Customer Reviews

Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Cultural Memory in the Present)

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At the end of the 1980s many studies came out devoted to the topic of Heidegger's engagement with Nazism (Farias, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard, et al.). Heidegger's philosophy as a whole was said to be compromised by this engagement (this is the line of interpretation already put forward by Adorno) or the engagement was said to leave the body of his thought intact (a position already advanced by Beaufret). The innovative starting point of "Heidegger's Volk" is that it avoids this alternative. That a new starting point is required has been made clear by the publication in the last few years of Heidegger's writings from his term as rector of Freiburg University (1933-34). Heidegger was convinced that his political engagement was grounded in his philosophy. Phillips, endeavouring to make sense of this conviction, claims that the problem-context of Heidegger's philosophy is political. This is not the old sociological contention, since Phillips does not translate Heidegger's lexicon into conventional political discourse. The refusal to translate is often the mark of the Heideggerian apologist. Heidegger's apologists generally sound very un-Heideggerian: in order to establish the political innoucuousness of his work they isolate it from the world in which it came about and thereby restore the abstractness and unworldliness that Heidegger sought to debunk. Phillips, however, extracts a political philosophy from Heidegger's ontology. He does not convert this ontology into an independently existing political discourse, such as Nazism. He sets the ontological lexicon to work politically. Heidegger's political philosophy is a philosophy of the world of the "Volk", of a community always already bound together because Dasein is essentially Mitsein. From this follows a rejection of both the liberal community bound together by individual interests and the Nazi community bound together by a common race. Heidegger's German nationalism, inspired by the metaphysical mission of the German people as propagated by Fichte and Hegel, and his opposition to liberalism led him to underestimate the significance of racism for the Nazi dictatorship. Heidegger stepped down as rector when he saw that the party was not about to come around to his view of the opportunities for a German nationalist government. Phillips reads through Heidegger's critiques of Hegel, Nietzsche, Plato and Kant in the 1930s and '40s to a critique of the regime. If Heidegger is at times harsh in this period toward his philosophical predecessors, it is, according to Phillips, because he has the regime in view. The book ends with a reading of Heidegger's essay on Trakl, one of his strangest texts and the subject of Derrida's Geschlecht papers.

I was deeply disappointed with this book. It's an important topic, but large chunks of Phillip's prose read like they were spit out by a computer programmed to generate nonsense. I've fought to decode their meaning several times only to give up, repeatedly exasperated. If you think you want to buy this book (as I did), I strongly recommend that you first USE THE "READ EXCERPT" FEATURE TO READ THE FIRST PAGE -- you'll immediately see what I mean. I wish someone would have warned me (discount or no, this was just money down the tubes).

PS, This has received some "not helpful" votes, so let me give an example. On p. 6, Phillips writes:

"A Volk that insists on its singularity, on its condition as 'this' Volk, is in the end, as Hegel had shown in his analysis of sense-certainty, always betrayed to the universal by its very 'thisness,' by the abstractness of singularity as such. A reprise of the nominalist cult of the particular does not describe Heidegger's reaction to Hegel's panlogism, since his critique of the universal pursues a different course from the beautiful soul's pathos-laden avowals of the particular's independence."

Phillips does not explain this *at all*, and virtually every page of his book indulges in this sort of high-level nonsense. Reader beware!