior to the self. Thomas's impulse is to run. "He returned to his room. He barricaded the door. He waited with his back against the wall. But neither the minutes nor the hours exhausted his wait. He felt close to an absence so monstrous that the encounter demanded an infinity of time" (TO, 31). The absence is the lack of existence, the anonymous and impersonal being of the il y a. This is the nothingness from which language emerges but which implies something beyond and before the nothing. Thomas exists in relation to nonexistence, he is presence in relation to absence. His being is not centered in the self as body, present as the locus of representation, but outside it. Thus it is only as represented that the self and body are incorporated in an "I," but this "I" i.s already displaced by the very words that define it as "1." In the confrontation with these words, which imply the nothingness, Thomas experiences "a sort of Thomas that has left his body and that moves towards the menace that has unveiled him" (TO, 31 ). This revelation of the position of the self exterior to the body is not alleviated by his attempt to escape the absence, and Thomas finds 14. Phillipe Mesnard, "Maurice Blanchot, le sujet et !'engagement," L'l11jini 48 (Winter 1994): 103-28.

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instead that he is in fact drawn toward the absence he feels "close to." The menace that puts Thomas's self in question is also the basis for the constitution of the self. For Thomas, the movement toward the nothing, the absence, that is the origin of language serves to expose the impossibility of escaping being. This is not an understanding of being as self but of being as infinite anonymity in the il y a. Here, even the absence of being implies being. Furthermore, in the confrontation with language, which implies the nothingness by carrying the absence with it, Thomas comes up against the limits of representation. The moment of the absence, the il y a, implies a moment prior to language. This is the moment of naming, which creates and destroys in the same act, but also implies a namer. The issue of the namer, the ultimate other who gives the name, will become of great importance to both Blanchot and Levinas. It is the possibility of God. During the writing of Thomas, however, Blanchot was obsessed with the absence on the other side of being, which he took for annihilation but which he came to realize was something even more strange and frightening. Writing Thomas l'ohscur, Blanchot "encountered in the search for annihilation (absence) the impossibility of escaping Being (presence)-whic~ was not even a contradiction in fact, but the demand of an unhappy perpetuity in dying itself."15 In Thomas, Blanchot intuits the possibility of the opening to the other but only in terms of the displacement of the self in the face of language and in relation to decline, destntction, and negation. literature presents Blanchot with the possibility of confronting language and creating a space for the other, but always at the supreme risk of losing oneself, as in Thomas, or of sacrificing the other, as in the case ofBlanchot's political writings. In the 1930s, Blanchot's focus was on the annihilation of the self and the attempt to protect the endangered self through the creation of a national subject. Mter the disaster, he came to recognize this negation, this deposition of the self, as the opening to the other. Mter the Shoah, Blanchot sought to move beyond any system of thought that privileged the same at the expense of the other. Thus he turned to literature, which, by means of its ambiguous nature, refuses categorical representation and the domination of the same. In this move, Blanchot turned away from his allegiance to the "I," which was the source of his nationalism, and toward the understanding of the other that he sought to explore in the confrontation of language with/in literature. Blanchol saw the ambiguity of literature as the means by which to reveal the paradoxical nature of language, as that which reveals the meaning of 15. Blanc hot, "Mter the Fact." in Vicious Circles: Tum Fic#ons and "After the Far./." (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985), 64. This is the focus of Blanchot's novel Arr;l de mort (1948).

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the singular to the common but also conceals the true meaning of the singular by replacing it with the common. Furthermore, Blanchot saw literature as the sole means of representing the unrepresentable without reducing it to the merely categorical. Here again we see the complex nature of Blanchot's project, which is defined by a historical event that is itself the basis for all understanding and thus stands outside history. For Blanchot, all our understanding is coded by the disaster, which is itself impossible to understand. Thus the access we can achieve is necessarily and infinitely ambiguous. The other offers itself as ambiguity.

Repetition and Circularity The centrality of the Shoah for Blanchot and the influence of Heidegger on him reveal the strange circularity of the reception of Heidegger in France. Both Blanc-hot and Levinas were profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work from the late 1920s and early 1930s, and this led them to their understanding of philosophy as ontological investigation into being, which is the basis for their understanding of temporality, the nature of truth, the nature of representation, a rethinking of history, the displacement of the Cartesian cogito, and most important for Blanchot, the structure of death. But both Blanchot and Levinas were dissatisfied with Heidegger's conclusions in his understanding of Dasein in relation to the Mitsein. This led them to an investigation of language and silence based on early Heidegger in an attempt to think their way past Heidegger. Thus Levinas and Blanchot began to explore language and silence well before the publication of the "Letter on Humanism," hence well before these became issues in the French understanding of Heidegger, which at the time was still dominated by ontology understood as existentialism. 16 After the Shoah, the need to elaborate the concept of the Mitsein so as to establish a place for the other based on a rethinking of Heidegger's work in relation to language became an imperative for Blanchot and Levinas. For them, Heidegger's ontology, which they saw as the basis for a rethinking of crucial issues such as the primacy of the self and the nature of representation, was still too focused on the self and thus part of a system that had no place for the other. 17 Even Heidegger's understanding 16. Here too Mallarme's influence on Blanchot cannot be underestimated. 17. For Levinas, Heidegger's investigation into DnsPin in BPi11g and Time was stiii based on the investigation of the individual Dasl'in as the access to an understanding of being and was thus essentially limited by the position of the self. It is the emphasis on the individual in Heidegger's concept of being-towards-death, coupled with the poverty of Heidegger's development of the concept of the Mitseiu, that leads Levinas to the conclusion that there is no space fm· the other in Heidegger's ontological investigation. Jean-Luc Nancy also

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of death as presented in Being and Time, which is the basis for Blanchot's understanding of language and literature, since they mimic death in their structure, required rethinking. Blanchot considered Heidegger's understanding of death still too focused on the individual. He saw Jemeinigkeit, the mine-ownness of death, as an exclusionary and insufficient notion. In the face of disaster (the Shoah), Blanchot wanted to rethink death in relation to language and literature so as to include room for the possibility of the other while at the same time conserving what is essentially "one's ownmost" in death. While this notion can never be clear, it is more understandable when one remembers that for Heidegger death is one's ownmost possibility, it is the possibility of the impossible. "In Dasein there is undeniably a constant ' lack of totality' which finds an end with death. This 'not-yet' 'belongs' to Dasein as long as it is" (BT, 286). Dasein does not complete itself until the moment of death but that is also the moment when all possibilities disappear for Dasein. Mter death Dasein has no more possibilities. "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein" (BT, 294). Blanchot sought to elaborate on and deviate from I-Ieidegger precisely regarding the issue of singularity, which is what Heidegger's conception of death rests on: "When it [Dasein] stands before itself in this way [as the possibility of the impossibility of Dasein], all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone [gelost]. This ownmost non-relational [ unbeziigliche] possibility is at the same time the uttermost one" (BT, 294). What is quite delicate in Blanchot's reading of Heidegger in the wake of the Shoah is that it does not deny the singularity of death but demands an investigation into the moment beyond/before. For Blanchot, this is the moment of Levinas's il y a but also the moment before the singular, when one can access the other in all its impossibility. Blanchot takes Heidegger to task for the overly subjectivist tendencies of Being and Time, the very issue Heidegger ascribed to the French reading of his philosophy in the "Letter on Humanism." As we have seen, Heidegger too was moving away from the methodology of Being and Time and the ontological investigation of being, which necessarily focused on Dasein as the existential manifestation of being. Heidegger's decision to break entirely with the metaphysical tradition of philosophy and tum to an investigation into the history of being was also a turn away from the primacy of the subject and toward language. His shift became explicit in France in 1947 with the publication of the "Letter on Humanism," his lectures from makes this point in an investigation into /Jasri11 in relation to the Hegelian category of self. His conclusion is that Heidegger's philosophy does not differentiate itself sufficiently from the Hegelian model and thus also becomes a philosophy of the self (~'Ol). See Jean-Luc Nancy, l.n rornmurwute dhoeuvrPP (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990), 203. Nancy also posits the Mitsein as the possible opening to a philosophy m-<·ommu.n instead of m-soi.

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Cerisy, his lectures on Thor, and his Holderlin lectures, which were translated byJoseph Rovan. The turn to poetry were strikingly similar trajectories for Heidegger and Blanchot. The interests of Blanchot and to an extent of Levinas were parallel to those of Heidegger in 1947: language and the poverty of traditional philosophy, given its tendency to cover up in the very act of revealing and thus deprive humankind of meaning in its desire to define everything. The "Letter on Humanism" introduced French philosophy to Hejdegger's concern with the relation of language to being and shifted it., focus away from existential humanism and toward an investigation into language and the decentered subject. In this way, the "Letter on Humanism" and the second reading of Heidegger in France opened the possibility for a serious interest in the work ofBlanchot and Levinas. Although Heidegger's shift in focus led French intellectuals to an interest in Levinas and Blanchot, their understanding of Heidegger deviated from, and even stood in opposition to, the second reading of Heidegger, despite parallel interests and methodologies. Blanchot and Levinas would play a seminal role in leading young French thinkers to (and away from) Heidegger by constantly challenging him in a way that Jean Beaufret's orthodoxy never could and that Jean-Paul Sartre never attempted. Blanchot and Levinas deviated from Heidegger because they both sought to confront the Shoah, which led them to rethink not only the relation oflanguage to being but also the place of the other in that relation. This is why, for them, "Language is not the house of being but the site of skepticism" (ED, 170). Being is not something lost that can be recovered through the patient investigation into the ancient, which will bring us understanding through contemplation. Instead, language is the site of meaning, but a dangerous site where meaning is derived from the act of negation and destruction. Language is the point of access to the moment beyond meaning, but it is also in danger of falling into the banality of categorization that deprives it of all meaning in the very act of defining. For Blanchot, the issue of being is inextricably linked to the relation with the other, and this can only be thought after, but in relation to, the rupture of the Shoah, as that which was and that which is al'\<\'ays to come. Heidegger's apologies for his own actions and for the actions of Germany during World War II confront the issue as the fruition of a certain history that can be traced through the metaphysical tradition of the West. In this sense, Heidegger saw nothing singular or exemplary in the event, nor did he confront the specificity of the Shoah. 18 18. Heidegger's claim that National Socialism was the result of a "structural malady" of the West, that one could substitute "East Germans" for Jews, and his equation of the extermination camps with the industrial production of food products, all attest to this trend in his thought. See n. 34 below.

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By contrast, Blanchot saw the Shoah as a singular and fundamentally ahistorical event, but also as the moment by which all history and meaning will now be understood. To understand history, Blanchot also applies the philosophy of Heidegger in a way Heidegger himself did not. As such, he develops a critique of history that is based on Being and Time but that also calls Heidegger's own historical account of the events of World War II into question. In Being and Time, Heidegger wants to expose the present-at-hand structure of history that distances it from any real temporal understanding of history understood through Dasein and the structure of care (Sorge). 19 Given the sophistication of Heidegger's analysis of historicality in Being and Time, his impoverished understanding of recent historical events as a basis for his apologetics is highly suspect. Blanchot's understanding of history is similar to his understanding of death in that it stems and deviates from Heidegger's work in Being and Time. Blanchot's confrontation with history grows out of his work with Levin as, his reading of death, his understanding ofKojeve, and the notion of disaster as the event that is always to come.

The Writing of Disaster The writing of disaster emerges in the shadow of the Shoah but is also based directly on Blanchot's involvement with all the key elements in the reception of Heidegger in France. In Blanchot's "La litterature et le droit a la mort" from La part du feu ( 1949), one can see a synthesis of all the strains of this reception that we have encountered to this point, read through the lens of Blanchot's particular engagement with the concept of disaster. Blanchot presents an interpretation ofHeidegger that is heavily indebted to Levinas's understanding of Being and Time but also relies on an understanding of history and an interpretation of language that can be traced to Alexandre Kojeve's Hegel seminar. This influence is the result ofBlanchot's work and friendship with Georges Bataille. Blanchot also presents an understanding of literature as fiction, as the unreal, .which is derived from the influence of Sartre's L'imaginaire and an understanding of language as the site of the sacred based on Heidegger's work on Holderlin. Finally, Blanchot's work is a movement away from Heidegger's ontology that follows Levinas's critique of the insufficiency of ontology in De ['existence al'existant. 20 Blanchot opens his investigation into the nature of literature in "La litterature et le droit a la mort" with a question, or rather with the possibility of avoiding a question, which still manifests itself as the question "Why does one write?" 19. See chap. 4. 20. See chap. 7.

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One can surely write without asking why one writes. But a writer who watches his pen print the letters still has the right to pause and say: Stop! Do you know what you are doing? Do you know where you are going? Can't you see that your ink leaves no trace? That you move freely but in an emptiness? That if you haven't encountered any obstacles it is because you have never left your point of departure? And still you write: you write without stop, I discover what I have dictated to you and it reveals to me what I know; in reading you, others enrich what they have taken from you and give you that which you learn from them. Now you have made that which you did not make; you have written what you did not write: you are condemned to the ineffaceable. (LDM, 293) The question implies that writing is more than it seems but also is that which necessarily avoids an answer. Each response Blanchot gives to the question is itself contradictory. How does the ink leave no trace? How does one write what one has not written? And how is a project that moves in an emptiness and never leaves the place it has begun, that does not say what it set out to say, and that does not leave a mark, condemned to the ineffaceable? For Blanchot the answer is the question: "Literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question" (LDM, 293). This question is also addressed to language through literature, which puts into question the very language the writer uses. In this sense, literature exists as a question but as the question that puts itself in question. This structure seems to mirror Heidegger's understanding of Dasein as that being for whom being is an issue and that thus questions its being. But the structure of the question also implies a negation, and here Blanchot is very close to Sartre's work in L'imaginaire. In Sartre, the question always implies a negative as well as a positive, and literature, which is not real but the unreal domain of negation, is exposed as a creation from nothingness. Literature "opens itself from the nothingness where it realizes its proper irreality" (LDM, 293). But while Sartre understands the imaginary as the site of free will where human beings create something from the nothing, which is the proof of freedom itself, Blanchot uses the relation of the real to the unreal to demonstrate the profound ambiguity of literature. 21 Thus for Blanchot, literature is the ambiguous liaison between the real and the unreal, between being and nothingness, and as such is more important than philosophy, religion, history, or any discipline that privileges the answer above the question. Here Blanchot is 21. In another article in J.a part du fru, "Les romans de Sartre," Blanchot makes this point explicit and claims that the importance of Sanre's wmk does not lie in the claim to freedom or the call to engagement but in the profound ambiguity that is the basis of his work.

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very close to the Heidegger of the "Letter on Humanism" in his desire to let the question ask questions and not to force a particular answer that in fact conceals the question. It is from literature's position as art that literature derives its access to the question, and Blanchot uses Hegel to formulate his own conception of art as the highest idea that formulates itself. 22 The formulation of the idea is of particular interest to Blanc hot: "To paraphrase Hegel, from his first step the individual who wants to write is arrested by a contradiction: to write he must have the talent to write.... His talent can only be seen after he has written, but he must have talent in order to write" (LDM, 295). Thus the writer's talent can be discovered only in the production of the work, the book. The writer must produce and make present that which exists in nothingness as his idea. But this production requires on the author's part an integrity, a commitment to the idea he wishes to write but which does not yet exist. The difficulty is that the work of literature as manifest can never be the pure idea of the writer, even though it is the fruition of that idea. Here we can already intuit the relation to Heidegger's concept of death, because for literature, as for Dasein, that which completes it also puts an end to it. But in literature, completion is not the end or rather it is the end that never ends. It is a perpetual dying. Blanchot returns to Hegel to trace the relation between writer and nothingness in the act of creation. This supposes a particular difficulty because the writer must take an idea, a pure concept, and transform it to make it accessible as a universal concept. For Blanchot, this act represents a certain danger: "The danger of writing for others is that the others will not understand your voice but the voice of another, a ' real' voice, profound and disturbing like truth." 23 The writer must take that which is most singular and make it communal. For Blanchot this is an impossible task; like death, it is the representation of the unrepresentable. In the act of representation something is destroyed, negated, and the meaning is changed. At this point it becomes clear that Blanchot's reading of Hegel is in fact Kojeve's reading of Hegel as presented by Bataille and as published by Raymond Queneau as Alexandre Kojeve's Introduction ala lecture de Hegel (1947). Blanchot claims that the act of negation in literature resembles the Hegelian notion of work as the motor of history, and he uses Kojeve's reading of Hegel to make this claim (LDM, 300). Literature does have a similar structure to work in Blanchot's reading because, as produced by work, literature is the transformation of raw 22. On Blanchot's use of Hegel, see Vincent Descombes, Modern f)"N~rh Pllil.osophy, trans. L. Scott Fox andj. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 112-13. 23. Blanc hot, "La litterature et le droit aIa mort," 299. Blanchot's concern with the author's inability to control the "public" understanding of one's work is of particular interest in relation to his political writing of the 1930s.

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material into something of use for man. Thus the production of a book is the historical manifestation of an object. But Blanchot deviates from Hegel because literature does not have the same properties as other objects produced by work and thus resists incorporation into history. "The essence of literature as thing (object) is still silence, the nothingness" (LDM, 300). Thus while it is a product of history in the Hegelian sense-it is the result of work-literature remains at some level outside history as that which is no-thing, not real, and that thus confounds history. The ambiguity of literature distinguishes it from the Hegelian notion of work defined by Kojeve, where the creative act of negation transforms nature into an object under man's control. In Blanchot's presentation, literature is the act of creation via negation that creates something completely out of man's control. "What is most striking is that in literature, trickery and mystification are not only inevitable but form the honesty of the writer. It is the place of hope and truth that he has within himself." This "malady" inherent in words "is also the sanctity of words" (LDM, 302). It is precisely the possibility of misunderstanding that opens the possibility of understanding. But this also must be understood in relation to Kojeve's reading of Hegel and Kojeve's definition of language a" an act of negation, where the presence of a word corresponds to the absence of that which is named. As opposed to the act of negation in naming, which provides a definition (a universal) that is substituted for the particular (singular) and thus destroys the singular in the creation of the common, literature leaves the relation ambiguous, because that which is named is not real. Thus in Blanchot's example of a writer writing about a cat, the writer is not able to clarifY a universal notion of catness that he can convey to the reader precisely because, in presenting the cat in his work, it is not clear but mystifying. The "cat is not a cat." We are reminded of Thomas in Thomrul'obscur, who himself becomes a cat but is never a cat. The reader is never clear on the identity of the cat or of Thomas; unlike the act of representation in nonliterary language, which is also the act of objectification (and in this sense the act of work), in literature this act of representation is always a slippage between the real and the unreal. It is a movement between the singular and the common and between the representable and the limits of representation. "The slippage makes the writer perpetually absent and irresponsible, that is to say without consciousness, but the slippage also extends the writer's presence in his risks and his responsibility" (LDM, 303). Literature exists as ambiguity and paradox. It is a tension and an open question that destabilizes meaning and thus does not allow for the sort of classification and objectification that is the domain of nonliterary language and the sciences of man. Literature cannot focus on finding an 228

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answer because it is fundamentally a question that opens only onto other questions. Blanchot presents this paradox in the form of a dialogue: ONE SAYS TO THE OTHER: You will not write, you will remain nothing, you will keep the silence, you will ignore words. THE OTHER: I don't know anything but words. -Write to say nothing. -Write to say something. -Not a book but your own experience, the knowledge of that which you did not know. -A book! A real work, recognized by and important to others. -Efface the reader. -Efface yourself before the reader. -Write to be true. -Write for the truth.

Which law to follow? Which voice to listen to? But we must follow both! (LDM, 303) For Blanchot, the paradoxical conflict between the singular and the communal is the basis for the ambiguity that constitutes the essential character of writing literature. 24 Thus literature exists as work in the Kojevian sense of the term but also outside work. 25 "One must destroy language as it is in order to realize it in another form"; thus, like work, literature destroys to create. Writing also stands outside history, because, unlike work, it does not create in relation to the real but in relation to the unreal. For Blanchot as for Sartre, the unreal always supposes nothingness. Blanchot pushes his understanding of this negation even farther than Sartre by following Heidegger's attempt to rethink the nature of representation in Being and Time and by arriving at the same conclusion Levinas draws in De !'existence al'existant: It [literature] does not negate only the walled-in situation of man but

passes over time, which is the wall, and forces an opening. It negates the negation of time and negates the negation of limits. This is why in the end it does not negate anything and the work where literature is realized is not the real action of destruction, of destruction and transfomlation, but the realization of the impossibility to negate. Literature is the refusal to intervene in the real world and transform d1e freedom that it must incarnate in things by means-of time into an ideal which is above time but as such is empty and inaccessible. (LDM, 306) 24. A reading of Blanchot's concept of ambiguity in relation to Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the term would also be helpful for grasping the divergent and pluralistic nature of the reception of Heidegger in France. 25. Blanchot cites Kojeve as the basis for his understanding of the concept of work in both Hegel and Marx in a footnote to "La litterature et le dmit a Ia mort" (305).

