English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Heidegger, the most Nazi of the great philosophers 0:00 The Gospel, that's the Asiatic. Herr Professor, Sie haben jahrzehntelang über das Wesen des Menschen nachgedacht. Zu welchen Einsichten sind Sie gekommen? Most people are still wondering whether Heidegger was really a Nazi or not.
0:32 I simply say that it's not just that he was a Nazi, he's the most Nazi of the great philosophers. In our daily life, in the different religions, in the different philosophies, in the different behaviors of science. If I kill someone with a knife, it's not the knife that's going to be sent to prison.
1:38 That's enough of putting the tool on trial now. Whether the tool is a club a million years ago or a particle accelerator, technē, right? We don't have to put it on trial, we put on trial those who use it. This concerns Franck Lecomte, who writes to us from Normandy, and I thank him, and who asks me for the source from which I can say that, in a pre-war declaration, of course, our Heidegger, which I moreover call, from that point on, panzer-philosophy, declared that the motorization of the German army, in short the creation of the Panzerdivisionen, which is better known as Panzerdivisionen, is a decisive stage of Western metaphysics.
2:29 So, I answer him that I found it, like many other things, even more stunning still, compared to the incredibly flattering image we have of Heidegger, in the post-war French philosophical school — I say French because even Sartre, Sartre isn't... that's something else, I mean, I'm not saying that Heidegger, obviously, but I mean, it's also something else than the French Heideggerians, there's no comparison, but anyway, I mean, they didn't yet see the danger in the immediate post-war period.
3:06 So, from Sartre to Derrida, I can say up to the contemporary period, there is a cult of Heidegger that is almost beyond comparison, it's like that, well, anyway. So even if I multiply the quotations, for example Heidegger says somewhere the enemy, the enemy almost in the sense of the Gospel, the enemy is the devil in the Gospel, the enemy — meaning of us, of the German people — is the Asiatic. The Asiatic, you see, that's not Asians or Eurasia, because that would be anachronistic, as if he had anticipated that Russia and China, well, anyway.
3:40 could make common cause. No, it's the Asiatic. I know my Germans a bit, you know, Asia — I'm exaggerating on purpose — Asia, for them, doesn't start at Poland, I mean, from the moment you're east of the Elbe and especially the Vistula, right? You're among subhumans, that's for sure, in the language of the Third Reich, that is. So, I mean, I understand that Franck is surprised, but he would be even more surprised if — and I recommend it — he read through the entirety of Emmanuel Faye's book.
Emmanuel Faye's book 4:15 I recall that I was alongside Emmanuel Faye when he was invited to present a later book than the one on Heidegger. Mr. Heidegger's book is called, and it's very important to recall this, "Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy." He doesn't just criticize Heidegger, he asks that — he's aware of what should be in the philosophy curriculum — not that Heidegger be censored, he must be discussed, discussed in the history of ideas etc., as a thoroughly Nazi thinker for that matter, but not placed within philosophy alongside a Plato, etc.
4:53 So of course, one can always say that this man understood nothing of Heidegger, me neither, it's so profound that one can just improvise, especially a Marxist — what could be cruder than a Marxist venturing into the dizzying depths of panzer-philosophy. Not only, and I was able to confirm this — I had already seen it reading his books — but I was able to confirm it discussing with him at meetings at the Tropiques bookshop, he had presented his book on Hannah Arendt this time, another untouchable idol, the one I call, you see, the disciple of the most Nazi of philosophers, because most people still wonder whether Heidegger was really a Nazi or not, I simply say that it's not just that he was a Nazi, he was the most Nazi of the great philosophers, full of minor philosophers appointed for a few semesters like that in Germany at the time of the Third Reich — I'm not even talking about the Baeumlers and Kriecks, for all that, look at the magnificent article by Lukács,
6:03 which can be found fairly easily online, and which does more than just a technical profile of each of the philosophers of that period. It's interesting, by the way, but that's not our subject. I answer very precisely that it's in the paperback edition, that is, the work that first appeared in hardback by Emmanuel Faye, the work titled Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy — this work has nine chapters, the quotation in question is found in chapter 9, roughly toward the end of chapter 9, and thus just before the final conclusion, the few pages of conclusion. I'm reading the passage that constitutes the essence of my answer to our friend Franck's question. Heidegger adds — yes, because Heidegger makes plenty of corrections regarding articles where he compromised himself a bit, where before the war he speaks freely, right?
