alan milchman

The publication of Victor Farías's Heidegger and Nazism in 1987 1 set off the Heidegger wars, which have grown in intensity over the succeeding years. The bitter controversy ignited in France by Farías's contention that both Heidegger's life and thought were integrally linked to Nazism, has now spread across the Rhine, to Germany, and the Atlantic, to America, where new fronts in the conflict have been opened. Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have been written in an effort to sort out the extent, duration, meaning, and bases, of Martin Heidegger's entanglement with National Socialism. The present essay, and its second part which is to follow, is concerned with the philosophical stakes arising from the Heidegger wars. Our concern is to indicate which issues, raised by this controversy, are the most significant in terms of their overall philosophical impact, and to point out ways in which the discussion can be fruitfully developed. In surveying the issues raised by the debate over Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, there is no way to avoid taking a position on the questions at hand, no way to avoid becoming a participant in the controversy. An overview of the issues to be discussed can best serve as an orientation to the battle lines in this increasingly acrimonious dispute. In part one, we will focus on Heidegger's stature as a thinker, and on the methodologies of reading Heidegger. In part two, our focus will shift to the ethical and political ramifications of Heidegger's relationship to Nazism.

This essay is animated by the conviction that a critical encounter between antiessentialist Marxism and Foucauldian-inspired governmentality studies can provide us with a purchase on a history of the present—that it can facilitate a diagnosis of the contemporary world. A ...

The publication of Victor Farfas's Heidegger and Nazism in 19871 set off the Heidegger wars, which have grown in intensity over the succeeding years. The bitter controversy ignited in France by Farfas's contention that both Heidegger's life and thought were integrally linked to Nazism, has now spread across the Rhine, to Germany, and the Atlantic, to America, where new fronts

Friedrich Nietzsche's compelling diagnosis of the cultural crisis of the modern epoch, signaled by the " death of God, " of the metaphysical certitude that, in several forms, had shaped the West for nearly two millennia, together with his commitment to genealogy, and perspectivism, which opened up the prospect of new modes for an art of living, present enormous interpretive challenges. To these must be added the difficulties presented by the very way in which Nietzsche writes his texts, which we believe are closely linked to the modes of thinking, feeling, and acting that Nietzsche sought to induce in his readers, and which are integral to what we see as a project of self-fashioning linked to an art of living. While the two are conjoined, there are distinctions between them as well. And the bases for such a distinction can best be illuminated by turning to Michel Foucault, whose own thinking ripened under the warm Nietzschean sun. Foucault's concern with Nietzsche begins early, and continues until his death. We can clearly see the beginning of that concern in his The Order of Things [Les Mots et les Choses] (1966), where Foucault links Nietzsche's death of God to what he sees as the " end of man, " the end of an historically specific understanding of human being and with it the whole of " … the entire modern episteme –-that which formed towards the end of the eighteenth century and still serves as the positive ground of our knowledge, that which constituted man's particular mode of being and the possibility of knowing him empirically …. " 1 For Foucault, then, Nietzsche initiated the end of that vision of " man, " that " invention " of human being, that had its inception at the end of the eighteenth century, and now was about to " … be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. " 2 For both these thinkers, then, the death of God entailed the death of man as a transcendental subject, demanding for both a new concept of man, of human being: for Nietzsche, the notion of the " overman " (the Ubermensch); for Foucault, the idea that we have to create a new mode of subjectivity. Indeed, we believe that Foucault can provide a framework on the bases of which Nietzsche's own concern with an art of living can come into sharper focus. Foucault