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Literature refuses to enter the real world and thus is not like work in the Hegelian sense. It is not under control, nor does it serve humans, but instead serves to expose the moment prior to negation. This is essential for Blanchot, because, if Kojeve's Hegelian model is kept intact, then the moment of confrontation between the self and the other can only exist within the sphere of negation that manifests itself as the Master-Slave dialectic. If, however, there is a moment prior to negation, then the encounter between the self and the other is not necessarily based on the model of negation. What Blanchot exposes in his understanding of literature is the impossibility of negating. This is because the anonymous being of the il y a is always prior to negation. This is the place prior to the self and prior to the "I" as posited in language and is thus the opening to the other. Furthermore, by exposing the infinity of anonymous being, which is the other side of dying, this move displaces the privileged position of death as that which is my ownmost. In its impersonal anonymity the il y a is like an endless dying that is never completed in the moment of death. Literature is also like this endless dying. The language of literature cannot be the language of negation but is somehow the negation of negation. Unlike nonliterary language, literature can never be an imperative but is always a question. "The language of the writer, even the revolutionary writer, is not the language of a commandment. The writer does not command but presents, and in presenting he does not render present what he shows but shows that which is behind what he presents, as the meaning and absence of it all" (LDM, 308). Here too we see a parallel between Heidegger's project in the "Letter on Humanism" and Blanchot's understanding of language in literature. Both want to avoid traditional prescriptive philosophy as Sartre practices it. Instead they want to let language be, let it present itself in its absence and in its silence. To this end both writers turn to poetry and specifically to the works of Holderlin as the site where language reveals and conceals all its meaning. 26 But Blanchot is also interested in the relation of this realization to the writer's position in and outside history and thus continues his exploration of the place of literature in association with Kojeve's interpretation of Hegel. In his model, Blanchot sees the writer as always already situated at the end of history. This moment becomes explicit in the Hegelian schema at t11e moment when the concept of death is universalized through the enactment of the Terror during the French Revolution, which removes the singularity of death by making it universal and in doing so overcomes the fear of death 26. Blanchot makes his agreement and disagreement with Heidegger explicit in "La Parole 'sacree' de Holderlin," in La part du feu. On Heidegger and Holderlin, see Beda Allemann, llolderlirt und IJPirleggpr (Zftrich: Atlantis Verlag, 1954); John Sallis, Jusearch in Pltf!'71om.enology, 1989, Special Topi.r: 1/eidt>gger and l/ol.fkrlin (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990).

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as manifested in theism. But as a result of the Terror, "no one has the right to a private life. All is made public and anyone who has a secret, who keeps to himself a thought or an intimate act, is the most guilty of all suspects. In the end, no one has the right to their own life, to an existence that is separate and physically distinct. This is the meaning of the Terror. Every citizen has the right to die: death is not a condemnation but the essence of their rights. It does not suppress those who are guilty but needs death to affirm who is a citizen. Thus it is in the disappearance of death that freedom is born." 27 Mter the Terror, death became universalized, leveled, and banalized to such a point that chopping off a human head had no more significance than chopping up a head oflettuce. This sense of death follows Blanchot's understanding of language because, in its universalized form, it loses its significance as singular and unrepresentable. As the significance of meaning is disappearing into the universal at the end of history, literature exists as a denial of the negation that leads to universalization. Blanchot sees this manifest in the works of the Marquis de Sade: "From a sentiment that is the most singular, the most hidden, the most private and the furthest removed from common meaning, he [Sade] makes an affirmation of the Universal. He presents the reality of public speech delivered from history so that it becomes an explanation of the human condition in its collective. In the end it is negation itself" (LDM, 311). From his position as the singular in relation to the common, Sade restores meaning to death not as a banality but as "the greatest passion." In Sade, death does not resolve itself but manifests itself as the greatest contradiction. Far from allowing death to be subordinated by language and universality, Sade presents death as the universal, which is also the singular. For Blanchot, the Terror is the "historical moment when life carries death and holds itself within this same death in order to obtain the possibility of the truth of speech. This is the question that literature seeks to accomplish and is itll very being" (LDM, 311). Literature exposes the moment of contradiction that lies hidden by the seemingly factual and common definition of the universal. But even when what is most private is made public, literature calls the relation of the two into question, thus dislodging the primacy of the universal and calling history itself into question. · For Blanchot, "Literature is linked to language. Language is both reassuring and troubling at the same time. When we speak, we make ourselves masters of things in a way that satisfies us." But when we speak we also destroy that which we name. "When I say 'that woman' I dispose of her. I remove our relation, take away the possibility of any surprising action 27. Blanchot, "La litterature et le droit a Ia mort," 309. See chap. 2.

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and transform her so that she becomes exactly what I want her to be. Speech makes life easy and secure. We would not know what to do with an object that has no name" (LDM, 311-12). Blanchot presents a melange of Heidegger's concept of the unheimlich and Kojeve's understanding of language as fundamentally destructive. Language becomes unheimlich, is always in proximity to death, because it is both what is closest and what is farthest away. It is familiar and yet strange, reassuring and troubling. But this understanding is placed within Kojeve's model of language as what manifests the negative in its capacity to create through destruction. The two themes are actually quite compatible, given that Kojeve's understanding of work, which underlies his understanding of language, is based on Heidegger's concept of death. 28 Blanchot follows Kojeve's model of language as structurally equivalent to murder and thus in constant proximity to death. "The word gives me Being but also deprives me of Being." Blanchot quotes Hegel as he is presented in Kojeve's Introduction ala kcture de Hegel to explain the nature of the act of naming: In a text anterior to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel wrote (and here he is the friend and neighbor of Holderlin): "The first act by which Adam made himself master of the animals was to impose on them a name. This is to say that he annihilated their existence (as individual existents)." Hegel wants to say that from that instant forward the cat stopped being a cat as uniquely real and became an idea." (LDM, 312) In language the cat is annihilated as the singular cat to become a universal concept that is called "cat" and defines catness. But again we are reminded of Thomas l'obscurand the fact that in literature this act of negation is blurred and the meaning of the cat as singular and common is put into question. Blanchot elaborates on the Kojevian notion of language as murder:

.

Without doubt language has never killed anyone. However, when I say "that woman," real death is announced and is always present in my language. My language wants to say that that person who is there right now can be detached from herself, subtracted from her existence and from her presence, and plunged into a nothingness of existence and presence. My language essentially signifies the possibility of that destruction and is at every moment an allusion resolved to that specific event. (LDM, 313) 28. Blanchot cites Kojeve's lnlmdu.ction a /,a I.P.ctureck 1/rg·el as the source for his interpretation of hmguage as destruction. See 372-75, where Kojeve states that as an act of negation, the conc.ept as manifested in language is equivalent to murder. This concept was expanded in the work of both Jacques Lacan and Georges Bataille.

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While language is not really death, it always evokes and mimics the structure of death as the presentation of the unpresentable. Language is the destruction of the singular in the attempt to make it common. Thus, for Blanchot, it is "precisely exact to say that when I speak, death speaks in me," but death as the limit of representation is also the basis for representation. To define being, one needs non being, even if it destroys the meaning of being in the act. "Without death everything would collapse into absurdity and nothingness" (LDM, 313). Language begins from nothing or rather from negation and thus does not present what really is but instead makes an allusion that destroys that which it names. Hence the allusion is always to death. But this allusion also gives us meaning and allows us to communicate. The paradox of language is that it "can only start from emptiness, and therefore no abundance or certainty speaks. Something essential is always missing in that which is expressed." The danger of language lies in its negation of the essential in the singular as it attempts to make the singular accessible to the universal. In language everything is labeled, categorized, and brought under human control. This tranquillity of language lulls man into thinking he is master of the world. Thus nonliterary language seeks to present the world as a "perfectly determined and objective reality"; literature, conversely, constantly disturbs this tranquillity, denies language the easy answers and confronts it with impossible questions. For Blanchot, "The language of literature is made of contradictions and disturbances. Its position is not stable or solid" (LDM, 315). Literature places determined objectivity in question. It interrogates the domain of science and philosophy and questions the status of truth because it exposes the essentially ambiguous nature of meaning. Here again we see the influence of Heidegger's unheimlich on the work of Blanchot. For Blanc hot, language provides us with meaning but the meaning of language lacks what is essential in what it has named. Blanchot describes the "lack" that occurs in naming using the example of Lazarus returning from the dead. Mter his return, Lazarus is spirit and not mortal; he is still Lazarus but has lost something vital. This loss is also seen in Blanchot's depiction of God the namer. It is God who is the origin of language, who is the giver of names, but the same God who has delivered language is also lost in language. Once the namer has finished naming, that which has been named no longer has any need for the namer, who is left to perish, but who, as the source of all meaning, can never die. Once all is named and presentable, language takes on a life of its own, destroying the original meaning on which it is based. In this sense the nature of objective reasoning and logic necessarily excludes the possibility of God, who is absolutely unrepresentable and unquantifiable:

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Who saw God die? In speech, death gives life to speech; speech is the life of that death and is "the life that carries death in it and holds death within itself." An admirable power. But something was there that isn't any longer. Something has disappeared. How can I retrieve it? How can I return to what was before if all of my power consists in making what comes after? The language of literature is the search for this moment that precedes. (LDM, 316) Literature seeks to find the Lazarus of the tomb who still smells of death and decay, not the Lazarus of the spirit who has returned. In his novel Le Tres haul, Blanchot attempts to come to terms with the displacement of the namer in his search for the moment prior. Mter the Terror and the establishment of the universal state as the supreme entity, after rationality, language, and bureaucracy have taken over as the basis of doctrine, after the end of history, the namer, the Tres haul, finds that he is a minor functionary in the state apparatus. He is lost and powerless. Henri Sorge, whose very name reveals the influence of Heidegger on Blanchot, is the moment before. Sorge is the Ungrundwhere speech, in naming, creates the world, but creates it from nothing. He embodies the Heideggerian structure of care, but as existence deprived of being. He is God deprived of his name. In the rational structure of the modern world, the place for God is replaced by the nothing. This nothing is still the opening for the possibility of God but for a God who has nothing left to say. Furthermore, because Sorge is existence without being, he has no possibility of not-being and thus cannot die. In his state of chronic illness he suffers decline but is deprived of the moment of death. Sorge is deprived of the possibility of the impossible. In Le Tres haul, Blanchot shows the degradation of even the most noble name in existence through language, which is inherently destructive but is also the site where the name comes into existence. 29 It is only after the death of God, after Henri Sorge is killed by his nurse, who has recognized him as le Tres haul, that he regains his meaning. It is only after it is too late that he finds his voice. Blanchot expands on the relation between language and God in "La parole 'sacree' de Holderlin" "The language of gods is becoming and changing, but the language of mortals is persistence. It is the affirmation of a duration of time that passes, the unity of a time that is torn. In this the Immortals need mortals because they need finitude. It is in finitude that the gods can establish the world and give it Being in the consciousness of Being. "30 Being only takes on significance through individual beings who are conscious of being. Outside the finitude of conscious beings there 29. See Pierre Klossowski, "Sur Maurice Blanchot," Les 1949): 298-314. 30. Blanchot, ''La Parole 'sacree" de Holderlin," 126.

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modemeJ, no. 40 (February

Maurice Blanchot is only the rumbling of anonymous being. Le Tres haut can communicate only within finitude because otherwise he is unrepresentable as the infinite. But in the finite he loses his significance as infinite. Sorge finds his ability to speak at the moment of death, but death is the moment of silence and the impossibility of speaking. Thus Blanchot forces the reader to confront Sorge's use of language in relation to his death and the moment beyond death, which is prior to speech and language. The ambiguous nature of literature allows Blanchot the author to create and destroy while at the same time confronting the reader with the impossible. A conclusion cannot be reached in reading his fiction. Is Henri Sorge le Tres haut any more than Thomas is a superior cat? Does Blanchot represent what he claims to represent or is it a trick? In Blanchot's fiction, the reader is constantly challenged to confront the meaning of language as destabilized, ambiguous, and always to come. The structure is not linear and speaks only after it has come to an end, with a series of repetitions and circularities that are ambiguous and strange. Literature exists as a thing, an object that is present, but also as fiction. It is imaginary and thus invokes the nothingness that is opposed to its object like incarnation. Like death, literature is the appearance of a disappearance. It finds its voice only when it is too late; therefore, it is al·ways to come. In this way literature exceeds death; It never completes itself by dying. It is not the singularity of death but the realization that even at the limit of death there is something prior that is also after: the impersonal anonymity of the il y a, the infinity of being. literature triumphs over tl1e meaning of words but that which it finds in those words taken away from their meaning is that the meaning has become a thing. It is meaning that is detached from its conditions and separated from its moment. It is errant like an empty power where one can do nothing, power without power. The simple impossibility of ceasing to be iliat appears as the proper determination of an indeterminate existence deprived of its meaning. (LDM, 319-20) Literature's triumph over words is constintted in its ability to expose the relation of language to being, a relation that places language in question; but this discovery is not comforting or encouraging. Instead. it is the troubling realization of a powerlessness in the face of being. For Blanc hot, Literature is the experience by which consciousness discovers its Being in its inability to lose consciousness. In this movement, where the disappearing consciousness pulls itself away from the punctuality of the Self and reconstitutes itself by way of the unconscious in an impersonal spontaneity that is the relentlessness of a haggard knowl~ edge that doesn't know anything, that no one knows, this ignorance

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finds itself always behind itself like one's shadow that changes when one looks at it. (LDM, 320) Literature opens the possibility of the moment prior to being, which is still and always being, though not being as attached to a Cartesian subject. Blanchot follows the work of Levinas on Heidegger by presenting the desire to cling to a subject (an "I") as the desire to fix being in a representable and localized site. For Levinas and Blanchot, this desire to fix being in a specific site is the flight away from the horror of the moment of anonymous being. Levin as and Blanchot do not agree with Heidegger that anxiety occurs in the face of death (of the possibility of not being); instead, they contend that it occurs in the face of the il y a (the possibility of always being). Furthermore, the confrontation with anonymous being, which is the horror of existence deprived of the world (the realization that that which "ceases to be" continues to be) is also the realization of the impossibility of dying, or rather the deprivation of that moment that gives meaning to all other moments. The impossibility of being lies in its infinite and unrepresentable character as that which still and always is. This is rendered comprehensible to us only in relation to the finitude of death, which is our limit. But the fact that limitlessness exists beyond death, beyond my ownmost possibility, also shows that there is something prior to that which is my own, and this, as frightening as it seems, is the opening to the other. Literature is open to the moment prior, but it is also always that which holds death within it. In its relation to death and being, literature stands outside history, or rather at the end of history in the Kojevian sense, as that which gives meaning to history and to narrative (as the side of being that can be defined and yet is always in question). "If one wants to bring literature back in a way that grasps all of its ambiguities then this is it: literature as common language begins with the end, which alone permits us to understand" (LDM, 324). Blanchot's statement can be understood on a number of levels. The moment of naming by God allows for common communication only after God has named all and thus ceases to be the namer. Henri Sorge in Le Tres hautgains his voice only after the novel ends. In this way Blanchot also claims that we come to understand being only in relation to nonbeing, only after it ceases to be. And perhaps most important for Blanchot's work is the realization that it is only in the face of disaster, the greatest disaster, the Shoah, that any understanding becomes possible and that all understanding is rendered impossible. 31 31. Dominick LaCapra suggests, in Wrilit1g Ilistury, Writing Tmuma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). that one "might want to inquire how Blanchot's Death Sert/.t'1U'P relates to the Holocaust, its antecedents, its larger context, and its aftermatheven though one might never arrive at definitive or even convincing answers. One might

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The rupture of the disaster is the opening to the possibility that lies within the impossible. Departing from Sartre's equation, Blanchot claims: "It is in this sense that one can say that there is Being because there is nothingness. Death is the possibility of man, it is his chance. It is by virtue of death that there remains a future in a world already achieved. Death is man's greatest hope because it is his only hope to be human" (LDM, 324). The limit of death and the constraints of finitude are tantamount to the possibility inherent in mortality. It is death that allows us to exist as Dasein in Heidegger's sense of the word and to be a totality that is never total except in the completion of itself, which is also the end of itself. Death defines the limits of the finite world but even in a world where all is achieved death is always that which is to come. It is the ambiguous and paradoxical nature of death that opens onto the moment before and after death, which is the infinity of the il y a. This is why for Blanchot, anxiety in the face of the "horror of Being" is more original than Heidegger's anxiety in the face of death. "Existence is our sole veritable anxiety, as has been demonstrated by Emmanuel Levinas. Our fear of existence is not caused by death which gives it its limit. Instead, our fear of existence is caused by the fact that existence excludes death, it is the underside of death where presence remains as the base of absence. It is the unrelenting day in which all other days begin and end" (LDM, 324). For Blanchot, anxiety is not caused by the limit of death but by the limitlessness of anonymous being. Death defines the self, being deposes it. Something like a subject is only possible in the face of death, which is also the end of the subject. In the infinite anonymity of being, the exclusion of death takes away this possibility and in so doing takes away all possibilities. This is counterintuitive for a traditional understanding of a Cartesian subject as the locus of being, but it does not seek to remove the Cartesian subject as Heidegger's philosophy does. Instead, Levinas and Blanchot want to dislodge the primacy of the Cartesian subject to create a space for the other, and this is the key to understanding the third reading of Heidegger in France. For Levinas and Blanchot, the moment of death presents a further paradox beyond that examined by Heidegger in Being and Time, which lies in the fact that death is not only the possibility of an impossibility but that after the moment of death existence remains but is deprived of the possibility of dying. This double paradox reveals Blanchot's use and even contend that inviting such questions is part of the way these texts are unsettling, question-worthy, and perhaps at times questionable" (188-89). See Dominick LaCapra, Represeflting the llolor:au.sl (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) and llistory and Mnnory after Auscllwilz. (Ithaca: Co.-nell University Press, 1998); see also Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastn;phe: G1'1'mart lnlelledu.ab betrvem Apom~-vpse and Enlightemnent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), esp. 205-7 and "Part 11.1946-47."