The motorization of the Wehrmacht, a "metaphysical act" 7:09 He doesn't need to mask his Nazism after the war, of course, since he's the darling of much more humanist people, particularly in the south of France, where he had taken part in meetings at Le Thor, near Avignon. Heidegger adds — yes, he makes corrections, so in '61, he does one of those falsifications, where he censors himself, right? And that had to be recalled before reading what follows. Heidegger adds, in 1961, a paragraph on the history of being.
7:42 In '61, the history of being goes down better than the history of the Reich's motorized armed forces. And he removes the three pages of the actual conclusion of the 1940 course. Now, in that conclusion — Emmanuel Faye referred, I don't know how, to the source, the 1940 course — in that conclusion he maintains that the motorization of the Wehrmacht, which had just secured the Reich's military victories in the French campaign — everyone knows it was, of course, the armored divisions that decided the outcome.
8:17 And that was the occasion that made famous this young captain de Gaulle, who had already written, just before the war, an essay on the role of armor in the modern army, and who had already seen that there was at least a French lag at that level. Not in every branch, but certainly in armor. So, motorization — I return to Heidegger — the motorization of the Wehrmacht, which had just secured the Reich's military victories in the French campaign, is not, he says, a phenomenon pertaining to technicism, but, I quote, a metaphysical act.
8:51 That's coded language, right? When Heidegger's pen writes "metaphysical," some people say, oh dear, I need to go do research, I need to reread everything from Aristotle's Metaphysics, right, up to Kierkegaard, by way of Leibniz, Spinoza. Well, all right. There you go. Moreover, the greatest specialist on the language of the Third Reich, on this codification, this perversion of apparently ordinary words, namely Victor Klemperer — whom I was happy to cite in another series of programs, the one I do, you know, under the title Musico-Sophie with Aymeric Monville — I had cited him, but there it was about music, the classical repertoire — Victor Klemperer, the brother of the illustrious conductor Otto Klemperer, one of the great charismatic conductors of the twentieth century.
Klemperer and the language of the Third Reich 9:55 This Victor Klemperer was a scholar of French literature, a great translator, and Jewish, and who survived first by a miracle, right? who escaped deportation because he had married a German woman — he benefited in the first year from a law stating that it didn't apply to deportation for those married to an Aryan, but when the Final Solution was decreed and there was no longer any distinction between those married to Aryans and the others, I mean, he saved his skin by crossing into Switzerland, and above all he specialized for years, years of research, in — and this is where it gets very interesting — the language of the Third Reich, how to decode each of the words of the Third Reich.
10:50 You know that, for example, Emmanuel Faye dwells at length on the term "völkisch." "Volk" is the people, as in the Anglo-Saxon languages, since these are Germanic languages, except it's spelled V-O-L-K — Volkswagen, that's simply the people's car, which was moreover created under the Third Reich. I'm not saying it's a Nazi car, even if it appeared under the Third Reich. I'm not very sectarian. "Völkisch," the adjective, or sometimes adverb, but most often adjective — one might think it should be translated as "popular," but it's much more complicated than that.
11:26 it's "people" in the sense of roots, almost biological roots. It's a matter of blood, this "völkisch." Well, anyway, it's not the law of the soil in Germany, it's the law of blood. Blut! I'll reread, and continue with the little paragraph about Klemperer. Heidegger adds, in 1961, a paragraph on the history of being and removes the three pages of the actual conclusion of the 1940 course. Now, in that conclusion — far from the history of being — he maintains that the motorization of the Wehrmacht, which had just secured the Reich's military victories in the French campaign, is not, he says, a phenomenon pertaining to technicism, but, I quote, a metaphysical act.
