September 23, re: an upcoming lecture by Joseph Cohen
and Raphael Zagury-Orly
I suppose that they are essentially echoing Donatella di Cesare’s finding of “self-annihilation” in three notes from Heidegger’s Annotations, in her Heidegger and the Jews, pp. 199-202.
October 2
I’ve replaced this discussion with a revised version (link upcoming below) that not only deletes reference to the Oct. 7 lecture (because that’s nearly antedated by the calendar), but substantially revises parts 2 and 5 of the listing below.
Discussion originally was divided into five sections:
- 1 | a short background note: contexts of Considerations
- 2 | an analysis of the three notes in Annotations that di Cesare finds incriminating
- 3 | a short discussion of the Cohen/Zagury-Orly gloss of their Oct. 7 lecture
[deleted at revision] - 4 | my initial posting which was ignored by the NYU Comp. Lit. Dept. [deleted at revision]
- 5 | thinking beyond being subjected to transcendental subjecting
Parts 3 and 4 remain below for whomever is interested. My current discussion revises the introduction (prior to part 1) and parts 2 and “5” (as part 3).
That’s here.
3 | re: the Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly lecture description
If Cohen and Zagury-Orly have a sense of “utmost rigor” (lecture prospectus for Oct. 7) that is like di Cesare’s explications of the above annotations, then their concern for what “we must” do will ring hollow—symptomatically so.
Anyway, for Cohen and Zagury-Orly, there’s to be a notion of “Heidegger’s philosophy,” though Heidegger denied that there was such a thing. (I believe that’s made explicit in Time and Being, but my feeling for On the Way to Language seems to echo that, too.)
Maybe for them, “Heidegger’s philosophy” is constituted by his deconstruction of metaphysicalism, as if his critical practice is also an instance of that metaphysicalism (thereby being self-undermining, because Heidegger has no phenomenological distance on linguistic framing?). Is it that “Heidegger’s philosophy” has no other content than that “certain and profound correlation” between metaphysics-for-“Heidegger” and contemplating jewish self-annihilation?— no existential phenomenological interest motivating deconstruction of the Christian West? And no interest in “the task of thinking” beyond the First Beginning which is so tragically destroying itself in the mid-20th century?
Thank god, the therapists have arrived. If Cohen and Zagury-Orly are anything like di Cesare, then hermeneutics of suspicion will have become more scholastic tragi-comedy of self-undermining texts.
Cohen and Zagury-Orly ask: “What occurs between the history of the truth of Being and the ‘self-annihilation’ of Judaism?”
Answer: German Catholic support for the diseased scapegoating that is Nazi ideology.
C/Z: “In which manner do these two motifs come to mutually weave each other...?
Through university academicism’s vapid historiology that provides the “warrant” for German political ideology.
C/Z: “...and what effects does this relation have?”
WW-II.
C/Z: “According to which Law does this correlation engage, animate and affirm itself?”
onto-theology of metaphysicalism.
C/Z: “How and why has the history of Being, in deploying the very essence of its truth, also constituted and produced an antijudaism culminating in a definite antisemitism, one without precedent in the entire history of philosophy?”
Because politicization of nihilism causes unfathomable tragedy that is too easily forgotten by new generations living in a perpetual present-centeredness.
But this is not about Heidegger’s efforts to teach (and show, through his massive archive of lectures) how to think with utmost rigor in ways that may evince primordially new beginning.
4 | my initial posting to the NYU Department “Event” announcement that was ignored
For what it’s worth, the posting mentioned themes of transcendentalization which I haven’t discussed in part 2, but would like to discuss in the last section. I have no idea why my posting remained “pending.” It’s antedated now by my discussion here (and I’ve revised the posting there—still “pending”—to just link to here). But it’s interesting to see what was ignored. Or not: Skip to the last section.
Heidegger was not anti-Semitic. But Catholic doctrine unwittingly called for a post-Hegelian (non-Marxist—post-metaphysicalist) critique of ideology that Heidegger sought to develop.
See: “some considerations of ideology“
One cannot understand issues of anti-Semitism in Europe outside of understanding the misappropriation of Christianity by Catholic doctrine. Heidegger’s notebooks give far, far more attention to his animus toward German Catholicism than he does to articulating German (Catholic) ideology about Judaism.
His notebooks are workbooks for monographic works of that time. They are not confessional diaries.
If Cohen and Zagury-Orly do not focus on issues within Christianity as such (i.e., how onto-theology is a politics), then their questions are ultimately self-undermining, thus symptomatic of issues unrelated to Heidegger’s critical thinking.
By the way, the standard German practice of capitalizing nouns hides the fact that Heidegger’s focus on being is about getting beyond its transcendentalization. His audience in Sein und Zeit was supposed to face issues of their lives: being in their world. The transcendentalization of that through metaphysicalization (“Being”) was to be deconstructed.
If Cohen and Zagury-Orly do not appreciate this difference between being and its transcendentalized displacement of thinking, then they will be undermining themselves.
By the way also, there is no such thing as “Heidegger’s philosophy.” “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking” was already implicit to questioning through _Being and Time_: about being in one’s time for the sake of actualizing our potential for authentic futures beyond Catholic metaphysicalism of power.