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incorporation of Kojeve's Hegel into his equation. "Death works with us in the world. It is the power that humanizes nature and that elevates existence to being. Death is in us as the part which is the most human. There is no death except in the world. Man would not know it except because he is man and he is only man because he is the death that is to come." This formulation is very close to Heidegger's. Blanchot continues: But to die is to break with the world. It is the loss of man and the destruction of being. But it is also the loss of death, the loss of that in death and in me which made it possible to die. As long as I live I am a mortal man, but when I die I cease to be a man and I cease to be a mortal. I am no longer capable of dying and death, which announces itself, horrifies me because I see what it really is. It is no longer death but the impossibility of dying. (LDM, 324-25) Blanchot conserves Heidegger's understanding of death but places it in relation to a more original moment that is articulated in the infinity of being as the impossibility of dying. Thus man's anxiety leads to a flight into the subject as the locus of representation, where he is removed from the paradox, which is not only the impossibility of death as that which negates being but also the realization of the impossibility of dying, which is the negation of that negation. Death is only presentable from this side of finitude, but the finiteness of death completes itself only at the moment of its end. For Blanchot, representation exists in the finite and only as negation. Any objective representation or narrative presentation already begins at the end and, lulled into the tranquillity of simply presenting, does not question the origin of the meaning it is presenting. For Blanchot, this is the danger inherent in language. Only literature can approach the paradox, because for Blanchot, literature is already the union of two contradictory movements. It is negation because it pushes the inhuman and undetermined side of things into the nothingness. Literature defines those things to make them finished and in this sense it really is the work of death in the world. But at the same time that it denies things in their existence it conserves them in their Being. Literature makes things have a sense, thus the negation that is death at work is also the arrival of the meaning to come. It is the act of comprehension. (LDM, 326) Literature stands before the paradox. It is not solely the presentation of facts or the description of things (though it can be that too) but also the meaning yet to come. Literature is already but it is also not yet. The act of comprehension begins at the end but exists as the arrival of a meaning yet to come. 238

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By its structure literature follows language in the attempt to make the singular common, but unlike language it is not realized in an objective manner, because that which is real in it is not all of it but the particular language of a particular work which is itself immersed in history. Furthermore, the whole is given not as real but as fiction. Thus the perspective of the world is taken from an imaginary point of view where the world can be seen in its totality. This creates a view of the world that is realized as irreal but which is based on the reality oflanguage. (LDM, 326) Here Blanchot's debt to Sartre must be acknowledged; for Blanchot the essential aspect of the imaginary is that it allows literature to conserve its ambiguous nature even when confronted with the tranquillity of language; in turn, literature constantly disturbs the tranquillity of language. This is also why literature stands outside history, even Hegel's history, precisely because it is not real. Unlike Kojeve's presentation of work as negation, literature does not negate to create a product under human control but creates a product that is out of control. In this sense literature is the negation of the Hegelian negation because it is only possible by virtue of the impossible. Literature is that which resists conflict and synthesis and instead recedes into perpetual ambiguity, but it is also the locus of meaning precisely because it resists totality. Blanchot's schema forces us to rethink Kojeve's presentation of Hegel's philosophy of history as well as Sartre's understanding of "engaged" literature. For Blanchot, "literature is not explication nor pure comprehension, because the inexplicable is always present in literature. Literature is expression without expression, it is an offer of language that murmurs in the absence of speech" (LDM, 327). Thus literature is neither work in the Hegelian sense nor a prescription for engagement in the Sartrean sense. For Blanchot, both these models confine literature to the realm of objective representation, which leads to tranquillity. For Blanchot, literature appears as linked to the strangeness of existence that Being rejects and that escapes all categories. The writer feels like the prey of an impersonal power that will not let him live or die. The irresponsibility that he cannot surmount becomes the translation of this death without death that waits at the edge of nothingness. Literary immortality is the movement by which the nausea of a survival that does not survive because it is a death that never comes to an end is insinuated within the world mined by the bmtality of existence. (LDM, 327) Literature exists, as always, in relation to death, and this is where it draws its meaning. But it is also linked to that which is beyond death, the

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il y a. It is the link between the finite and the infinite, which is the realm of the off-the-edge. If it falls into infinity then it is rendered meaningless and incommunicable, but if it falls into the finite it loses its singularity and becomes objective classification. For Blanchot, literature's power lies in its ability to resist the serenity that results from thematization and representation while using these tools to present precisely what is unrepresentable, inherently unstable, ambiguous, and enigmatic. It is created within history and yet exists outside the historical. Blanchot points out that this may be an enigma, but "the mystery comes from literature's right to indifferently affect every one of its moments so that every one of these results in a negative sign or a positive sign." Blanchot points out the unsatisfying nature of this "strange right that is bound to the question of ambiguity in general," but it is precisely this dissatisfaction that resists the seductive calm. It is only through literature in its ambiguity that one can present the singular to the common in a way that resists objective classification. Literature resists tranquillity because "ambiguity is its proper response" (LDM, 328). Ambiguity is the space for the singular in relation to the common and for the unpresentable to present itself. It is the moment by which all moments are defined because it is the confrontation of the infinite with the finite that limits it. It is the moment of death but also the moment beyond death, as anonymous being, which horrifies us because it robs us of what is most familiar and most secure. But in doing so it also opens up the space where the other has as much right to be as the "I" does. It is also the moment of the Shoah, the rupture of the present in the form of the disaster. For Blanchot, the Shoah is that which is most singular but must be understood in common. It is infinitely inconceivable and yet was conceived. It is beyond telling and yet must be told. It stands on the edge of death as the limit of representation and thus is the basis for any understanding of life in our postcatastrophic world. This is to say that for Blanchot, the lessons that humankind needs to learn to live ethically must be learned from the disaster of the Shoah, even though they will have been learned too late. According to Blanchot, literature is the only site of investigation that is not doomed to end in the banalization of representation. It exists as that which comes into being from the horror of disaster and opens onto the possibility of the other. It is infinitely dangerous and infinitely meaningful. "In its initial double meaning, which is at the base of all speech like a <..ondemnation still ignored and a happiness still invisible, literature finds it' form. Thus it is the form that chooses to find itself behind the value and meaning of words and the question it poses is the question that poses literature" (LDM, 331). Heidegger has had a profound influence on the

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way Blanchot privileges the question that allows one access to being. Even though Blanchot's understanding is based on the work of Levinas and indebted to Sartre and Kqjeve, his model is principally Heideggerian in its use of death and the central position of the question. This is perhaps not surprising, given that all of Blanchot's philosophical influences were directly influenced by Heidegger. But it is sadly ironic, given the centrality for Blanchot of a confrontation with the Shoah, that Heidegger was silent on the issue.

Confronting Disaster For Blanchot, the impossible task of presenting the unrepresentable falls on literature as that which is always yet to come. It is through literature that the unpresentable is made present in language in a way that destroys the original meaning in the act of representation but conserves the trace of the unpresentable as enigmatic and fundamentally ambiguous. Thus what is singular is made accessible to the community in a way that destroys its true nature but leaves the trace of the destniCtion and the relation to nothingness that is inherent in fiction. But literature is infinitely dangerous because it is a creation by destruction that takes the singular and makes it common in such a way that it revokes the author's responsibility for the work and leaves it "open" to interpretation. Literature as common language always risks falling into mere objective categorization, which leads to somnolent tranquillity. But according to Blanchot, this ambiguity, which is the danger of literature, is also its saving grace. Literature is not what it seems to be; it is not quantifiable or categorical. It is both the moment of death and a moment always yet to come. Literature announces the il y a, which deposes the sovereign position of the "I" by positing a moment prior to the self. This moment before the self-which stands on the other side of death as the il y a-is the opening to the other. But in order for this moment to manifest itself, the somnolence of language must be disturbed. The metaphysical tradition that commences all investigation with the "I" as the locus of representation must be broken. For Blanchot, the opening to the other can manifest itself only after it is too late-in the wake of a rupture so great that it tears a hole in representation. This rupture is the disaster of the Shoah. Literature as the writing of the disaster is beyond history because it begins where history (narrative representation) ends; but it is also the condition by which history understands itself. For Blanchot, the Shoah is the historical moment outside history through which all history is understood. Thus Blanchot's project opens the space for the other but only in confrontation with the most horrible.

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His project is thinking literature, thinking death, thinking the unrepresentable, thinking disaster, thinking the Shoah. Blanchot's project confronts the Shoah by using the work ofHeidegger and Levinas, as well as that of Kojeve and Sartre, to rethink philosophy in the wake of the disaster. Blanchot challenges the Hegelian notion of history and narrative as well as that of the dominant subject in Sartre. But most important is his attempt to think past Heidegger by using Heidegger to establish the parameters (always ambiguous) of a thought that is always to come, thus confronting Heidegger's understanding of death in Blanchot's search for the moment before/after. In this sense, Blanchot represents the culmination of the initial reception of Heidegger in France. His work addresses the Heidegger of the first and second reading and in his critical engagement with Heidegger he foreshadows the central issues of the second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France. 32 But most important is that this culmination occurs within the framework of Blanchot's confrontation with the disaster, his attempt to think the Shoah, a topic Heidegger addressed only in silence. In a letter to Catherine David dated November 10, 1988, in the wake of the controversy created by Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism, Blanchot wrote: It is in Heidegger's silence on the issue of the Extermination that his irreparable error lies, his silence or refusal to ask Paul Celan forgiveness for that which is unforgivable. This refusal threw Celan into a despair that made him sick, because Celan knew that the Shoah was the revelation of the essence of the West and that he had to preserve the memory in common, even at the expense of losing any hope for peace, to safeguard the possibility of a rapport with the Other. 33 For Blanchot, the Shoah is the revelation of the essence of the West but it is also the moment of rupture that opens the possibility of a rapport with the other. 34 This is a painful and disturbing moment that 32. Blanchot's (and Levinas's) critical use of Heidegger led such thinkers as Jean Baudrillard, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigary, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,Jean-Fran(ois Lyotard, andjean-Luc Nancy to confront the themes of alterity, difference, plurality, mystery, and the secret. 33. This letter was published as "Penser !'Apocalypse" in /,e nout1el obseroateur,January 2228, 1988, 79. 34. The thesis that "modernity" and the West were responsible for World War II and the Final Solution was employed by Heidegger to shift the blame from Germany in particular to the West in general. Others, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer in n~e Dialectic oj Enlighlenment (trans. john Cumming [New York: Herder and Herder: 1972] and Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and Till' /lol.ormLI·t (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), have attempted to investigate the complicity of the West and the project of modernity in a manner that does not excuse or diminish the role that Germany, and particularly Germans, played in the rise of National Socialism and the enactment of the Final Solution.

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forces one to confront the most horrible, the impossible. But this confrontation can exist only when one voices it: when one says what one cannot say. Heidegger's fault lies in the fact that he never asked for that which he could never have: forgiveness. By refusing to ask forgiveness Heidegger refused the Shoah in all of its significance. He engaged in the kind of forgetting and covering up that his philosophy claimed to remedy. Heidegger refused to speak the unspeakable, instead turning to equivocations and generalizations. He sought refuge in the tranquillity of language, which allowed him to ignore the horror of the disaster. To speak the unspeakable is to preserve the memory of the disaster even at the cost of losing its singularity. But this risk is coded by the rupture of the Shoah, which disturbs any possibility of future serenity, even in the face of silence. Mter the Shoah, the moment in history that defines all history and thus is outside history, Heidegger's silence speaks his culpability precisely in his refusal to speak. Blanchot and Levinas both broke with Heidegger after World War II precisely on the issue of the Shoah. They turned away from ontology, which they felt was still limited by the dominance of the self, and toward a new investigation based on ethics as the site of the rapport with the other. Blanchot saw the disaster of the Shoah as a rupture so great that it exposed the deficiencies of the W'esiem-~physical tradition and opened the possibility for a new understanding of phuosophy based on the relation with the other. This third reading of Heidegger's philosophy in France moved away from Heidegger and into the realm of the Mitsein (Being-with-others), which is underdeveloped in Being and Time and never fully elaborated in his later work. 35 It is in this concept of being-with-others that Blanchot sees the power
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Shoah would not manifest itself in France until the 1970s, after a period when Vichy had been interpreted in several different ways, primarily in terms of collaboration and/ or resistance and in the wake of the Algerian conflict and of the student rebellions of May 1968. 36 But ifBlanchot's critique of history is to be taken seriously, his work is always to come but is always already. The confrontation with the Shoah and the desire to find a place for the other would later become a central issues in French philosophy, especially in the late 1960sY Blanchot's work would be instmmental in leading younger thinkers, who saw the issue of the other in the new light of the Algerian conflict, to also confront the issue of the Shoah. This led these intellectuals toward and away from the philosophy of Heidegger. Blanchot's project may have been untimely, but its time was yet to come, and when it did it was embraced by a younger generation of intellectuals who came to see ontology, produced in the metaphysical tradition and exemplified in existentialism, as ultimately solipsistic. Blanchot's rejection of existentialism was aided by Heidegger's critique of metaphysics, but it also moved past Heidegger. Blanchot saw Heidegger as constrained by his emphasis on the question of being, an emphasis that failed to address the place of the other, which Blanchot saw as the central issue in the wake of the Shoah. Blanchot's work marked a shift of emphasis from ontology to ethics and the relationship of self to other. This is also the basis of Emmanuel Levinas's project in Totality and Infinity, which in effect breaks with the first reading of Heidegger in France as manifested in the work of Kojeve, Wahl, and Sartre, but also with the second reading of Heidegger in France (as manifested in the work of Jean Beaufret and his students), and with Heidegger himself, even as it announced a new engagement with Heidegger. This skeptical, critical, and engaged use of Heidegger in an effort to "overcome" him characterizes the third reading of Heidegger in France. 36. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); see chap. 4, "Obsession (after 1974):Jewish Memorv." 37. I will attempt to demonstrate the relation between these concerns, the reception of Heidegger in France and the origins of"postmodern" philosophy, in the conclusion.

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7 Emmanuel Levinas: ... aI' autre

We have examined three major shifts in the emphasis of French philosophy as it pertains to the reception of Heidegger in France. The first was toward history and used Kojeve's reading of Hegel (which was heavily coded by the work of Heidegger) to rehabilitate a notion of progress through struggle and battle in the wake of World War I. The second shift was toward ontology in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. This emphasis on beifigand~_istence came after the project of history and teleology seemed to have lost i-ts\' Advmtures of a Co11r.ept from l.ukacs to lfabermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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in question. Both Heidegger and his critique of the Western metaphysical tradition were central to Lcvinas's project.

World War II, 1939-1945 In 1939 Levinas was mobilized to serve in the Tenth Army; by June 16, 1940, his company had been captured by the German army and the soldiers sent to prisoner-of-war camps. It was thanks to his capture as a soldier in the French army that I..evinas was not deported to the concentration camps as a Jew. The official policy of the German army was that Jewish prisoners ofwar from the Western Allies were not to be subject to execution or deportation to the camps. The Jewish soldiers were to be separated from the other enlisted men and assigned to special work parties but otherwise were to be treated like prisoners ofwar. Furthermore, the Jewish prisoners of war were not to be marked as "Jews." Raul Hilberg cites the German generals' fear of reprisals against German prisoners of \'\'ar as the basis for this policy. 2 In any event, this agreement most probably saved Emmanuel Levinas's life. Levinas was transported to a POW camp in Fallingpostel, not far from the camp at Bergen-Belsen. He was placed with the other Jewish soldiers in a special section of the camp and, despite the official policy of the German army, was made to wear the yellow star on his uniform. The majority of his time in the camp was spent doing manual labor. Because of his status as a soldier in the French army, he was allowed to correspond and to receive packages. As a result, Levinas spent his free time reading: I was in a Jewish camp but it was not a period of torture for me. One would work in the forest, spend the day in the forest. We received material sustenance in the form of packages and moral sustenance Books would arrive, in letters, like all the other French POW's. from where no one knew.... I read Hegel, of course, but also philosophical texts from all over, many books I had never had the time to read before. I read more Proust than ever, and the authors of the eighteenth century: Diderot, Rousseau, and many other authors who didn't fit into any specific category. And then I'd ask myself, "Why do I bother?'' But in that life of daily physical labor in the forest-under surveillance by guards who were not violent-the time was not wasted from a cultural point ofview. 3 2. Raul Hilberg, 17le Destmction of the European jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1961), 401. This policy did not apply to Jewish members of the Red Army or to former Jewish members of the Reich who were serving in any army. These prisoners of war were either shot or sent locamps. 3. F. Poirie, Emnln.rmell.etfinas: Qui ilrs-riQ·us? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 85-86.

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Despite the segregation, the derogatory remarks from the inhabitants of the local village, and the constant reminder of his subhuman status inscribed on his uniform, the war passed for Levinas without incident and without the slightest news of the atrocities committed at the camp in Bergen-Belsen. In Paris, events were taking a different turn. The fate of Levinas's wife, Raissa, their child, Simone, and his mother-in-law was very much in doubt. Mter the implementation of the Franco-German armistice and the transfer of power to the Vichy government inJune 1940, the French had little room to bargain with the Germans. By October 3, 1940, the French government at Vichy had enacted the Statut des juifs (Statute on the Jews), which assigned an inferior status to Jewish citizens, noncitizens, and foreigners living on French soil. 4 As German pressure intensified in 1942, the Vichy government agreed to surrender foreign Jews and Jewish immigrants in an attempt to protect France's "native" Jews. 5 Mter the implementation of the Vichy 'jewish Laws," it was clear that the Levinas family would have to either leave France or go into hiding. To his credit, Maurice Blanchot offered assistance when the Levinases needed it most. He arranged to hide the Levinas family in the convent of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, just outside Orleans. Blanchot also arranged for correspondence between Emmanuel and his family and kept him apprised as best he could about their situation in France. Levinas would never forget this act of kindness and friendship. "[Blanchot] always took the " path that was the most un"eKpected, the most noble, but also the most difficult. He followed a totally fiiteriorevolution and never made the smallest concession, not even in regard to himself. His moral elevation, the aristocratic property of his thought, is what counts the most and what elevates it above the rest." 6 Levinas too followed an evolution that was a direct result of the events of World War II. In the POW camp, he began to reformulate his position in relation to ontology in the form of an anicle titled "11 y a." On his return to Paris after the war, this article would become the basis for De ['existence a l'existant, and with this wor-k Levinas would break with the ontological project. Levinas describes the il y a, the "there is," as

4. Michael R. Marrus and Robert 0. Paxton, Vichy France and tltejnos (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), 3-4. See also Renee Poznanski, ]m'-~ in Fran.c.e during World War 1/, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover: University of New England Press, 2001); Richard Weisberg, Vichy Law and thf' Holocaust (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 5. Hilberg, The Destruction uf the European jews, 389. 6. Fran~ois Poirie, Entrt'li.en avec Emmamvl LeTJinas (Paris: Babel, 1996), 72-73.

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something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. It is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that "there is" is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of Being is open: there is. In the absolute nothing that one can imagine before creation-there is. 7 In the impersonal, anonymous being of the "there is," Levinas attempts to explore the space prior to the positing of a subject. The foray into the il y a was an extension of the unease and disquiet Levin as sought to investigate in De l'evasion, but a solution to this metaphysical problem would not be found until after the war. 8

Return to Paris, 1945 When Levinas returned to Paris in 1945, his first concern was for his family in France. Then slowly he began to take stock of the events that had happened in Europe. Over the next few months, stories of the death camps became more and more real and more and more unbelievable. Before long, Levinas found out the fate of his own family in Kovno. In June 1941 the Germans took control of Lithuania; on June 24, Kovno fell into German hands and the Jews were immediately rounded up. Pogroms were incited by the Germans, and after several days of intensive violence five thousand Jews were dead. By July 13 the Jews had been segregated and Lithuanian groups working with German Einsatzkommandos shot Jews around the clock, five hundred a day. For the following months the Jews were systematically shot in groups of a thousand. On November 1, the detention center was converted into a "proper camp," and the survivors were held until being deported to camps in Germany. 9 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethirs and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 48. 8. Samuel Moyn's work demonstrates that Levinas was already interested in the theme of transcendence in the early 1930s and this suggests that he may have moved beyond the question of being prior to World War II. While I agree that Levinas was interested in the issue of transcendence in the 1930s, I believe this manifested itself in the same sort of unease and discomfort that confronted Blanchot at the same time. In the following sections I will demonstrate that while the possibility of confronting something beyond being (the il y n) was present in Levinas's prewar work, it was seen as a terrifYing prospect. This sense of terror and unease grew during his internment. The solution to this confrontation, which allowed Levinas to move beyond the question of being, was not realized until after the Shoah and war. See Samuel MO)TI, "Selthood and Transcendence: Emmanuel Levinas and the Origins of Intersubjective Moral Theory, 1928-1961," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000; and also idem, "Judaism against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinas's Response to Heidegger and Nazism in d1e 1930s," 1/islory and Mnnmy 10, 1 (Spring/Summer 1998): 25-58. 9. Hilberg, The D11strurtion of thf' Europf'an.few.\~ 196-208.

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After the Shoah, the question of being no longer sufficed. Heidegger's investigation of being had removed the emphasis from the subject but had also removed the possibility of placing the emphasis on the other. For Heidegger the question was first and foremost being. Levinas believed that for philosophy to make sense in the wake of the Shoah, it would have to move beyond Heidegger's emphasis on being, but it could not return to the investigation of the individual being and that being's own personal horizon. Instead, philosophy had to work through the question of being to arrive at the relation of an individual being to an other. Through the notion of the il y a Levinas was able to "exit from the self and move to the 'Other,' to the other's suffering and the other's death before I concern myself with my own death." 10 But the il y a can be understood only in relation to Heidegger's project of ontological investigation and Levinas's desire to move beyond that project. In De ['existence a l'existant Levinas attempts to do just this. He begins his investigation into the relationship between "existence" and "existants" by stating that the fundamental error of traditional philosophy is its recurring desire to think being (existence) in terms of a specific being (existant): The difficulty in separating Being ( etre) from being ( etant) and the tendency to consider one inside of the other is certainly not accidental. They are derived from the habit of situating the instant, an atom of time, outside of any', vent. The relation between "being" and "Being" does not rely on tw independent terms. The "being" is already in contact with Being, it c not be isolated. It is. It already exercises the same domination over ing that the subject exercises over attributes. (EE, 16) According to Levinas, being is not an attribute of an existant, and thus traditional philosophy avoids the issue of interrogating the relation between being and beings. Levinas's critique of traditional philosophy is very similar to Heidegger's, but Levinas includes Heidegger in his criticism and seeks to ask a question that was beyond the scope of Heidegger's Being and Time. "Detached from 'the being' that dominates it, what is the event of Being, of Being in general?" According to Levinas, while Heidegger addressed the issue of the relation of being to beings, he did not proceed to the exploration of being detached from beings. This is because Heidegger relied on the phenomenological method that looked to derive an understanding of being in general from its manifestation in a specific being, Dasein. Here again we encounter the fundamental tension between the existential subjectivist and ontological antisubjectivist tendencies that run through Being and Time. In De ['existence a l'existant, 10. Poirie, E.L: Qui ;,,e.~-tJous?92.

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Levinas wants to explore the presence of being prior to any specific existant and thus prior to representation or localization: Being refuses itself to all specifications and specifies nothing. It does not have the qualities that an object supports, nor the support of qualities. It is not the act of a subject but nevertheless can be expressed in the formula "this is." Being becomes an attribute because we are immediately obligated to declare that the attribute does not add anything to the subject. (EE, 17) According to Levinas, in traditional philosophy we assume that being is an attribute of the subject because being has no objectlike qualities (no qualities at all), but this is despite the fact that being is an attribute that adds nothing to the subject. In traditional philosophy we attribute physical, spatial, and temporal dimensions to being so that we can place it within a schema of representation and understanding. This is how we come to believe that we are the masters of being. This critique of traditional philosophy is based on Heidegger's work in Being and Time, wherein Heidegger broke with traditional metaphysics by displacing the primacy of the subject as the locus of being (as in the Cartesian model) and thus placed being beyond the limits of representation. But it is also a critique of the subjectivist aspects of Being and Time that led to the first reading of Heidegger's philosophy in France. Levinas wanted to move beyond the project of Being and Time and to "explore the idea of Being in general, in all of its impersonality, in order to analyze the notion of the present and the position whereby the effect of a hypostasis, a being, a subject, an existant surges forth from within impersonal Being" (EE, 18). Levinas wanted to move past the exploration of the relation of beings to being (which was Heidegger's project in Being and Time), to an investigation into the moment when the subject occurs and is posited in the midst of anonymous being. Thus Levinas's philosophical investigation is profoundly indebted to Heidegger's in its critique of traditional metaphysics and emphasis on the relation between beings and being, but Levinas wants to move beyond Heidegger's work in Being and Time in order to investigate the nature of being prior to the positing of the particular subject or Dasein. Levinas makes this point clear when he states: If at the beginning our reflections are inspired in a large measure-by the notion of ontology and the relation that man has with Being-by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, it is because they are based on a profound desire to move beyond the climate of this philosophy and by the conviction that one would not know how to move past this philosophy by returning to a philosophy that is pre-Heideggerian. (EE, 19)

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Thus for Levinas it is only tltrough a critique that addresses the structure, results, and faults of Heidegger's work that Levinas sees the possibility of moving beyond the philosophy of Heidegger. Levinas focuses his critique on Heidegger's concept of Being-towardsdeath. Levinas agrees with Heidegger's presentation of Dasein as a temporal construct but does not agree with Heidegger's understanding of the finitude of being localized in the singular Dasein as defined in Beingtowards-death. For Heidegger, death is one's ownmost possibility, but it is also the possibility of the impossible as the confrontation with one's own finitude. "In Dasein there is undeniably a constant 'lack of totality' which finds an end with death. This 'not-yet' 'belongs' to Dasein as long as it is" (BT, 286). Dasein does not complete itself until the moment of death, when all possibilities disappear for Dasein. Mter death Dasein has no more possibilities; it is completed, which is to say it has finished. "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein" (BT, 294). While Levinas agrees that death is the completion of Dasein and defines its finite character, he does not agree that it is the completion of being. This is because for Levinas, while the individual being may be finite, being itself, as manifested in the anonymous and impersonal being of the il y a, is infinite and beyond life and death. Therefore Heidegger's description of anxiety in the face of cleat~' is a misconception. Individual beings encounter anxiety, but after death t ey are returned to the realm of anonymous being, which does not. 11 The fore, the cause of anxiety, according to Levinas, is not the finitude of d~ath, which is the limit of our self, but instead the infinity of anonymous )\eing that continues long after we have shed our mortal coil. Unlike deatl\, being never stops but is always there in its menacing anonymity. The question for Levinas is: "Anxiety before Being-the horror of Being-is this not more original than anxiety before death?" (EE, 20). For Levinas, what is truly horrible and terrifYing is not death, which actually fixes the subject as an individual being in relation to its own finitude, but the realization that being exists anonymously prior to and after the positing of a self. What is unsettling is the realization that the self is not a primary category but simply a manifestation within being that has no claim in the face of the il y a, which is anonymous impersonal being. For Levinas, what is frightening in death is not one's finitude but the realization that being continues infinitely after one dies-the realization that being has no need for any individual existant. Levinas's primary concern in De !'existence a l'existant, written in the context of prison camps and the aftermath of World War II, was to break 11. See Simon Critchley, "II y a-A Dying Stronger than Death (Bianchot with Levinas) ," Oxford Literary Review, 15,1-2 (1993): 81-131.

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with the ontological project by placing a moment prior to the posing of an individual being; but he also realized that one cannot escape the "non-sense,'' the incomprehensibility of that moment of the il y a. "In De l'existence a l'existant, I analyzed other modalities of Being, taken in its verbal sense: fatigue, indolence, effort. In these phenomena I showed a dread before Being, an impotent recoil, an evasion and, consequently, there too, the shadow of the il y a." 12 The rupture Levinas had determined in the ontological system was not a space of liberation, as was the case with the Bergsonian rupture with positivism. The space prior to identity was undetermined, unretr resentable, neither an "I" nor nothingness, and thus entirely unsettling. According to Levinas, it is precisely the fear of the anonymity of infinite being that leads to philosophical constructions such as the Cartesian or Husserlian cogito. In the face of the il y a, which is pure anonymity and prior to any meaning, we attempt to construct systems that conserve the importance of the subject, the "I," so as to assign meaning to the world around us in reference to that over which we have control. In doing so we avoid the it y a. Traditional philosophy avoids the confrontation with the il y a by basing everything on self, the "I." Levinas concedes that he too was seduced by this reassuring strategy: My first idea was that perhaps a "being," a "something" one could point at with a finger, corresponds to a mastery over the ''there is" which dreads in Being. I spoke thus of the determinate being or existant as a dawn of clarity in the horror of the "there is," a moment where the sun rises, where things appear for themselves, where they are not borne by the "there is" but dominate it. . . Then one refastens Being to the existant, and already the ego there dominates the cxistants it possesses. 13 In this first model, which is based on traditional metaphysics, the individual being falls into a sort of solipsism, where it assumes that by asserting its mastery over "things" it can also master unease and anxiety. 14 But in this model, where the self is posed in opposition to all it masters, the ego that poses itself is "already encumbered by the existants it dominates." According to Levinas, Heidegger succumbed to this tendency in his description of being-towards-death wherein Dasein encounters its own singularity: "When it (Dasein) stands before itself in this way (ao; the possibility of the impos-

12. Levin as, Ethics and lrifinifJ, 51. 13. Ibid., 51-52. 14. It would be of interest to compare the experience of the "il y a" to that of Sartre's "nausea." See Mkhael Brogan, "Nausea and the Experience of the II y a: Sartre and Levin as on Brute Existence," Phi!.osojJhy Today 45, 2 {200 1): 144-53.

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sibility of Dasein), all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone (gelost). This ownmost, non-relational (unbezilgliche) possibility is at the same time the uttermost one" (BT, 294). For Levinas, Heidegger's understanding of death is still too focused on the individual. Levinas felt Heidegger's presentation of the Jemeinigkeit, the mine-ownness, of death led to the same conclusion as traditional metaphysics. In the end Heidegger suffers from the same desire to pose a subject, even if it is a complex subject, which is not the locus of being but in relation to being. For Levinas, the structure of Heidegger's being-towards-death misses the essential point of the it y a because Heidegger's structure places the emphasis on finitude. What is horrifying about the il y a is not anything like finitude but the fact that it never ends and goes on without us. The il y a is precisely that which deprives us of our ownmost possibility as manifested in being-towards-death. In the il y a: "It is subjectivity, the power of private existence, that is stripped from the subject in the horror. The subject is de-personalized." What is horrifying is not the possibility of death as finitude but the impossibility of death in infinity. If being-towards-death is the possibility of no longer being possible, the il y a is the negation, the impossibility, of that possibility. "It is, if we can say this, the impossibility of death, the universality of existence even in its own annihilation" (EE, 100). The horror of death does t1ot lie in the finitude but in the realization that anonymous being goesfn infinitely. In this sense, the il y a is the negation of negation. Even ter death it is. The il y a is pure being. It is without world and without 'me. It is the realization that even where there is nothing, there is. ~ The il y a is the recognition of being in all its strangenes and a1terity, as that which is beyond representation or localization and thus is completely beyond our control. We do not observe the il y a, but rather it observes us. This is why "our relation with the il y a is horror. We have already noted its insinuation in the night like an indeterminate menace that comes from a space that is disengaged from space's function as the receptacle of objects and the access of beings" (EE, 98). Theil y a is not representable because it does not have the properties of an object; it is outside time because it is infinite. It is that which is completely beyond us and yet it is always there in front of us. Our attempt to escape the il y a always relies on a return to the self, to consciousness: "To be consciousness is to be pulled out of the il y a because the existence of a consciousness constitutes subjectivity. This consciousness is the subject of existence and this is to say the master of Being which has been named in the anonymity of night" (EE, 98). For Levinas, consciousness is the locus of representation, and naming is the act of representation par excellence. When consciousness names being, it gives it a time and a place. It is locatable and categorical. Thus 253

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in the act of naming, subjective consciousness creates the illusion of mastery over all it names, even over being. But as Levinas shows, it is impossible to escape the il y a: it murmurs in the silence, it appears in that which is not representable, it waits infinitely on the other side of death. Levinas contends that anxiety in the face of death is not what Heidegger supposes but is instead anxiety in the face of the realization that when the subject concludes, the il y a remains. "The horror is the event of Being which returns at the heart of this negation (death) as though nothing had happened. To quote Macbeth, 'this is more strange than the crime itself.'" Being, in its alterity and strangeness, is more horrifYing than death. The corpse is not disturbing because it is dead but because "it carries within it its own phantom. It announces its return" (EE, 100). Not as an individual being but as/in anonymous being. The phantom is unheimlich for Heidegger and for Freud, not because it is dead but because it is not dead. It continues to be, but it defies the categories of time and space. It is frightening in its complete alterity and otherness as that which forces us to confront the other side of finite being. In its form it appears as that which is familiar, but it is completely unfamiliar. For Levinas, it is the horrifYing presence of infinite being. For Levinas, there is no escape from the il y a, and this must be read in the historical context of Levinas's own experience in the POW camp, the persecution of his family in France, and the tragic fate of his family in Lithuania and of the Jewish people in Europe. Levinas transfers his own sense of unease, insecurity, and persecution to the philosophical fear that there is no escape from anonymous being, which continues with or without individual beings. Furthermore, the event of the Shoah led Levinas to see the poverty of any attempt to escape from the il y a by seeking refuge in the construct of the "I," which leads to the objectification of everything around it. The construct of the "I'' is an illusion that leads the "I," the subject, to assume its mastery over being on the same model as its mastery over objects. This desire to master what is not the self is thus a flawed constmct that potentially leads to the domination and even extermination of the other in the name of the same. 15 Levinas points out that it is the work of Heidegger in Being and Time that exposes the faulty nature of this stmcture, but he contends that Heidegger himself is still enclosed within that same structure through his understanding of being-towards-death. Furthermore, this emphasis on the subject that exists finitely always ends in solipsism: "Traditional philosophy-Bergson and Heidegger included-resides in the conception of time that is either entirely exterior 15. One must certainly acknowledge that the jews were targeted precisely because they were not anonymous and their German persecutors were not anonymous either. But in Levinas's model, the persecution of that which is not the "same," of that which can be defined as "other," is an attempt to escape from the horror of the if Y a.

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to the subject (time as an object) or entirely contained in the subject. In either case it is always a question of a solitary subject" (EE, 160). Levinas presents the traditional Aristotelian model of time in the first case, and Bergson's and Heidegger's two different conceptions in the second. Levinas's criticism of Heidegger is apt because the section on time in Being and Time comes dangerously close to pure subjectivity, as in the following passage: "In the everyday way in which we are with one another, the leveled off sequence of 'nows' remains completely unrecognizable as regards its origin in the temporality of the individual Dasein" {BT, 477). The essential point for Levinas, however, is that time in its finitude is the realm of the subject and as such serves as a refuge from the il y a. But this refuge is based solely on the model of the self and as such is entirely solipsistic. Theil y a is unsettling and horrible precisely because it displaces the self. It forces the subject to realize that it is not the locus of representation. But while this deposition is frightening and unsettling because it is a relinquishing of control, it is also the means by which we can escape the solipsism that leads to the objectification of everything that is not the subject. The il y a is prior to the self and thus removes the primacy of the self. In this sense, the other has as much right to existence as the "I." Both exist in and from the il y a. One can never escape from anonymous being, but from one's position in the il )1 a one can 1 make an act of deposition, in the sense one speaks of deposed ~ings. This deposition of sovereignty by the ego is the social relaticlnship with the Other, the dis-inter-ested relation. I write it in three/words to underline the escape from Being it signifies. I distrust the ¢mpromised word "love," but the responsibility for the Other, Bein~-for-the­ other, seemed to me, as early as that time, to stop the anonymous and senseless rumbling of Being. J6 Here Levinas makes the move from ontology to ethics. At the level of the il y a, being is beyond meaning; and at the level of the subject, the study of being leads to solipsism. Thus while ontology, especially in the work of Heidegger, leads one to understand the relation of beings to being, this is all it can do. For Levinas, the essential question of philosophy does not lie in addressing how we relate to being but in addressing how we relate to each other. Through his investigation into the il y a and the moment prior to the subject, Levinas thought he had found the opening by which one can address the other in all its alterity without reducing the other to the realm of mere object. Thus Levinas broke with ontology as the investigation of being and ventured into the realm of 16. Levinas. Etllir.s nnd Infinity, 51-52, italics in original.

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ethics, which for him was the investigation into the rapport between the self and the other. Levinas's turn away from ontology was made clear immediately after World War II with the publication of De /'existence al'existant and his lecture "Time and the Othe1~" both in 1947. But his response to what he considered the crisis ofWestern philosophy-manifested in the events ofWorld War II, Stalinism, and principally the Shoah--came in the form of his these de doctorat, published in 1961 as Totalite et infini. 17 This text is decisive for our study of the reception of Heidegger in France because it closes a certain reading of Heidegger in France and opens another. In his quest to interrogate and rethink the Western philosophical tradition, which he saw as a tradition of totality, Levinas sought to break with the current understanding of Hegel, Husser!, Heidegger, and Sartre by shifting the emphasis of his project away from a concern with the subject and toward the understanding of the other. In doing so, Levinas works from Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics by removing the emphasis on the ego cogito from the center of the inquiry, but he does not follow Heidegger in shifting the emphasis of his investigation toward being. Instead, Levinas discovers an unexpected ally in his implementation of a Heideggerian critique of metaphysics. Levinas turns to Descartes, understood through Heidegger's critique of intellectualism, in order to shift the focus of his argument from an emphasis on the prima<--y of the "I" to an emphasis on the relation to the other. 18 This is not the Descartes employed by Husserl or Sartre but the Descartes of the "Third Meditation." In Descartes's reflections on the relation of the finite to the infinite, Levinas saw the key to escaping the concept of totality that had dominated Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger: "It is true that I have the idea of substance in me in virtue of the fact that I am a substance; but this would not account for my having the idea of an infinite substance, when I am finite, unless this idea proceeded from some substance which really was infinite." 19 This use of Descartes implies a return to intellectualism, as in the work of Husserl, since it relies on the "idea of infinity" as produced by an "I think"; but what is significant for Levinas is precisely the limited nature

17. Translated into English by Alphonso Lingis as Totality and h1.ftnity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980). 18. On Levinas's use of Descartes, see Dennis Keenan, "Reading Levinas Reading Desca1·tes' 'Meditations,"' Joumnl of the British Soriety for PhP.rwmPnology 29, 1 (1998): 63-74; Jean-Franc;:ois Lavigne, "L'idee de l'infini: Descartes dans Ia pensee d'Emmanuel Levinas," 1?1>-uue de milnjJhysiquR et de rrwrale 92, 1 (January-March 1987). 19. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Pltilojophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 31.

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of intellectualism shown in Heidegger's critique of representation. For Levinas, the idea of infinity exceeds the limits of representations and thus puts the primacy of the ego cogito, the source of thought and representation, permanently in question. Levinas works with and against Heidegger in his use of Descartes to remove the primacy of the "I" (which was also Heidegger's project) but without removing the "I" as the source of cognition and prime locus of philosophy (which is antithetical to Heidegger's project). This conservation of the radical singularity of the "I" is more than a movement away from the ontology of being, as Heidegger conceives it, because it also serves to break with the program of totality that seeks to incorporate the "I" into a larger model or system, be it positivism, neo-Kantian rationalism, or the Hegelian concept of absolute knowledge. Levinas's understanding of infinity stands in opposition to the traditional understanding of totality, which is structurally linked to all totalizing projects based on thematization and representation, such as law, state, politics, and economy. These structures, while necessary for society to exist, are potentially devastating and disastrous if the rule of totality banishes infinity, which Levinas characterizes as the source of all ethics. Thus there is much at stake for Levinas, who explains, in an astonishing understatement, that his critique of totality "came, in effect, after a political experience that we have not forgotten. "20 The primary reference is to National Socialism, but Levinas's critique of totality should also be seen in the light of the revelations of the Stalinist purges and the Soviet gulags, which Levin as saw as "the end of a certain Europe, the definitive end of the hope to implement a political regime based on a notion of charity; the end of the hope of Socialism. "21 Levinas's philosophical construct, which relies on a reading of D scartes through Heidegger (as opposed to Sartre's reading of Heide er through Descartes), breaks with both Heidegger and Descarte as defined within the parameters of French philosophy. In this sense vinas remained outside the heimisch field of traditional French phil sophy, despite his position as a professor at the University of Poitiers n 1961. But, unlike in 1927, Levinas could now implement his critique of traditional philosophy from within the French academic system and to an audience that was open to the concepts of alterity and difference in a discourse that sought to investigate the unheimlich rather than domesticate it. Levinas turned away from traditional philosophy and the work of Heidegger to engage what he felt was the most pressing issue of philosophy in the wake of the Shoah, namely an understanding of the ethical relation with the other. Rather than turning away from metaphysics, 20. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethiqueet bifini (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 73. 21. Poirie, Ent-retien avec Emmanw.l Ler.1inas, 165.

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Levinas sought to redefine metaphysics as first and foremost ethics and, in so doing, he brought an end to the first phase of the reception ofHeidegger in France.

Totality and Infinity Totality and Infinity is an especially difficult book because it serves as both a critique and a rehabilitation of Western philosophy.22 Thus the book does not serve as a clean break with the Western metaphysical tradition, as in Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism," but is rather an attempt to reread Western philosophy in a new light, shifting the emphasis through an internal critique of the tradition. While relying heavily on the work of Heidegger as the source of his critique of traditional intellectualist and theoretical philosophy, Levinas mobilizes this revised understanding against Heidegger. Levinas wants to reread it in light of its limitations as presented in Heidegger's critique of representation. Levinas's goal is not to remove the subject from philosophical investigation but to put it in question permanently. For these reasons Totality and Infinity is also an extremely difficult book to explicate because it folds in on itself. The concept of totality, which Levinas sets up in opposition to infinity as the all-encompassing unity that seeks to remove all singularity and to establish a universal whole, and from which the singular being must separate itself, turns out to be based on the model of separated being. Thus one cannot consider this model progressive or teleological but only an ambiguous relation between the two categories. To explain what is essential in the relation between Levinas's work and Heidegger's, and in Levinas's break with the understanding of Heidegger in France, we will first try to establish the two categories of totality and infinity as understood by Le\'inas and then read Levinas's understanding of separated being in terms of these two categories. In that way, we can see how Levinas attempts to redefine metaphysics as ethics in a way that uses Heidegger's philosophy to think otherwise than Heidegger.

Totality For Levinas, the notion of totality constitutes the essence of the Western philosophical tradition. As the basis for politics, war, and most institutions 22. On Levinas's Totality m1d htjirtit_'V see Adriaan Peperzak, To till' Other: An lntrodurt.ion to the Philosophy of Emmnnu.el Lf'uinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), chap. 5, "'A Key to Totality a7Ui htjir1it.y"; see also Edith Wyschogrod, Rm,marw.el Ln.1imLr: 11w Problnn of Et.himl MdajJ!tysir.r (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); Moyn, "Selfhood and Transcendence," chap. 6, "Autonomy and Responsibility: A reading of Totality anrl Infinity, 1961" (Moyn has revised his reading of 1olmily and Infinity in the epilogue to Ori[Jirtf of the Otlwr: Emmanuel Ln.Jinas (J1td lntPnoar Philosophy, forthcoming.)

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in society, totality is the system of universal reason that attempts to codifY everything within a unifYing theory or practice. As such, Levinas portrays totality as the tyranny of the same, whereas infinity is characterized as the opening to alterity. In the critique ofTotalitywhich comports the association between the two words [Totality and Infinity] there is a reference to the history of philosophy. This history can be interpreted as a tendency toward Universal synthesis. It is a reduction of all experience and all that is sensible to a Totality that engulfs the world and does not let anything outside in, so that consciousness becomes absolute thought. This tendency toward totality can be traced to the model of the individual subject from which it is extrapolated. Particular experience becomes universal synthesis on the basis of thematization and representation; "the consciousness of the self is at the same time consciousness of everything .... There are very few protestations against this totalization in the history of philosophy." 23 For Levinas, all systems of thought that aspire to pure reason or absolute knowledge are examples of this totalizing tendency, which seeks to make that which is other conform to the rules of the same. "The 'I' is identical in its very alterations. It represents them to itself and thinks them. The universal identity in which the heterogeneous can be embraced has the ossature [framework] of a subject, of the first person. Universal thought is an 'I think'" (TI, 36). Universal thought does not open to the other but represents what is other as recognizable to the same. In the Hegelian system, where the "I" confronts the other, that encounter is not based on a desire to understand difference but instead on the desire to define and possess the other in relation to the "1." The desire for recognition, as in Kojeve's presentation, is a desire that the other recognize you at the value you feel you have. It is not a desire to discover the worth of the other. The fact that the encounter leads either to mastery or slavery shows that this model is based on "the possibility of possessing, that is, of suspending the very alterity of what is only at first Other, and Other relative to me" which is "the way of the Same. "24 The totalizing tendency goes beyond philosophies of conflict (such as Hegel's dialectic); even utopian, positivist, or idealist philosophies that deal only with universal principles are sites of totality. What makes totality so dangerous is that it resides in such formulas as the "universal rights of man," and thus appears to be the basis ofmorality, when in fact it suppresses any possibility of morals. 23. Levinas, Ethique ef lnfini, 69. 24. Ibid., 38.

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Absolute Knowledge as it has been researched, promised, or presented by philosophy is a thinking of Equals. In "truth" Being is engulfed. Even if "truth" is considered as never definite it still promises a truth that is more complete and more absolute. There is no doubt that because we are finite beings we could never achieve this task, but on the basis by which this task is attempted it consists in making the Other become the Same. 25 For Levinas, the project of totality is the project of equivocation, of creating categories of definition based on perception, specifically vision. 26 It is a process of objectification and classification that removes all that is particular and different in order to create a universal system of representation. Even systems that admit to the impossibility of achieving universal reason are still part of this project because of their emphasis on equivocation and representation. The philosophy of Husserl and the project of phenomenology must be regarded suspiciously as part and parcel of the project of totality. Husserl's emphasis on representation in the form of phenomenological description is based on individual consciousness of, which itself is the basis for the phenomenological reduction. According to Levinas, Husserl's work is a prime example of theory-oriented intellectualism that attempts to classify the other in reference to the "1," the same. Even in the critique of totality it is still possible to embrace it. This is the nature of Levinas's claim against Heidegger, whom Levinas credits for supplying the critique of representation and of the intellectualist tradition of theory centered in the "1." VVhile Levinas agrees with Heidegger's critique of the limitations of intellectualism, he does not believe Heidegger escaped the influence of totality. Levinas sees Heidegger's removal of the subject, Cartesian cogito, as playing into the hands of the totalizing tendency. For Levinas, that removal would have been significant if it had opened the clearing to the other. Instead, Heidegger shifted his focus to the question of anonymous being, in effect denying the possibility of primacy to either the "I" or the other. For Heidegger, being is primary. 27 According to Levinas, Heidegger's ontology is a structure of totality because it subsumes all beings under the rubric of an anonymous and total being that is complete unto itself. "The relation with Being that is enacted as ontology consists in

25. Ibid., 85. 26. for an in-depth exploration of the relationship of vision to Levinas's project, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: Tlte Denigration of Vuion in Twenlieth-rentury Frmch 11wugltt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 10. See also Jay's Marxism and Totality for further discussion of totality. 27. See Lucien Goldmann's similar critique of Heidegger regarding the relation of totality LO being in Lucien Goldmann, l.ukacs and I lrideggf'T: Towa,rds a New Philosophy, trans. William Boelhower (Boston: Routledge, 1977).

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neutralizing the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it. It is hence not a relation with the Other as such but the reduction of the Other to the Same" (TI, 45-46). Levinas sees Heidegger's critique of the Western metaphysical tradition as valid, but sees Heidegger's philosophical project as removing any possibility for an ethics, precisely by focusing on being and thereby removing the subject from the equation. For Levinas, this emphasis on anonymous being can only lead to the domination of particular beings by the general category of being. By removing the subject, Heidegger removes the locus of any encounter with the other, obviating ethics. In his emphasis on being, Heidegger seeks to avoid egocentric subjectivity, while for Levinas "alterity is only possible starting from me" (TI, 40). This is to say that it is only from the position of the subject, the me, in relation to the other that an engagement with the other as other becomes possible. What makes this structure difficult to grasp is that while the encounter with the other can occur only in relation to the particular subject, the particular subject (the "I") is the basis for the philosophy of totality that seeks to subsume the other as part of the same through universal thematization and objectification. Levinas claims that the tendency toward totality is based on a misreading because "the common element that allows me to speak of an objective society by which man comes to resemble an object is not the first." 28 This is to say there is a moment prior to the construction of "objective society" that is the basis on which we have society. This leads Levinas to question whether "the social, with its institutions, universal forms, and laws, comes to limit the consequences of war between man, or whether it limits the infinite that opens the ethical relation between man and man?" 29 For Levinas, the answer is clearly the latter. But society cannot simply be dismissed: universal reason based on representation and thematization is necessary for human beings to exist collectively. A society could not exist without recourse to general rules or codes that define the parameters of that society. Levinas is not suggesting we dismiss the concept of totality but rather that we rethink that concept in relation to infinity. Without infinity, the outwardly directed but self-absorbed project of totality, whose prime goal is to organize men and things into structures of power and thus give them control over nature and e~siJ____ _..-other, goes completely unrestrained and ventures completely outside the realm of the ethical. 30 While organization and objectification are necessary at some level, this project can have horrendous repercussions if left 28. Levin as, Itthique elln.fini, 72. 29. Ibid., 75. 30. Poirie, Entretien avec Em,nanUR[/.n.Jinas, 12.

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unchecked. In response to the unbridled rule of totality, Levinas offers the possibility of infinity.

Infinity According to Levinas, infinity is beyond representation and thematization and thus completely beyond what is comfortable or controllable for a finite being. We have recourse to infinity but not to the understanding of infinity. It presents itself in forms such as the il y a, which is the rumbling of infinite and anonymous being-and as such is beyond any particular subject. Levinas also offers the model of the elements (earth, sky, wind, sea), which imply the infinite to us in our finite understanding of the world; we cannot grasp the elements as we grasp an object. They are not representable. We name them but, according to Levinas, we cannot thematize them. They always exceed our attempts to contain them. The navigator who makes use of the sea and the wind dominates these elements but does not thereby transform them into things. They retain the indetermination of elements despite the precision of the laws that govern them, which can be known and taught. The element has no form containing; it is content without form. The depth of the element prolongs it till it is lost in the earth and the heavens. "Nothing ends, nothing begins." (TI, 131) The elements and the il y a, which are closely related, imply infinity but they do not announce it. This is to say that the presence of infinity is felt in our everyday life, but as anxiety, unease, and discomfort, because it is a feeling of lack of control. We flee from this anxiety that is produced by the il y a and the elements, seeking refuge in the totalizing structures that give us the illusion that we are in control of the world. Thus, in confronting the elements or the il y a, we do not recognize the infinite but only the menace of the unknown. "It is wind, earth, sea, sky, air. Indetermination here is not equivalent to the infinite surpassing limits; it precedes the distinction between the finite and the infinite" (TI, 132). As implied in the elements and in the il y a, infinity is unarticulated and unarticulable. Here again Levinas presents us with a seemingly paradoxical structure; the exteriority of infinity is unrepresentable, entirely beyond the grasp of finite being, but at the same time it is the only means by which the "I" can engage the other in its alterity without reducing it to the same. But if the infinite does not present itself for thematization because it is unrepresentable, how can we have recourse to the infinite and thus to ethics? Levinas's answer is that the infinite is the original moment prior to finite being, prior to representation, and prior to totality. Infinity is always already

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there for us, implied in the elements. The question thus becomes how we recognize the infinite: how do we recognize that which is beyond our capacities for recognition? Here Levinas turns to Descartes and doubles back on his own critique of totality to reread the philosophical tradition and articulate how we come to engage the moment prior to totality, which is the realm of infinity. "It is true that I have the idea of substance in me in virtue of the fact that I am a substance; but this would not account for my having the idea of an infinite substance, when I am finite, unless this idea proceeded from some substance which really was infinite."31 For Levinas, the realization of infinity can occur only through the intellectual act of reflection, which requires a cogito, as Husserl pointed out, but for Levinas a cogito limited in its capacity. For him, infinity lies outside the realm of equivocation and thematization, which is the realm of the same, and thus stands as entirely other. The cogito can think the idea of infinity but our idea of infinity is necessarily inadequate, as Descartes shows. For Levinas, all other ideas can be made to fit into a Husserlian model of intentionality, but the idea of infinity exposes the limited nature of representation: "The idea of Infinity is exceptional in that its ideatum surpasses its idea, whereas for the things the total coincidence of their 'objective' and 'formal' realities is not precluded; we could conceivably have accounted for all the ideas, other than that of Infinity, by ourselves" (Tl, 49). The idea of infinity does not come from the interior but somehow from the outside. The idea of infinity punctures the self as that which is always the same and opens it to that which comes from outside, to that which is totally other. "Infinity is characteristic of a transcendent being as transcendent; the infinite is the absolutely Other" (TI, 49). By returning to the intellectualist tradition through his critique of totality, Levinas presents the relationship with infinity that comes to us in our relationship with the other as the relationship between a specific ego cogito and that which exceeds it and thus places its primacy in question. For Levinas, this rapport between the same and the other can occur only to a thinking being capable of reflection. This relationship with infinity is not produced by the thinking being-the "I" does not escape totality by itself. Instead, it is produced by the other, which pierces the "I" and breaks totality. "It is not 'I' who resists the system, as Kierkegaard thought; it is the Other" (TI, 40). 32 Thus, as Levinas presents it, the idea of infinity can be produced only in an isolated subject, a separated being that is not the source of the idea of infinity. It is the presence of the other that produces the idea of infinity in the isolated subject (the same). This is because the other is beyond me, 31. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 31. 32. For a detailed account of the influence ofKierkegaard on Levin as, see Moyn, "Selfhood and Transcendence."

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completely exterior to me, and resists thematization and objectification. Whereas totality attempts to incorporate the other as the same, infinity opens the possibility of accepting the other in all its alterity and as such calls into question the primacy of the "I" (the same). For Levinas, this moment when the "I" must relinquish its dominant position as "the measure of all things" in favor of the other is the origin of ethics. "The idea of Totality and the idea of Infinity differ precisely in that the first is purely theoretical, while the second is moral" (TI, 83). But the ideas of totality and infinity are thus linked because the separated being requires the realm of the theoretical to produce the idea of the infinite, which comes from the other and places the idea of totality in question. I.....evinas presents his book as "a defense of subjectivity ... not at the level of purely egoist protestation against Totality, nor in its anguish against death, but as founded in the idea of Infinity" (TI, 26). He is not interested in defending the isolated subject against the encroachment of totality nor in understanding the su~ect's fear in the face of death, which he sees as equally indebted to the totalizing notion of finitude that necessarily excludes infinity. Instead, Levinas's defense of subjectivity in the face of totality is based on the relation of the subject to infinity. His project seeks to "distinguish between the idea of Totality and the idea oflnfinity, and affirm the philosophical primacy of the idea of Infinity. To recount how Infinity is produced in the relationship of the Same with the Other, and how the particular and the personal, which are unsurpassable, as it were magnetize the very field in which the production of Infinity is enacted" (TI, 26). Thus to rethink the Western philosophical tradition is to rethink totality in the light of the "production" of infinity in the relation of the same to the other. But to do this we must first understand the "production" of infinity. "Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing in me. It is produced in the improbable feat whereby a separated being fixed in its identity, the Same, the '1,' nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by virtue of its own identity" (TI, 26-27). To understand the production of infinity in the relation of the same to the other, we must first come to understand the nature of separated being.

Separated Being As we have seen, Levinas understands totality as extrapolated from the

model of separated being. 33 For Levinas, Western philosophy has been 33. On separated being in Totality and hifinity, see Travis Anderson, "The Anarchy of the Spectacle: Emmanuel Levin as on Separated Subjectivity and the Myth of Gyges," GraduafR Faculty Philosopltyjmtnull20/21 (1998): 321-34.

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duped by the structural similarities between totality and separated being; it is a great mistake to believe that separated being is derived from totality. Rather than investigate the singularity of interiority, Western philosophy has concentrated on the rational character of separated being and drawn a correlation between the multiplicity of particular beings and universal principles or rational ideals. This leads to the erroneous conclusion that separated being has somehow fallen from the realm of totality, to which it must naturally return. Levinas's project opposes this claim: The positions we have outlined oppose the ancient privilege of unity which is affirmed from Parmenides to Spinoza and Hegel. Separation and interiority were held to be incomprehensible and irrational. The metaphysical knowledge which puts the Same in touch with the Other then would reflect this fallenness .... As a stage the separated being traverses on the way of its return to its metaphysical source, a moment of a history that will be concluded by union, metaphysics would be an Odyssey, and its disquietude nostalgia. (TI, 102) This is to say that if the mod~l of totality were correct, then the separated being's disquietude would be a nostalgia to return to the whole from which it was separated, and the odyssey of its return home would constitute something like history in the Hegelian sense of the word. But according to Levinas, what is lost in the return to the absolute is the particular being itself. The fall itself exhibits a rupture that needs to be repaired, but Levinas points out that "the philosophy of unity has never been able to say whence came this accidental illusion and fall, inconceivable in the Infinite, the Absolute, the Perfect" (TI, 102). The fall comes from the exterior and thus implies something beyond totality. Furthermore, the model of the fall is based on a notion of lack that needs to be filled. Totality by definition lacks nothing, and from this Levinas deduces that the structure of totality is based on separated being, not vice versa as supposed by Western philosophy. The concept of totality is based on the separated being's need to encounter the world through the primacy of the "I" (the same). Rules oflogic, of representation and universal reason, emanate from the model of the separated being that seeks to classifY the world in terms that make it manageable, accessible, and recognizable. But for Levinas, this is not the original position of the separated being in relation to the other. It is simply the most comfortable because it allows the subject to catalog everything that it encounters based on the model of the same and thus avoid the disquieting issue ofalterity (the other). For Levinas, the entire project of totality is based on the exclusion and subordination of the other. By contrast, an investigation into the nature of separated being that relies not on the universal but on the particular exposes the original rapport of the separated being with the other.

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For Levinas, the relation to the other cannot come from rules of logic but must instead come from beyond what is rational. It cannot follow the model of a "need" that must be filled, the logical model of totality. Instead the relation with the other must be posited in the separated being by something exterior to it in a way that does not correspond to the reasonable, the rational, or the representable. Here Levinas presents us with two questions. The first is how separated being establishes itself as an entirely self-sufficient whole, distinct from the larger model of totality. The second is how such an isolated and satisfied being has access to infinity, which is necessarily exterior. Both answers rely on the work of Heidegger. Levinas uses Heidegger's model of being-towards-death both to critique representation and equivocation and to present the separated being as its own totality, sufficient unto itself and distinct from a larger whole. As we have seen, Heidegger presents death as the phenomenon that both completes and concludes Dasein so that Dasein exists toward its own totality as the moment when it ceases to be. The moment of one's death constitutes Dasein in its singularity and uniqueness and also denies the incorporation of Dasein into a totality based on the laws of adequation and representation; that moment of death is beyond the limits of representation and adequation. Death is in each case entirely particular and singular and as such puts the very notion of representation into question. Death is a possibility and can be presented as such. It can be named and it can be discussed: "However, this possibility of representing breaks down completely if the issue is one of representing that possibility-of-being which makes up Dasein's coming to an end, and which, as such, gives to it its wholeness" (BT, 284). Death stands as distinct from any other possibility because it is the possibility of having no more possibilities. The singularity of this event forms the totality of Dasein as distinct from any other Dasein. Levinas appropriates Heidegger's model of death to present separated being as distinct from totality and situated in time. But he maintains his critique of Heidegger's being-towards-death as presented in De !'existence a l'existant by placing the finitude of separated being in relation to the infinity of anonymous being. In this way Levinas employs Heidegger's structure of death both to situate separated being as its own totality and to place it in relation to infinity. For Levinas it is essential that "in separated being the door to the exterior must be opened and closed at the same time" (Tif, 159). Levinas also deviates from Heidegger by emphasizing the subjectivity of the separated being. For Heidegger the emphasis on a particular subject was detrimental to his project because it led to intellectualism and suqjectivity, as in the philosophy of Husserl or Descartes. For Levinas, 266

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the return to subjectivity and intellectualism through a nuanced reading of both allows him to understand the relation of subject to other. Levinas feels that Heidegger followed the wrong path in this aspect of his philosophical project. For him, Heidegger's attempt to break with the metaphysical tradition by removing the subject as the locus of investigation actually returns Heidegger to the folds of the totalizing project in the most dangerous way. Levinas feels that Heidegger, by removing the subject, has removed the possibility of understanding the relation between one specific existant and another and thus has removed the possibility for an ethical understanding of philosophy. "In Ileidegger the fundamental relation for being is not in relation to the Other but to death. Thus he denounces everything in the relation with the Other as inauthentic based on the fact that one dies alone." 34 In essence, Levinas thinks that Heidegger got the structure of death right but got the significance wrong: My death is not deduced from the death of the others by analogy; it is inscribed in the fear I can have for my being. The "knowledge" of the threatening precedes every experience reasoned in the terms of the death of the Other; in naturalist language this is termed an instinctive knowledge of death. It is not the knowledge of death that defines menace; it is in the immanence of death, in its irreducible oncoming movement, that menace originally consists. (TI, 233) In this passage Levinas is in close proximity to Heidegger in specifYing that the singularity of death is beyond that which can be reasoned or understood by allusion to the death of the other; but Levinas disagrees with Heidegger, asserting that our fear of death is not a fear of the finite, the end, but instead the fear of the infinite, the endless. For Levinas, death does not lie on the horizon but is somehow always beyond: The anguish of death is precisely in the impossibility of stopping, the ambiguity of a time that has run out and a mysterious time that still remains. Consequently death is not reducible to the end of a being. What "still remains" is totally different from the future that one welcomes, that one projects, and in a certain measure draws from oneself. (Tlf, 49) Death is the conclusion of one's possibilities, the end of one's projects and of one's future, but for Levinas it is not the end. In this sense, death closes separated being in on itself while at the same time opening it to infinity.

34. Levinas, Etltiq1u t>t h~fin~ 51.

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In the model we have defined so far, the opening to infinity is manifested in the stntcture of death and thus lies on the edge of the finite. Levinas tries to clarify the nature of the production of infinity in the relation of the same to the other. As we have seen in our discussion of infinity, the idea of infinity is not produced in separated being but is posited in separated being from the exterior, from the other. Thus the idea of infinity does not follow the rules of logic or representation, as in the production of most ideas; it is in fact an idea that exceeds itself. For Levinas, the idea of infinity can be understood only outside the rules of logic and reason. If the relationship with the other were based on logic, it would appear as something the separated being lacks and thus needs in order to make itself whole, following the model of totality. The idea of infinity is beyond our comprehension because we do not need it. It is produced in a separated being that is completely content and satisfied and thus cannot be seen as a lack or a want. Levinas presents the relation of separated being to the idea of infinity as based on his concept of desire, which he opposes to basic need. For Levinas, desire is metaphysical, and thus ethical, and distinct from need in that need follows the rules of logic and thus can be satisfied. 35 Through needs, such as hunger or thirst, separated being does have a relation with the external world but only so as to satisfy its own needs. This egocentric "I'' lives in total contentment and is closed to totality by its obsession with that contentment. But in its total contentment the separated being realizes a lack that is not a need but instead what Levinas calls desire. It is a call from the exterior presence of the other. This desire does not conform to the model of needs, where an internal lack is satisfied by the production or consumption of something external that is internalized by the separated being. Instead this desire is produced within a separated being in complete satisfaction and contentment and thus relates to something exterior to the economy of separated being. Levinas's understanding of desire in relation to need seems to mirror Kojeve's distinction between animal and human desires. 36 But Levinas differs from Kojeve, for whom desire is the satisfaction the individual seeks either through immediate consumption, work (deferred satisfaction), or the recognition of self-worth by the other. Kojeve's model of animal desire can be read as corollary to Levinas's understanding of need, but Kojeve's understanding of human desire is in direct opposition to Levinas's understanding of metaphysical desire. In Kojeve, human desire is precisely a lack, a void or a hollow that needs to be filled and can be 35. See the essays in Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Phil.osoph:y and Desire (New York: Routledge, 1999). 36. See chap. 2.

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satisfied only by the other who recognizes my worth. This is the origin of the struggle for recognition. In Levinas's model, desire does not follow a logic of need: "Desire does not coincide with an unsatisfied need; it is situated beyond satisfaction and non-satisfaction. The relationship with the Other, or the idea of Infinity, accomplishes it" (TI, 179). Contrary to Kojeve, who sees need as the incorporation of the other into the same, Levinas presents desire as the desire for the one thing that cannot be contained within a finite self, namely, the infinite. Levinas sees Kojeve's reading of Hegel, with its emphasis on bloody struggle and a teleology toward absolute knowledge, as based on a misreading of the concept of desire based on the logic of totality. 37 In opposition to Kojeve's "fight to the death," Levinas sees the original encounter between human beings in terms of the gift of discourse. But this opening to the other can be seen only in its originary peaceful conception, produced in the idea of infinity and understood through a return to intellectualism. According to Levinas, the "I" has the ability to contain a concept, but the idea of infinity overflows the finite container of the "1." The idea of infinity is necessarily unrepresentable, the site of alterity and difference that exceeds the grasp of the "I'' and places its primacy in question. Thus, in intellectualism, the "I" opens to infinity, to the other, not to obtain the validation of the "I" but instead to problematize the "I" in relation to the other. Infinity occurs only after reflection in the model of Husserl's "consciousness of," but reflection is not sufficient to contain infinity. The importance of Heidegger's critique of intellectualism is that it allows Levinas to conserve a space for infinity in the realm that is beyond representation. Like Heidegger, Levinas does not jettison intellectualism but returns to it through a nuanced reading based on Heidegger's critique. The idea of Infinity does not proceed from the I, nor from a need in the I gauging exactly its own voids; here the movement proceeds from what is thought and not from the thinker. It is the unique knowledge that presents this inversion-a knowledge without a prior. The idea of Infinity is revealed, in the strong sense of the term .... Infinity is not the "object" of a cognition (which would be to reduce it to the measure of the gaze that contemplates), but is the desirable, that which arouses Desire, that is, that which is approachable by a thought that at each instant thinks more than it thinks. (TI, 61-62) This construction is not Husserlian because the contemplative act is inverted so that the cogito does not produce the idea of infinity as it 37. Compare this to Lac an's reading of desire; see Carolyn Dean, '11v 5Mf and lt.v Pleasures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), part 1: "Psychoanalysis and the Self."

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does in the concept of intentionality. But it is certainly not Heideggerian either because the emphasis is still on a cogito and the intellectual process entailed in the model ofintentionality. 38 Instead, this model is based on the breach of the separated being, the same, which occurs in the idea of infinity that is produced in the relation with the other. This arouses metaphysical desire, which is the moment of discourse. Here it is essential that metaphysical desire be aroused in the satiated, content, separated being, so that "in Desire the being of the 'I' appears still higher, since it can sacrifice to its Desire its very happiness" (TI, 63). In this move, the separated self moves beyond itself and beyond the realm of the logic of need by placing the other first. Metaphysical desire is the appeal of ethics. "The separated being is satisfied, autonomous, and nonetheless searches after the Other with a search that is not incited by the lack proper to need nor by the memory of a lost good. Such a situation is language" (TI, 62). Language is the moment of ethics, prior to ontology. It is the gift of discourse and the welcoming of the other that occur in the saying that comes before any thematization and comprehension of what is said. For Levinas, discourse is the opening to the other precisely because one never knows what will be said; the saying always lies beyond our grasp of what is said. For Levinas, it is through language that our rapport with the other is manifested: "Truth arises where a being separated from the Other is not engulfed in him, but speaks to him. Language, which does not touch the Other, even tangentially, reaches the Other by calling upon him or by commanding him or by obeying him, with all the straightforwardness ( droiture) of these relations" (TI, 62). According to Levinas, man's principal and originary relationship is not with finitude, as Heidegger had supposed, but instead with language. But language is also dangerous because it necessarily leads to thematization, which is the realm of the same. Language is always in danger of degrading and becoming a mechanism of the same that removes the alterity of the other. 39 For Levinas, what is essential in language is that it is given. Its use already implies the other in all its alterity. Language ruptures interiority and opens separated being to the infinite through the act of speech, which implies the other. "A calling into question of the Same-which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the Same-is brought about by the Other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other 'ethics'" (TI, 43). The presence of the other is announced in discourse, which presupposes all the other social structures that exist under the rubric of totality. 38. See also Adriaan Peperzak,"Phenomenology-Ontology-Metaphysics: Levinas's Perspective on Husserl and Heidegger," Man and World 16 (1983): 113-27. 39. See chap. 6.

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For Levinas, the calling into question of the self by the presence of the other as manifested in language is the primary moment of philosophy and society and affirms the primacy of ethics. Levinas admits that this is often suppressed by the tendency to make things the same. One views a phenomenon such as language as pure equivocation or "a gesture of behavior. But this omits the essential of language: the coinciding of the revealer and the revealed in the face, which is accomplished in being situated in height with respect to us-in teaching." Language announces the other in its alterity and thus it places the self in question, and by placing the self in question it opens the possibility of an ethical society based on alterity instead of homogeneity. "The relation of the face to face both announces a society and permits the maintaining of a separated 'I"' (TI, 67-68). Thus for Levinas, community is not originally established on the model of totality but on the basis of the face to face, which is the model of alterity. He wants to rethink society in light of this revelation, to see society based on the structure of separated being, which presupposes the relation with the other, infinity. Levinas does not want to break with metaphysics but to reread it through his conception of ethics. Our understanding of concepts such as desire, freedom, responsibility, and language can then take into account the primacy of infinity and the necessity of thinking alterity, and only then can philosophy break the grip of totality and present the possibility of an ethical society. But Levinas does not present this rethinking in the form of a prescription or programmatic imperative. This would be a return to the model of the same. Instead he attempts to construct a system based on that which cannot be thematized or objectivized. It is not a program of political engagement but of philosophical instruction, a teaching that offers the possibility of more than it says. How such a program might be enacted is difficult to discern. What is clear in this model is an antitotalitarian motif that runs throughout the work and Levinas's own abhorrence of political action as subjugation or imposition. In light of his philosophical construct, Levinas purports to be able to reevaluate such structures as work, economy, the state, and even philosophy based on the idea of infinity (the other) and not on the idea of totality (the same). In this sense, Levinas's work is the systematic development of an understanding that had never been thought through before (TI, 19). He presents a system based entirely on difference, not homogeneity. Thus he challenges all the previous Western philosophical traditions to rethink their projects in light of the possibility of infinity, the possibility of alterity. But while Levinas seeks to question the entire Western philosophical tradition, we will focus on three specific critiques that nm throughout Totality and Infinity: critiques of the Hegelian dialectic, of

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the Sartrian notions of freedom and responsibility, and of Heideggerian ontology.

Kojeve's Hegel For Levinas, the Hegelian system is the system of totality par excellence. 40 But it is also on the basis of his rereading of several terms from Hegel presented by Kojeve, such as desire, that Levinas is able to move past the work of Heidegger. Levinas believes that Hegel's model is based on a system of negation and synthesis that leads to homogeneous unification in absolute knowledge, but he also believes that this entire construct is based on a faulty premise. In Hegel's system presented by Kojeve, the initial confrontation between human beings is a necessarily violent and potentially lethal stmggle for recognition. 41 Levinas claims that this is a misreading of the initial confrontation coded by the model of totality, which understands the relationship between human beings only in the context of making the other resemble the same. For Levinas, even the fight to the death supposes a prior moment manifested in the encounter of the "face to face" wherein the other presents himself to me as entirely other. The stn1ggle for recognition already conforms to representable logic, since it is a need that one logically tries to fill, but the appearance of the other is prior to the mles of logic and equivocation: "The Other's designs do not present themselves to me as do the laws of things. His schemes show themselves to be inconvertible into data of a problem, which the will might calculate. The will that refuses the foreign will is obliged to recognize this foreign will as absolutely exterior, as untranslatable into thoughts that would be immanent in itself." Even the conflict with the other presupposes the uncontainable nature of the other. The fact that the struggle for recognition culminates in an act of possession shows that the possessor concedes the ability to contain the other as other but only to contain him as object, without recourse to him in his alterity. In Kojeve's model, only possession and subjugation, and never recognition itself, are produced in the stmggle for recognition. Levinas sees this as proof of the limitation of Kojeve's reading of Hegel, which does not achieve a rapport between individual beings (the same and the other) except at the level of homogenization; the same becomes the model for every particular in absolute knowledge. 40. On Levinas and Hegel, see Robert Bernasconi, "Hegel and Levinas: The Possibility of Reconciliation and Forgiveness," Archirri.o di Filas(~fia 54 ( 1986): 325-46; and "Levinas Face to Face-with Hegel," jonrnal of the /Jritish Society for Pherw71U'Tlol<Jgy 13, 3 (October 1982); 267-76; Adolph Lichtigfeld, "On Infinity and Totality in Hegel and Levinas," Soullt AJrifan Journal of Philn.mphy 2 (1983); 31-33; Brian Schroeder, "The (Non) Logic of Desire and War: Hegel and Levin as," in Silverman, Philosophy a11d Desire. 41. See chap. 2.

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Whatever be the extension of my thoughts, limited by nothing, the Other cannot be contained by me: he is unthinkable-he is infinite and recognized as such. This recognition is not produced again as a thought, but is produced as morality. The total refusal of the Other, the will preferring death to servitude, annihilating its own existence in order to cut short every relation with the exterior, cannot prevent this work, which does not express him, from which he absents himself (for it is not a word), from being entered in this alien reckoning, which it defies, but recognizes precisely in its supreme courage. (TI, 230-31) Hegel's system reveals the moment of morality, which is prior to the moment of struggle, so that even "in its efforts to escape the Other in dying, it recognizes the Other" (TI, 231). Recognition cannot occur in the model of totality, because it is not open to alterity and excludes the possibility that recognition is already and originally produced through the idea of infinity as the opening to the other. This misreading occurs because the separated being opens to the other through the idea of infinity but perceives this confrontation with alterity in terms of the model of the confrontation with the elements we try to master. The character of the world, which separated being comes to know through enjoyment, is misconstrued as hostility because our relationship with the other stands outside our relationship with the world we enjoy. The primordial relation of man with the material world is not negativity, but enjoyment and agreeableness (agrement) of life. It is uniquely with reference to this agreeableness-unsurpassable within interiority, for it constitutes it-that the world can appear to be hostile, to be negated, to be conquered. . . But this insecurity brings into the interiority of enjoyment a frontier that comes neither from the revelation of the Other nor from any heterogeneous content, but somehow from nothingness. It is due to the way the element, in which the separated being contents itself and suffices to itself, comes to this being. (TI,

149-50) Even insecurity and fear imply something exterior that one is afraid of and thus open to the possibility of infinity. In Levinas's understanding of Hegel, it is anxiety in the face of the elements that leads to work and economy, not the Master-Slave dialectic as presented by Kojeve. Levinas wants to maintain the Hegelian categories of work and economy, but he wants to substitute the initial moment of morality and ethics (which is the possibility of recognizing the other in its alterity) for Kojeve's initial moment of conflict and battle as presented in the struggle for recognition. For Levinas, "Labor already requires discourse and consequently the height of the Other irreducible to the Same, the presence

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of the Other" (TI, 117). Phenomena such as labor, economy, law, and the state all exist in the realm of the social, which already acknowledges the other. This original moment of recognition opens the possibility of being more than the realm of need, more than the universal, of exceeding totality by acknowledging infinity and thus establishing the possibility of an ethics that is already promised in the initial encounter with the other.

Sartre Levinas and Sartre followed similar trajectories from the work of Husserl to the work of Heidegger, but Levinas believed that Sartre never overcame the intellectualist tendencies of Husserl, even after his turn to Heidegger.42 For Levinas, it was essential to view intellectualism through its limitations, lest one continue to see the other in the same way that one regards an object or thing. He saw this as the main fault in the existential ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre. Levinas opposed Sartre's presentation of the pour-soi and en-soi because he believed Sartre's definitions were based on the primacy of vision and thematization. 43 Sartre focuses primarily on the symmetry of the relationship between self and other; the fact that he views the other as an object means that the other must view him in the same way. 44 Thus Sartre could understand the other only as a limitation of the self. Levinas felt that Sartre's philosophy was ultimately solipsistic, despite the fact that Sartre provides a space for the other, because the other's position in Sartre 's philosophy is always as an obstacle to the primacy of the "I." Here too Levinas locates the originary moment of ethics-the other does contest the primacy of the "I." According to him, Sartre's interpretation is accurate insofar as the other always places the self in question, but Sartre is concerned only with the freedom of the self and not the freedom of the other. Sartre's philosophy falls within the project of totality in its emphasis on the freedom of the "I" (the same), which relegates the other to the position of an obstacle, an object, and ignores the other as other. 42. On Levinas and Sartre, see Christina Howells, "Sartre and Levinas," in Tile Provoration of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (L.Jndon: Routledge, 1988); Steven Hendley, "Autonomy and Alterity: Moral Obligation in Sartre and Levinas," journal of the British Soriety for Phenomenology 27, 3 (1 996): 246-66; Marek Jedraszewski, "On the Paths of Cartesian Freedom: Sartre and Levinas," Analerta 1/uswrliana 27 (1989): 671-83; David Jopling, "Levinas, Sartre, and Understanding the Other," Journal of the Bn:tislt Society for Pltmomenology 24, 3 (1993): 214-31; Arnejohan Vetlesen, "Relations with Others in Sartre and Levinas: Assessing Some Implications for an Ethics of Proximity," Constellations 1, 3 (1995): 358-82. 43. See chap. 4. 44. See jay, Downcast Eyes, chap. 5.

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Emmanuel Levinas: ... al'autre 1b Levinas, Sartre's understanding of freedom is indicative of "a tradition that subordinates unworthiness to failure, moral generosity to the necessities of objective thought," which is "perceivable in European thought." In Sartre, "the spontaneity of freedom is not called into question; its limitation alone is held to be tragic and to constitute a scandal. Freedom is called into question only inasmuch as it somehow finds itself: if I could have freely chosen my own existence, everything would be justified" (TI, 83). In contrast, Levinas sees the limitations of personal freedom as the possibility for something more meaningful than freedom: "Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent" (TI, 84). Sartre mistakes the uncovering of the arbitrary and violent nature of personal freedom for its limitations. In his existential philosophy, one's freedom is always impeded by the other; hence the conclusion that "Hell is other people." Sartre sees freedom as a sentence, but Levinas considers this conclusion a misreading of the limitations of freedom in the face of the other. "Existence is not in reality condemned to freedom, but is invested as freedom. Freedom is not bare. 1b philosophize is to trace freedom back to what lies before it, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary.... To welcome the Other is to put my freedom in question" (TI, 84-85). According to Levinas, Sartre's error was to afford primacy to freedom over the moment prior to it, which is the welcoming of the other. In Levinas's schema, freedom is the essential basis for responsibility, which is itself a deference of one's own freedom in favor of the other. Levinas makes it clear that his notion of responsibility is not based on the notion of an arbitrary choice that the individual must make in a given situation. Instead, for him, responsibility is the deposing of the self in favor of the other, a free and conscious limitation of one's own freedom in favor of the other's freedom. "The infinity of responsibility denotes not its actual immensity, but a responsibility increasing in the measure that it is assumed; duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished" (TI, 244). Responsibility grows and expands on itself. It is not arbitrary but the limitation of the arbitrary. For Levinas, true freedom is the exercise of this responsibility precisely because responsibility exceeds itself in giving to the other the gift of its own freedom. According to Levinas, freedom without responsibility is arbitrary, because "freedom is not justified by freedom." It is only by choosing responsibility that one places one's freedom under judgment. "The Heideggerian Geworfenheit [thrownness] marks a finite freedom and thus the irrational. The encounter with the Other in Sartre threatens my freedom, and is equivalent to the fall of my freedom under the gaze of another

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freedom. Here perhaps is manifested most forcefully being's incompatibility with what remains veritably exterior" (TI, 303). In both these cases, separated being is concerned only with itself and thus is incompatible with what is exterior. For Levinas, freedom does not appear in and of itself but only in relation to the other, as a usurpation. The quest for freedom in the face of the other, who puts one's freedom in question, is the desire to negate the other and enforce the domination of the same. But even the domination of the other admits to the moment prior, where the other puts one's freedom in question. According to Levinas, Sartre exposed the limitations of freedom but misinterpreted the cause. By inserting the prior moment of ethics into the concepts of freedom and responsibility, Levinas rehabilitates these concepts so that they no longer result in an impasse or a sentence but in a rapport with the other that produces infinity.

Beyond Heidegger Levinas's critique of the Western philosophical tradition relies heavily on Heidegger, and Levinas does not challenge the validity of Heidegger's analysis of being-in-the-world or his critique of intellectualism. 45 But Levinas wants to view these analyses in light of the prior moment of ethics. He believed that his own work could not be accomplished without the influence ofHeidegger, but also believed that the strength of Heidegger's philosophy lay in the nature of his critique, not in his philosophical investigation into being. As we have seen, Levinas breaks with Heidegger precisely on the issue of subjectivity. Heidegger struggled with the issue of subjectivism in Being and Time and his attempt to remove the subject from

45. On Levinas and Heidegger, see Silvia Benso, "Of Things Face-to-Face with Levinas Face-to-Face with Heidegger," Phil.osophy Today 40, 1 (Spring 1996): 132-41; Luk Bouckaert, "Ontology and Ethics: Reflections on Levinas's Critique of Heidegger," lnternafiorwl Phil.o~opltical Qua·rt.erly 10 (1970): 402-19; Tina Chanter, "Levinas and Impossible Possibility: Thinking Ethics with Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the Wake of the Shoah," RPsearrh i11 Plunu"n.erwlogy 28 (1998): 91-109; Richard Cohen, "Levinas, Rosenzweig, and the Phenomenologies ofHusserl and Heidegger," Philosophy Todny 32,2 (Summer 1988): 16578; Theo De Boer, "Judaism and Hellenism in the Philosophy of Levin as and Heidegger," ArchitJio di 1'7losojia 53 (1985): 197-215; Darin Crawford Gates, "Ontological Disclosure and Ethical Exposure: Heidegger and Levin as on Meaning, Subjectivity, and Non-Indifference," Philosophy Today 4 (2001); C. D. Keyes, "An Evaluation of Levinas's Critique of Heidegger," Research in Phenorneuol.ogy 2 (1972): 121-42; Robert John Sheffler Manning, lntnpreting Othnwise than 1/PidRgger: ErnmanuRli.R'I.Jinns~\ Ethic.~ as Fint Philosophy (Pittsburgh: DuquRsnf' llnivn-sily Prrss, 1993); Pefmzflk, "Phnwrnnwlogy-Ontolor;y--MelnfJitysirs" 113-27; and irlnn, 'J(J the OIIU'T: An lntrodurtion to tltr Philosophy of Emrnaruul Levinns (West Lafayette: Purdue

University Press, 1993).

276

Emmanuel Levinas: ... a rautre

t11e philosophical equation Was often undercut by his investigation into particular being. Levinas saw Heidegger's attempt to remove the subject from his philosophical project as a crucial error, because for Levinas the subject is the singular separated being, the site of the encounter with the other. For Levinas, Heidegger's analysis of such categories as tools and objects cannot be complete because it fails to take into account the nature of d1e relationship of the subject that uses those objects and instead addresses only the act of use. "The enjoyment of a thing, be it a tool, does not consist simply in bringing this thing to the usage for which it is fabricated-the pen to the writing, the hammer to the nail to be driven in-but also in suffering or rejoicing over this operation" (TI, 133). By removing the subject, Heidegger excludes the possibility of investigating the phenomena of need, contentment, and enjoyment. "It is interesting to observe that Heidegger does not take the relation of enjoyment into consideration. The implement has entirely masked the usage and the issuance at the term-satisfaction. Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry. Food can be interpreted as an implement only in a world of exploitation'' (TI, 134). But Levinas sees this as indicative of the fundamental problem of Heidegger's analogy: by removing the subject, and thus denying the investigation into need, contentment, and metaphysical desire, he also denies the possibility of an investigation into the other. "The relation with Being that is enacted as ontology consists in neutralizing the existent in order to comprehend or grasp it. It is hence not a relation with the Other as such but the reduction of the Other to the Same" (TI, 45-46). For Levinas, ontology as presented by Heidegger, despite his breakthroughs, is still cast in the model of totality. Levinas does take into account Heidegger's turn away from ontological investigation and toward an investigation into the history of being, but sees this as a retreat further into the model of totality. According to him, Heidegger's focus on being and on "man as the shepherd of Being" continues to exclude the subject and perhaps has rendered the subject even more powerless than before. Levinas considers Heidegger's turn to language as a relegation of existents to eternal and impotent servitude under the totality of being. Levinas states the difference in their understanding of language: "For Heidegger, language carries wisdom that needs to be explained.... In effect, for me, what is said does not matter as much as the saying itself. Language is less important to me in terms of its content of information than it is in the terms that it addresses an interlocutor. "46

a

46. Levinas, t.'thiqw et lnfini, 32-33.

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Because Heidegger's emphasis is on the relation of language to being, Levinas sees it as impersonal and deficient in the realm of ethics, which Levinas has defined as first philosophy. Furthermore, Levinas does not see Heidegger's turn to language as a turn away from ontology, but rather as a move deeper into ontology, since Heidegger's concern is with being and nothing else. Levinas extends this critique to Heidegger's analysis of technology. He does not see Heidegger's critique of technology as an attempt to liberate man from the rule of technology but instead as the continuation of the rule of ontology in Heidegger's work. A philosophy of power, ontology is, as first philosophy which does not call into question the Same, a philosophy of injustice. Even though it opposes the technological passion issued forth from the forgetting of Being hidden by existents, Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny. (TI, 47) Levinas believed he owed a great debt to Heidegger's philosophy. It was only based on the rereading of intellectualism in light of Heidegger's critique that he could construct a philosophy that opens to the other. But Levinas also judged Heidegger harshly. For Levinas, Heidegger's philosophy was ethically bankrupt, and the moral imperative to move beyond the philosophy of Heidegger became painfully clear to him in the aftermath of Heidegger's political choices and the horror of the Shoah. Levinas is able to move past Heidegger, Kojeve, and Sartre by inserting a prior moment that conserves the singularity and particularity of the "1," the subject, in relation to a uniform plurality of society, but that does not reduce the other to the same in that society. Levinas does this by redefining the dynamic using the idea of infinity. In this way, he is able to posit a rational subject that is not merely a lost part of a greater totality but a separated being that exceeds totality (and itself) through the production of the idea of infinity. "The 'I' is a privilege and an election. The sole possibility of going beyond the straight line of the law, that is, of finding a place lying beyond the Universal, is to be 'I.' The morality called inward and subjective exercises a function which universal and objective law cannot exercise, but which it calls for" (TI, 245). For Levinas, the model of infinity is the possibility of a moral society precisely because it allows the individual to exceed the universal. It commands the individual to do more than is asked. It is the possibility of a society that does not ask the other to be the same but instead asks the same to defer to the other. Levinas explores the possibility of accepting the world based on a model of alterity and not homogeneity.

278

Emmanuel Levinas: ... a I' autre

Levinas's attempt to move beyond the Western metaphysical tradition by rehabilitating the very meaning of metaphysics is especially interesting in that he uses Descartes, filtered through Heidegger, to displace the primacy of the ego cogito in favor of the other. But what is essential for our project is that Levinas's work opened the possibility of rereading all these prior philosophies in the light of an ethics of alterity, plurality, and difference. In this sense Levinas's Totality and Infinity engaged all the various readings of the first phase of the reception of Heidegger in France in a way that exhausted them. Mter the work of Blanchot and Levinas, any "reading" of Heidegger or his French interpreters was necessarily a "rereading" that engaged both Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man and as such implied the issues of politics, ethics, and responsibility. But this third reading was still primarily concerned with the Heidegger of Being and Time and as such remains within the parameters of the first phase of reception. The second phase of the reception ofHeidegger in France, from 1961 to the present, would take this critique and extend it to all of Heidegger's work but also to areas of investigation beyond Heidegger, Sartre, Kojeve, or any of the figures of the first phase. Thus the third reading, and specifically Totality and Infinity, marks the end of a certain use and understanding of Heidegger's philosophy and the opening to another. This new engagement with Heidegger began in the 1960s and continues to the present through the work of Levinas and Blanchot, but also serves as the basis for the projects of Jean Baudrillard, Helene Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,.Jean-Fran<:ois Lyotard, and Jean-Luc Nancy. This new reading of Heidegger was especially attractive to a younger generation of intellectuals who had come to the realization that the ontological projects of Heidegger and existentialism did not sufficiently address the issue of morality; who were confronted with the failure of socialism through the revelations about Stalin's regime and were thus uncertain about the future of Marxism; who had witnessed the terrible capacity of technology in the atom bomb; who were confronting the legacy of colonization, which presented a concrete example of the subjugation of the other under the rule of the same. Behind all these historical realities loomed the specter of the Shoah, which whispered the urgency of the need to construct an ethics, the need to approach the other, the need to rethink the project of the West.

279

Conclusion

"What draws young people together and ignites the sparks that join them is a sense of common grievance. " 1 For the young French intellectuals of the generation of 1933, it was the collective feeling that the previous generation of philosophers and thinkers were out of touch with reality, unable to address the complex problems of a rapidly changing world. Traditional French philosophy had been unable to explain the senseless killings and mass destruction that marked the French "victory" in World War I, or the precarious position of an industrializing France. The generation of 1933 was receptive to Heidegger's thought because it seemed to confront these complex questions in a way that returned philosophy to the concrete issues of everyday existence. But while Heidegger's philosophy was introduced to France through the work of Emmanuel Levinas in the late 1920s, the generation of 1933 was not yet ready to scrap the teleological project on which their education had been founded. It was not until Alexandre Kojeve's seminar on Hegel at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to 1939 that this generation began to incorporate Heidegger's philosophy into their own work. In Kojeve's seminar, Heidegger's Being and Time served as the light by which Hegel could be read to rehabilitate the concept of history through an understanding of progress in relation to struggle. But the generation of 1933 also read Heidegger in the light of their own philosophical heritage and training. The new and foreign philosophy of Heidegger was modified to fit an old and familiar schema. Heidegger's philosophy was understood by the generation of 1933 in "existential" terms, as fundamentally anthropocentric and primarily 1. Robert Wohl, Tltf' Gnwralion of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 215.

280

Conclusion

concerned with the "human actor's" place in history, as in the work of Raymond Aron. In this way, the first understanding of Heidegger's philosophy in France conserved the tenets of progress and free will that were the legacy of this generation's own French philosophical heritage. This process of incorporation was taken a step further by Jean-Paul Sartre in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In Sartre's presentation of Heidegger's "existential" thought, Descartes's "I think therefore I am" became Heidegger's "I am therefore I think." This interpretive transfiguration situated Heidegger's philosophy in the French Cartesian tradition and retained Descartes's ego cogito as the locus of philosophical investigation. But the popularity of Sartre and existentialism slowly emptied Heidegger's categories of being, anxiety, facticity, responsibility, and engagement of their original force. As existentialism expanded its hold on popular culture, these terms became commonplace and lost their antiestablishment status. Sartre's existentialism was soon viewed by many younger scholars as old and tired, and this opinion was reinforced by Sartre's turn toward Marxism and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's retreat to phenomenology. But in 1946 Heidegger returned to confront the first reading ofhis philosophy through his "Letter on Humanism," addressed to Jean Beaufret. In this letter and in his subsequent publications, Heidegger's philosophy returned in all its alterity and opened a new way of reading his work that broke with the understanding of the first reading. The second reading of Heidegger brought to France a "new" Heidegger who appeared more radical than the "old." Not only did Heidegger offer a "corrective" to the French existentialist reading of Being and Time; in the interim between the publication of Being and Time and the "Letter on Humanism," his philosophy had shifted further away from traditional metaphysics. He had moved away from the ontological emphasis of Being and Time, closely associated with existentialism, toward an investigation into the history of being that looked to language (and not the human actor) as the opening to a more original understanding of being. Heidegger's philosophy was reintroduced to France and the process of reception was repeated through a second reading of Heidegger's philosophy, which produced a new array of interpretations. Furthermore, the new possibilities of the second reading (which stood in opposition to those of the first) coincided with the rise in popularity of structuralism, which also sought to displace the centrality of the human actor but from the perspective of the traditional sciences. This second reading resulted in the formation of a devout following of Heidegger led byJean Beaufret, who attempted to canonize an understanding of Heidegger based on the philosopher's own words. This approach drew directly from Heidegger but did not attempt to move beyond what he himself was doing. This orthodox approach was necessarily limited by 281

THE THIRD READING

the nature of Heidegger's philosophy but also by the revelation of his affiliation with National Socialism. Mter that realization and in the wake of the Shoah, Levinas and Blanchot were compelled to place Heidegger's thought in permanent question. Given his political decisions, his philosophy could not be left unchallenged. Using Heidegger's critique of anthropocentrism and intellectualism, Levinas and Blanchot looked to construct a new philosophical program that could rethink the primacy of the su~ect in relation to the other and by doing so move beyond Heidegger's concern with being toward an emphasis on ethics. This third reading, which sought to challenge Heidegger's thought, represents another cycle of repetition that broke with the orthodox understanding of the second reading and led to a whole new realm of possibilities. Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity is itself a fitting conclusion to the first phase of the reception of Heidegger in France that began with his work in the late 1920s. With that book, he closed the door on the first reading and opened the door to a dialogue with the second reading that shifted the focus of the discussion to include the other in relation to ethics, testimony, desire, responsibility, and the secret. These themes would become central areas of investigation for thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Lacan, but also for younger thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Paul Ricoeur. This opens the second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France. The second phase is also marked by the rise of structuralism and this separates and distinguishes it from the first phase. A history of that phase would begin with an overview of the rise of structuralism in the 1950s and its opposition to the existential phenomenological project as embodied in the work of Sartre. 2 This would then lead to an investigation of the philosophical production of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan in the 1950s. These two veterans of Kojeve 's seminar on Hegel formed a bridge between the use of Heidegger and structuralism that shaped the second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France. Merleau-Ponty attempted to appropriate the works of Mauss, LeviStrauss, and Saussure in the service of his phenomenological project and in the process he introduced a generation of young philosophers to modern linguistics and anthropology. 3 I would argue that Merleau-Ponty's turn 2. Specifically, one would look to Claude Levi-Strauss's critique of Sartre and the primacy of the phenomenological subject in /,a fJi'nSPe smwage (Paris: Pion, 1962). See Fran~ois Dosse, 1/istrrry of Stru.rturali~rn. vols. 1 and 2, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pt·ess, 1997); Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 3. Dosse, llistory ofStnutumlisrn, 38-39.

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Conclusion

toward structuralism was based largely on the influence of the second reading of Heidegger that displaces the primacy of the human subject in favor of an investigation into the larger field of being. Thus it is ironic but not surprising that Merleau-Ponty's work in the 1950s, and the publication of Signs in 1960, led to the decline of existential phenomenology and the rise of structuralism. Equally important was the way the influence of Saussure (via LeviStrauss) increasingly intersected that of Heidegger in the work of Lacan. This is perhaps most explicit in Lacan's "Rome Report" of 1953, which is an attempt to reread Freud through Hegel, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, and Saussure. 4 It is true that Lacan's use of Hegel is heavily indebted to Kojeve and his use of Saussure is based almost entirely on Levi-Strauss, but what is essential for our purposes is the way he used Heideggerian themes to frame his argument. One could then trace this filiation from Heidegger through Blanchot and Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan, straight to the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and the generation of thinkers who rose to prominence in the 1960s. The estrangement of Heidegger's thought from Sartre's existential phenomenology and its insertion into the "structural" field of analysis changed the way Heidegger was read and used in France in the 1960s. This shift toward structuralism conserved the importance of reading Heidegger in France, but now as an "antihumanist."5 But the second phase is equally indebted to the works of Blanchot and Levinas and points to the centrality of the Shoah in understanding or using Heidegger's philosophy. The recurring Heidegger Affairs confirm this, as intellectuals concerned with the work of Heidegger were continually forced to take a stand on his political decisions in relation to his philosophy. Mter the first Heidegger Affair in 1946, one could no longer use Heidegger's philosophy without confronting the issue of his National Socialism. Mter the work of Levinas and Blanchot, one could not use Heidegger without confronting the issue of the Shoah. This coincides with the model of reception that Henry Rousso presents in The Vichy Syndrome. According to him, the centrality of the issue of the Shoah did not manifest itself in France until the 1970s, and only after a period during which 4. Jacques Lacan, report to the Rome Congress held at the Instituto di Psicologia della Universiti di Roma, September 26-27, 1953. Published as "Fonction et champ de Ia parole et du langage en psych analyse" in Errits I (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966). 5. A corollary condition that distinguishes the second phase from the first is that Heidegger's philosophy was increasingly presented in relation to that of Nietzsche. Whereas in the first phase this relationship was occasionally explored, in the second it became essential. This too is related to the concerns of the young "structuralists" and their own interest in Nietzsche and language. Michael Roth explores this in Knowing and 1/istury (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), afterword.

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THE THIRD READING

the significance ofVichy had shifted several times, based primarily on the issues of collaboration and/or resistance. 6 Given Heidegger's affiliation with the fonner Resistant Jean Beaufret, it makes sense that the debate would originally be focused in terms of whether or not Heidegger was a Nazi. Mter the work of Levinas and Blanchot, the issue of Heidegger's silence on the Shoah loomed larger and larger, as the centrality of the Shoah became a growing source of concern for France as a whole. In the second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France, any use of Heidegger's philosophy constantly confronts the issue of the Shoah, even when one decides to ignore its relevance. But here we return to the issue of the repeated Heidegger Mfairs in France. Since the first Heidegger Affair in 1946, there were two other large-scale affairs at twenty-year intervals, in 1968 and 1988, with countless minor skirmishes in between. Each subsequent Heidegger Mfair has been more virulent and heated than its predecessor. The reason for this escalation lies in the nature of the appropriation of Heidegger's philosophy, first by the existentialists, then by Jean Beaufret and his students, and finally by proponents of a certain understanding of postmodernism. Each successive cycle of Heidegger's reception in France has been based on the ground cleared by the movement before it and the phenomenon of his philosophy has established its own French tradition over the past fifty years. In this light, Tom Rockmore's claim, in his assessment of the escalation of each Heidegger Affair, that "French scholars sometimes acted as if they were as much engaged in defending French thought as in defending Heidegger's position" is absolutely correct. 7 Heidegger's thought has been sufficiently incorporated into the French philosophical tradition through the publication of works by French intellectuals indebted to his thought that a "French Heideggerian" tradition ha
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Conclusion

during the first Heidegger Affair and based on the first reading of Heidegger in France. Both the necessitarian thesis, which sees Heidegger's philosophy as inherently National Socialist, and the contingency thesis, which sees his politics and his philosophy as unrelated, were established through the debates of the first Heidegger Affair. The survival of these strategies throughout the numerous readings and interpretations of Heidegger's work has more to do with their efficacy in defending or prosecuting Heidegger than with their ability to explain Heidegger's relationship to National Socialism. The contingency thesis, presented by de Waehlens during the first Heidegger Affair, included a defense strategy that claimed anyone who thought that Heidegger's philosophy was compatible with National Socialism did not understand that philosophy. This claim holds a certain ironic validity if one understands Heidegger's philosophy through the first reading of Heidegger in France, but it has served equally well for Beaufret, despite its increasingly absurd nature in light of the avalanche of historical information linking Heidegger to National Socialism.8 There is a definite link between Heidegger's philosophy and his decision to turn to National Socialism in the 1930s. But the extremist nature of the necessitarian and contingency theses have precluded any serious investigation into this link by forcing one to focus on whether Heidegger was or was not ~ National Socialist and whether his philosophy was orwas not National Socialist. This belies the complexity of the question by privileging an immediate polemical response. This need for a response that allows one to take a stand on the Heidegger issue has become an inherent characteristic of the second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France. But the ability to align oneself "with'' or "against" Heidegger has in no way resolved the issue of Heidegger's political choice or of the relation of his politics to his philosophy. As jacques Derrida pointed out, this is part of the fascination with the Heidegger Mfair precisely because no one has ever been able to reduce the whole work of Heidegger's thought to that of some Nazi ideologue. This "record" would be of little interest otherwise. For more than a half-century, no rigorous philosopher has been able to avoid an "explanation" with [explication avec (auseinandersetz.ung)] Heidegger. How can one deny that? Why deny that so many "revolutionary," audacious, and troubling works of the twentieth-century have ventured into or even committed themselves to regions that, according to a philosophy which is 8. See Victor Farias, Ilei.de-ggpr and Nazism, trans. Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Hugo Ott, Martin HeidJ>gger: Untmiii'J.TS zu .\'einer Biographie (Frankfurt an Main: Campus, 1988); Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin J/eidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Tom Rockmore, On 1/eideggers Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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confident of its liberal and leftist-democratic humanism, are haunted by the diabolical? Instead of erasing or trying to forget it, must one not try to account for this experience, which is to say, for our age? And without believing that all of this is already clear for us? 9 Derrida's statement, made in 1987, points to a fundamental tension between the philosophy of Heidegger and the liberal humanist tradition of France that has become its home. But it also refers back to the work of Blanchot and Levinas. It refers to the rethinking of Heidegger's project, which is tantamount to an investigation into National Socialism that does not succumb to the most immediate and comfortable schemas of representation and understanding. The second phase retains the tension of the first in the conflict between Heidegger's uncanny philosophy and the traditional philosophical emphasis on representation, definition, and categorization, but the stakes have been raised by the political ramifications of Heidegger's philosophical critique. In the first Heidegger Affair, Heidegger's French defenders understood him as an "existential'' thinker in the same way that Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Gabriel Marcel were considered "existential" thinkers. This implied a certain allegiance to humanism, individuality, freedom, and responsibility that owed more to the legacy of the Enlightenment project than to the work of Heidegger. Despite the way the understanding of Heidegger's philosophy has changed in France over the last fifty years, the strategies adopted in the first Heidegger Mfair have remained virtually unchanged. Thus a rethinking of these terms and of the nature of the questions asked is necessary to move past the categories of "pro" and "con" that mark the parameters of the first Heidegger Mfair and to address the substantive issues of the nature of Heidegger's attraction to National Socialism, his silence on the Shoah, and his philosophical trajectory. But the constant resurfacing of the Heidegger Affair also points to a certain allergic reaction to Heidegger's philosophy in France. It is of interest to note that the majority of French accounts chronicling the reception of Heidegger in France credit Raymond Aron with the initial introduction of his philosophy. Until recently, both Levinas and Kojeve have been relegated to the background of the French Heideggerian tradition, while such ''French" thinkers as Aron, Sartre, Beaufret, MerleauPonty, and Jacques Lacan have been given center stage. The peculiar nature of the reception of Heidegger in France lies precisely in the fact

9. Jacques Derrida, "L'Enfer des philosophes," Le nouvel observateur, November 6-12, 1987, trans. Peggy Kamuf in Points (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 182. The insertion of ausrinandn-srlwng is my own, based on Derrida's explanation of the translation in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press," in Points. . , 441-42.

286

Conclusion

that the site that has become the "home" of his appropriation in philosophy is entirely uncomfortable with the un(heim)lich nature of that philosophy and the means by which it entered-through a continental drift of Eastern European and German emigres who found positions within the French universities and publishing industries but were outside the mainstream of French academic thought. In his 1988 essay Heidegger and "the jews," Jean-Fran(,;ois Lyotard attempts to present an explanation for the reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France. He places Heidegger's work within a French literary tradition that holds that the real objective of literature is to represent in words what every representation misses, what is forgotten. This, Lyotard contends, is what philosophers in France have understood to be at work in Heidegger's texts. But in establishing his explanation, Lyotard presents a question he claims he will not, or perhaps cannot, answer. "I will not try to 'explain' here why it was France that found itself in charge of a thinking of the immemorial. To assume that an 'explanation' is permissible and possible means to presume that it bears some relationship to a 'political' history (which is more than a story) marked by the beheading of a king." 10 This passage is illuminating on a number of levels-first and foremost because it once again attempts to explain the phenomenon of the popularity of Heidegger's philosophy in France by placing his work within a preexisting French tradition, but also because it reveals the problematic nature of this sort of incorporation. Lyotard links Heidegger's thought to the origins of the French Republic, "marked by the beheading of a king." This can be interpreted literally, as the beheading of Louis XVI, or allegorically, as the beheading of the Cartesian tradition, as in Levinas's description of the "deposition of the sovereign ego . in the sense one speaks of deposed kings."ll In either case it represents the establishment of a new tradition that breaks abruptly and violently with the old. But this new tradition, despite its antipathy toward the old, is inextricably linked and beholden to the previous tradition by the nature of this break. In this sense, Lyotard places Heidegger's philosophy within the French republican tradition, but as a response to the darkest moments of excess and terror. In Lyotard's model, the use of Heidegger's philosophy in France is haunted by an internal critique of the tradition that inherited it. 12 10.Jean-Frant;ois Lyotard, /JeidRggerand t/u> "jf"ws, "trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 5. 11. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 51. 12. The work ofLevinas became popular in the 1960s for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which was his use of Descartes in Totality and Infinity to rethink, and thus rehabilitate, Heidegger's philosophy by moving past it.

287

THE THIRD READING

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre described nothingness as a "worm coiled in the heart of Being," alien and yet essential to Sartre's philosophical system (EN, 57). Perhaps this metaphor also applies to the place of Heidegger's philosophy in France. Like Sartre's worm, Heidegger's philosophy now sits deeply imbedded in the heart of modern French philosophy. It lies at the center of the flow of French intellectual thought, and yet it gnaws at the very tradition it has become a part of, foreign, inextricable, and somehow essential.

228

Index

Action (journal), 150, 170, 171 Agregation, 42, 50, 52, 55, 113, 115, 159, 200 Alliance Israelite Universelle, 42 Anti-Semitic/ism, 9, 20, 22, 147, 175,211, 212 Aristotle, 5, 24, 2fi, 142, 144, 145, 255 Aron,Jean-Paul, 203 Aron, Raymond, 3, 5, 9, 18, 27, 36, 42, 45,55,56,57,66,84,87-95, 100,106, 109,111-113,115,116,119,120,130, 131, 133, 158, 159, 175, 178, 180, 185, 204, 209, 281, 286; "historicality" ( Geschictlidtkeit), 93, 94; Introduction aIa philosophie de l'histoire, 90-93, 106, 112, 178, 180; Kojeve's influence, 88-94 Axelos, Kostas, 195, 201-204 Barrc~s, Mamice, 43 Barthes, Roland, 201 Bataille, Georges, 45, 56, 65, 66, 95, 150, 209,225,227 Bataille-Lacan, Sylvia, 203 Baudelaire, Charles, 29 Baudrillard,Jean, 279 Baumler, Alfred, 175 Beaufret,Jean, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 18, 70, 83, 112, 154,157-164,166,167,184-186,188, 196,197,199-206,209,222,243-245, 281,284,286 Beauvoir, Simone de, 56, 115, 116, 119, 166, 167 Bergson, Henri, 6, 7, 23-26,28,29,35, 51, 59,67,69,88,89,100-102,104,113,114, 120,144,254,255

Bergsonism, 5, 8, 35, 36, 55, 69, 114, 115, 252 Biemel, Walter, 201,204 Bifur (journal), 117, 119 Blanchot, Maurice, 4, 18, 29-31, 162, 209-244; "disaster," 212, 214-217, 221, 222.225,237,240,242,243,245,247, 279, 282-284, 286; L'icriture du desastre, 217, 224; "La litterature et le droit a Ia mort," 225-241; Thomas l'obscur, 214, 215, 218-221, 228, 232, 235; Le Tres llau.t, 215, 216, 234-236; use of il y a, 21~221, 223, 230,235-237,240,241 Bloch, Marc, 23 Blonde!, Charles, 24, 26, 39, 42 Blum, Leon, 54, 210, 211 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 49, 50, 78 Bougie, Celestin, 88, 90 Boutmy, Emile, 53 Brasillach, Robert, 211 Brehier, Emile, 56, 58, 86, 90, 163, 164, 169, 185 Breton, Andre, 66, 95 Brunschvicg, Leon, 5, 6, 9 n. 11, 23, 36, 39-43,55,56,58,59,86,9o, 100,101, 114, 159, 160 Butler,Judith, 72 Carteron, Henri, 24, 26 Cartesian, 32, 40, 44, 68-70, 85, 87, 98, 109, 113, 114, 121. 132, 135, 140, 149, 151, 153, 154, 165, 167, 184, 191,201,210, 213,214,218,222,236,237,250,252, 260,281,287

289

INDEX

Cassirer, Ernst, 24, 40, 41, 173, 181 Cassirer, Toni, 40 n. 62, 173 n. 38 Cavailles,Jean, 40, 41 Gelan, Paul, 242 Celine, 56 Chaim of Volon (Chaim ben Isaac of Volozhin), 19 Char, Rene, 202, 204 Cixous, Helene, 279 Cohen,Hennann,40 College de France, 50-52, 54 Committee of Public Instruction, 49 Compte, August, 6 Confltumres (journal), 161, 163, 166, 205 Corbin, Henry, 56, 58, 66, 69-71, 112, ll6, ll9, 124, 130, 131, 133, 146, 157, 160, 161, 163, 169, 179; translation of Heidegger into French, 69-71, 117, 118, 124, 131, 131 n. 33, 133; Dasein/1ialiti!humaine, 70, 71; Gezoorfenheit/sa direlir.tion, 71, 133; Vorhamle11heit/realili-des-dwses, 70, 71; lultandertluit/Tealiti-usleruiks, 70, 71 Cultural Center at Cerisy-la-Salle, 201-204 Dali, Salvador, 95 David, Cathe1ine, 242 Davos Conference, 39-42, 173 Deleuze, Gilles, 201, 279 Delp, Alfred, 79 Derrida,Jacques,3, 10,279,283,285,286 Descartes, Rene, 4, 5, 9 n. 11, 12, 24, 68, 110, 114, 122, 146, 151, 159, 160, 163, 164, 184,188,256,257,263,266,279,281 Descombes, Vincent, 57, 68 Diderot, Denis, 154, 246 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 12, 13, 15, 17 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 21, 24, 61, 64 Dreyfus Affair, 25, 53 Dreyfus, Hubert, 81, 101 n. 41 Durkheim, Emile, 5, 24, 88, 91 Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale, 43 Ecole Normale Superiure, 9, 22, 42, 49-57, 84, 88, 91, 100, 113, 116, 120, 158, 159, 161, 199,200;reformof1903,54 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 17, 44, 49-51,56,59,60,64,65,69, 70,131,280 Einstein, Albert, 39, 67 Enlightenment (project), 4, 6, 19, 78 Farias, Victor, 242 Fauc;onnet, Paul, 90, 91,94 Faurisson, Robert, 205, 206

290

Febvre, Lucien, 23 Fedie,-, Franc;ois, 201 Ferry, Luc, 9 n. II Fessard, Gaston, 67, 90, 201 Fichte,Johann Gottlieb, 159 Final Solution, 18, 215 Fink, Eugen, 40 Fleurquin, "Captain," 162, 163, 164, 168 Foucault, Michel, 3, 279, 283 Freiburg, University of, 31-39, 163, 169 French Communist Party, 148-150, 168 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 26, 95, 96, 154, 283 Gandilac, Maurice de, 40, 41, 170-174, 176-178, 183, 194,201 Gaon ofVilna (Rabbi Eliyahu ofVilna, Elijah ben Solomon), 19, 21 Gestalt Psychology, 100-103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 21 Gogol, Nikolai, 21, 61 Goldmann, Lucien, 201, 204 Gordin,Jacob, 86 Gottingen circle, 27, 58, 59; Theodor Conrad, 27; Hedwig Conrad-Martius, 27; Johannes Daubert, 27; Moritz Geiger, 27; Roman Ingarden, 27; Hans Lipps, 27; Adolf Reinach, 27; Edith Stein, 27 Groethuysen, Bernard, 8, 56, 59 GUivitch, Gemges, 8, 28, 56, 59, 89, 101, 102,200 Gurvitsch, Aron, 66, 69, 101 Haar, Michel, 201 Halbwachs, Maurice, 28,90 Hegel, G.W.F.: "desire" (Begierde), dialectic, 69; Phenomenology of Spirit, 90, 97, 115, 160, 171, 172, 195, 204; "struggle for life and death" (Kampf auf Leben und Toll), 82 HeideggerAffair/s, 9, 10, 17, 18,112, 154,157,158,162,165,168-184,201, 283-286 Heidegger, Elfride, 202, 203 Heidegger, Martin: "authenticity" (Eiwm.tlichkl'it), 17, 139, 144, 148; Bl'iug a·nd TimP., 11,33-35,37,39, 40, 64, 79, 80,83,85,86,93, 105,112,132,133, 135, 138, 141-143, 154, 160, 161, 165, 168, 172, 177-181, 186-188, 190-192, 194, 195, 197, 198,216,222 n. 17, 223,225,229,237,243,249,250,276, 279, 254, 255, 280, 281; "being-in-theworld," 15, 38, 38, 80, 105, 124, 125, 137, 140, 192; "being-towards-death,"

Index 82, 138,223,251-254,266,267;"call of conscience" ( Ruf des Gnoi.mm.s), 140; "care" (Sorge), 94, 143, 144, 225, 234;Dasdn, 12-17,43,80-83,101, 124-126, 128, 133, 135, 138, 141-144, 146, 165, 166, 178, 188, 191, 192, 194, 210,222,223,225-227,237,249-253, 266, 277; Dasdn andrealitt-humaine, 192; "datability" (Datierbarkeit), 142; Das Man, 13, 15-17, 127, 143, 144; ek-stasis, 141, 220; "estrangement" (Entfrtrmdung), 195; "fall" (llt>rfallen), 138, 143, 144, 146; "homelessness" ( 1/dmatliisigkeit), 194, 195; inauthenticity ( Uneigentlichkdt), 127, 138, 144; "Letter on Humanism," 18, 83, 96, 98, 112, 154, 157, 158, 162, 167,171,183-201,222-224,227,230, 243, 245, 258; Mitsein (being-with), 14, 39, 222, 243, 281; "present-at-hand" (VOJI,andenheit), 70, 71, 125, 126, 137, 142; "project" (enllllerfen), 143, 144; "ready-to-hand" (Zuhandenhdt), 70, 71, 105, 125, 126, 137, 142; "resoluteness" (Entschlossenluil), 82; "significance" (Bedeutsamkeit), 142; "thrownness" (CJI!loorfenheit), 122, 124, 140, 143, 275; time, 141-144, 255; "the turn," 186, 187; "uncanny" (unheimlich), 8 n. 11, 198, 219, 232, 233, 254; "understand" (verstehen), 81; "What is Metaphysics?" (Was isl Metaphysik?), 117-120, 122, 123, 128, 129, 131, 136, 187, 214 Heinemann, Fritz, 60 Hering,Jean, 27, 28, 33, 102 Herr, Lucien, 53, 57 Herriot, Edouard, 54 Hilberg, Raul, 246 Hitler, Adolf, 41, 42, 91, 170, 173, 177, 210-212 Holderlin, Friederich, 225, 230, 232, 234 Husser!, Edmund, 12, 27-29, 31-40,56--60, 63,67, 71, 79,83,88,90,93,99-105, 107-109, 112. 115-117, 119-126. 128133, 135, 136 n. 40, 140, 142, 145, 146, 148, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 179, 182, 185,218,252,256,260,263,266,269, 274; Cartesian Meditations, 28, 43, 59, 101; eidetic science, 32 n. 46; intentionality, 37, 38;Wesensrhau, 31 Hyppolite,Jean, 9, 9 n. 56, 100, 200 Institut fram;ais de Berlin, 116, 159 Irigaray, Luce, 279

Ivanov, Nina, 67 n. 41 Jahrlnult fin· Phi/Qsaphie und Phiinommowgie Forsch?.mg, 28, 58

Janicaud, Dominique, 10 n. 16, 201, 203 Jankelevitch, Vladimir, 149 Jaspers, Karl, 56, 63, 64 Jaures,Jean, 54 Junger, Ernst, 133 Kaiser Wilhelm University. See Strasbourg, University of Kandinsky, Wassily, 61, 63 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 6, 23, 24, 40, 56, 57, 88, 114, 160, 173,204 Kantian, 40 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 12-14, 16, 17, 44, 71, 84, 85, 90, 130, 131, 137, 138, 163, 191, 216,263 Kojeve, Alexandre: and Aron, 88-94; "desire" (BegiP.rde), 72-75, 268; "desire for recognition," 75, 80, 272, 273; "end of history," 77-79, 83; on Hegel, 71-83; Hegel seminar, 65-83, 109, 131, 132; and Lacan, 94-99; "master-slave dialectic," 75-78, 80, 81, 230, 273; and MerleauPonty, 99-1 09; Self-Consciousness, 72-77; "struggle for life and death" (Kampf a11{ Leben und Tod), 75, 82, 269; teleology, 68; using Heidegger to read Hegel, 68, 79-83; "work" (Arbeit), 76, 229; Angst! Kampf auf 1-Pben 1md Tod, 80, 82, 83; Bejindlirhkeit/Begierde, 80, 81; Verstelum/ Arbdt, 80, 81 Kojevnikov, Alexandra, 61 Kojevnikov, Vladimir, 60, 61 Kovno (Lithuania), 19-22 Koyre,Aiexandre,8,9,27-29,44,45,51,56, 58-60,64-66,69,79,86,89, 169,200; Hegel seminar, 60, 65 Kuki, Baron Shuzo, 116 Lacan,Jacques. 18,56,66,67,84,94-98, 111,150,169,186,202-204,206,209, 282, 283, 286; "desire," 96-98; Kojeve's influence, 94-99; language as negation, 98; "master-slave dialectic," 96; "mirror stage," 96-98; "struggle for recognition," 96,97 l.aCapra, Dominick, 236 n. 31 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 210 n. 4, 279 Lakanai,Joseph, 49 Lavisse, Ernest, 50

291

INDEX

Lefebvre, Henri, 9 n. 11 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 114 Lemkul, 61-63 Lenin, Vladmir Ilich, 62 Lenmism, 21 Lennontov, Mikhail, 21, 24, 61 Levinas, Emmanuel: critique ofHeidegger, 276-278; critique ofK.ojeve's Hegel, 272-274; critique ofSartre, 274--276; "De !'existence a l'existant," 214, 218, 225, 229,247, 249-25ti, 266; "desire," 2~270; "face to face," 271, 272; "ily a," 218-221, 223,230,235-237,240,241,247-255,262; "infinity," 256, 257, 261-271, 273-275, 278; "Martin Heidegger et !'ontologie," 43; "separated being," 263-273, 276; "Surles ideen de M. Husser!," 34--37; TIIR ThR.ory C!f blluition in Ilusserl :~ PI!R1t01Til"rwfogy, 34-38, 42, 44, 103, 105; "totality," 257-262, 264--266,268,271-274,277,278; 1otaury and lnji.nit:y, 244, 256, 258-279, 282 Levinas, Raissa, 247 Levinas, Simone, 247 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 51, 201 Levy,Paul,210-212 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 39, 53 Liberation, 151 Lichtenberger, Henri, 39 I..Owith, Karl, 170, 176-183 Lycie Condorcet, 88, 199, 200 Lycee Henri N, 161, 199 Lycee Louis le Grand, 84, 100 Lyotard,Jean-Fran~;ois, 3, 279, 287 Mallarme, Stephane, 29, 217 n. 11, 222 n. 16 Mannheim, Karl, 89 Marceau, Marcel, 162 Marcel, Gabriel, 44, 45, 86, 100, 102, 183, 185,200,201,204,286 Ma~iolin, Robert, 66 Man:, Karl, 62, 67, 71, 72, 90, 103, 115, 148, 150, 153, 166, 168, 189, 195 Marxism/t, 9, 49, 99, 100, 103, 131, 150, 153, 195.243,279,281 Maurras, Charles, 43 Mauss, Marcel, 39, 51, 282 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: "being-in-theworld" ( etrp..au-monde), 102, 104-108; dialectic, 106-108; interiority/exteriority, 104; Kojeve's influence, 99-109; "mastel"slave dialectic," 105; Phenmrumok.Jgy of Perception, 100, 104, 109, 164; Stnu:tunt of !Mtauim; 103-105; "work" (Arbrit), 107

292

Minotaure, /,e (journal), 96 Monod, Gabriel, 53 Moscow, University of, 62 Mounier, Emmanuel, 100 Moyn, Samuel, 248 n. 8

Nancy,Jean-Luc, 222 n. 17, 279 Napoleon. See Bonaparte National Socialism, 3, 4, 17, 18, 153, 157, 161, 163-165, 167, 169-181, 183-185, 194, 195,205, 206,211, 213,224 n. 18, 245, 257, 282-286; Third Reich, 89 Neo-Kantian/ism, 4-8, 12, 13, 23, 24, 29, 35,36,40,41,55-57,59,69,86,88,89, 100, 101, 104, 110, 114. 115, 159, 160, 217,257 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 44, 55, 84, 198, 216, 283 n. 5 Nizan, Paul, 100 Nouvelle Revue Fram;:aise, 160, 211 Occupation (German}, 149, 153, 211 Ott, Hugo, 33 Palmier,Jean-Michel, 166 Papin sisters, 96 Paris, University of, 54 Pasteur, Louis, 53 Patri, Aime, 71 Peguy, Charles, 56 Peiffer, Gabrielle, 27, 28 Pe1·icles (Resistance group), 161 Philolenko, Alexis, 201 Piaget,Jean, 39 Plato, 5, 24 Pos, Hendrik, 173 n. 38 positivism, 6, 7, 26 Pradines, Maurice, 24, 25, 43 Preau, Andre, 201 Proust, Marcel, 29, 120 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 21, 24, 61 Queneau, Raymond, 45, 56, 60, 66, 150, 162, 164,227 Quint, Leon-Pierre, 201 Rabinbach, Anson, 162 n. 9, 165 n. 19, 185 n. 64, 195 n. 72 ll.Pdunrhes J>hilosophiqrus (journal), 56, 58, 60,

65,69, 79,86,90, 120,130,132 Renan, Ernest, 52 Renault, Alain, 9 n. 11 Resnais, Alan, 162, 163, 166

Index Resistance (French), 150, 161, 199, 284 Rnm.e dew Franre et de t'etranger (journal), 56 Reoue de m.etaphysique et de morak (journal), 90,102,200 Ricouer, Paul, 199 n. 75, 201, 204 Rim baud, Arthur, 29 Rockmore, Tom, 10 n. 16,67 n. 39, 165 n. 19, 176 n. 46, 205 n. 97, 206, 284 Rosenberg, Alfred, 175 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 203, 206 Rousseau,Jean:Jacques, 154, 246 Rousso, Henry, 205, 243 Rovan,Joseph,160, 161,224 Rubinstein, Diane, 211 n. 7 Russian Revolution, 20, 21 Sade, Marquis de, 231 Salomon, Gottfried, 39 Sartre,Jean-Paul: "Anxiety/anguish" (angoisse/Angst), 124, 127, 128, 130, 137, 138; "bad faith," 138, 139; Bei11g and Nothir1gne.ss, 17, 112, 124, 127, 130, 133-149, 150, 152, 153, 164, 165, 197, 288; Cahiers po'unm.e morak, 150: "contingency," 126-129, 140, 141, 153; Dastrin as realiti-humaine, 118, 119, 124, 128, 131, 133-135, 136 n. 40, 137-140, 146-148, 151; Existentialism is a Jlumam'sm, 150-153, 165, 186, 188, 190, 199; "for-itself" (pour-sot), 134-142, 144-146,148, 153, 275; "freedom," 138, 139, 145-148, 152; Geworfenheit as "contingency," 122, 124, 128, 133, 140, 145; "good faith," 152; "in-itself (ensm), 129,134-142,144-146, 153,274; L7maginaire, 118, 129, 137, 160, 225, 226; L111lllgl'nation, 114, 118; Nausea, 118, 120, 124-129, 134, 149; No Exit, 148, 149; "nothingness," 117-119, 122-124, 129, 134-141, 145, 146, 148; La tran~cendence de l'ego, 118, 120-123, 125, 128, 129, 133; War Diaries (Garnets d.e la drok de gurrre), 112, 117, 129, 130 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 51, 201, 282, 283 Scheler, Max, 24, 27, 28, 101 Schlageter, Albert Leo, 178 Schmitt, Carl, 133 Schwabe, Moses, 21, 22, 23 Second Empire, 50 Shoah, 102,209,209,212,213,215,216, 219,221,222,224,225,236,240-245, 249,254,256,257,278,279,282-284, 286

Shoutak, Cecile, 64 Simmel, Georg, 89 Sirinelli,Jean-Franc;ois, 4 n. 1 Socialisme l't Liberti (Resistance group), 150 Solovyov, Sergey, 64, 65, 81 Sorbonne,23,28,43,53,54,56,59,65,69, 84-86,90,91,101,102,169,200 Sorel, Georges, 56 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 27, 103 Starobinski,Jean, 201 Steiner, George, 112 Strasbourg, University of, 22, 23, 39 structuralism, 196,200,281-283 surrealists, 95 Taine, Hyppolite, 52, 53 Talmud, 21 Tl'mp.s, k, 53 1'm!ps motlerne.~. les (journal), 58, 150, 158, 165,168,170-172,176,177,179,183 n.62 Terres de.1llomm.es (journal), 166 Third Reich. See National Socialism Third Republic, 5-7, 22. 52, 53-55, 89, 91, 210 Thomas Aquinas, 26 Tolstoy, Leo, 21, 24, 61 Towarnicki, Frederic de, 157, 161-168, 170-176, 181, 183-185 Turgenev, Ivan, 21, 61 Valery, Paul, 9 n. 11, 29 Vich~211, 212,244,247,284 Virgil, 50 Voltaire, 154 Waehlens, Alphonse de, 170, 179-181, 183, 201,285 Wahl,Jean, 44, 45, 56, 60, 71, 84, 85, 86, 124. 130, 131, 132, 134, 158, 163, 168, 185, 186, 200, 201, 2tl4; Etudes kU>rkegaanliennes, 130; "Heidegger et Kierkegaard," 86, 87, 130; on Hegel, 84; on Heidegger and Kierkegaard, 84-85, 87; I.e maUu>Ur de ro11.~cience, 84; "Vers le concret," 86, 130, 132 Webe~Max,88,89,92

Weil, Eric, 44, 45, 56, 66, 86, 170, 179, 181-183 Witt, George, 62-64 Wohl, Robert, 4 n. 1 Wolin, Richard, 205 World War One, 4, 7-9, 28, 49, 54-56,67, 69,89,91, 109,159,245,280,280

293

INDEX

World War Two, 18, 30, 42, 57, 69, 79, 91. 103, 104, 109, 112, 130, 132, 133, 149, 151,152,154,159,162,169,200,204.

294

209,218,224,225,243,245-247,251, 256 Zola, Emile, 25, 43