Not indicting the tool 12:13 Heidegger consistent, he who has always, right, criticized technology, like the flock of today's environmentalists — and that passes for a leftist theme, that is, criticizing technology. You understand why I'm a bit vehement when I say, if I kill someone with a knife, it's not the knife that's going to be sent to prison, that's enough of putting the tool on trial now. Whether the tool is a club a million years ago, or a particle accelerator, technē, right, we don't have to put it on trial, we put on trial those who use it and the ends to which they put this technology.
12:49 In short, to hammer the point home, we must go back to the subject, instead of putting objects on trial. You see, the motorization of the Wehrmacht is not technicism, it's a metaphysical act. In other words, me, Heidegger, I'm consistent, I don't want to criticize technology. But it's more than that, it's not to be criticized as a byproduct of technicism, which I denounce throughout every page of all my works and well before.
13:23 And I insist on this theme because there are wars — that's what I hold most against him. I can't be more honest. Maybe I would have been more of a Nazi than him at the time. Who knows, I can't be more honest. There's the intellectual confusion. I would have been unemployed, I mean, it was terrible, the 1930s, right. Look at all of Chapoutot's research work that I used in another video. I even projected some excerpts from those excellent videos in certain parts of the history of the Reich.
Excerpt from Chapoutot: Nazis recycled into management 13:56 Yes, you cite a number of exemplary cases of this transition into the administration of the Federal Republic of Germany of Nazi dignitaries, and also into the private sector, since that's also what's at stake with the question of management. Former Nazi dignitaries are highly prized in private companies. Yes, because on one hand, people like Reinhard Höhn are people who were very well trained. They generally have a doctorate, they have a very good university education.
14:26 And moreover, for 12 years, private industry or the private economy experienced a veritable orgy of orders and profits thanks to them, since the SS is also an economic empire, a concentration-camp empire that rents out, at unbeatable rates, quasi-free labor to German industry. So these people in private industry have not forgotten the services rendered. And so we realize that after 1945, the SS networks and particularly the networks of the SD, that is, the SS intelligence service to which Reinhard Höhn belonged, these networks are in place everywhere.
15:01 In the higher administration, in the private sector, in diplomacy, at universities, in hospitals, in the police. And these networks make it possible to recycle, to place, what are called the Alte Kameraden, the old comrades who are in difficulty. That's exactly what happened to Reinhard Höhn, who was first employed by an employers' think tank in the late '40s, and who very quickly was tasked with founding a business school. For the Nazis, it's very clear: the individual, in himself, has no meaning, has no existence, and has no rights outside of his productivity.
15:33 In other words, if you're not capable of producing for the Reich, of producing for the race, you don't have a right to life. It's very clear. Lives — how to put it — non-productive beings, to use Nazi terminology, are considered lives unworthy of being lived. Already, regarding German efficiency and Nazi efficiency, when we say that, we are dependent on the discourse that the Nazis held about themselves — the impeccable organization, the trains running on time, etc. Now, in practice, what we observe from 1933 onward is that Nazi functioning is a gigantic maelstrom, a permanent cacophony, very disorganized, perfectly entropic, in fact, and utterly consuming of time, energy, money.
Judeo-Bolshevism and metaphysics in Heidegger 16:18 In the confusion, there was the German intellectual world. Perhaps we would eventually have been convinced that if I had been unemployed for three years, it was because the Jews occupied all the jobs, in communication, in culture — I'm not talking about all the others, but they were, well, there you go, anyway, don't just take my word for it, consult the documents of the period.
16:53 Nothing beats studying documents when it comes to history. It's not the Jews or the Communists who are singled out in Nazi discourse, it's Judeo-Bolshevism. For them the two are inseparable. Besides, Jesus, Marx, all that, it's the Jews. In the Nazi mind, that's how it works. Collectivism, charity, turning the other cheek — no, you must not turn the other cheek, you must charge ahead with the panzer. So, you see, it's very important that he specifies that this motorization is not a phenomenon pertaining to technicism — that one's a good one — but a metaphysical act.
17:31 Here technology is sublimated, whereas usually it's vilified. Victor Klemperer, the conductor's brother, showed that the word "historicity" had become a keyword of the language of the Third Reich, or LTI. One could say that, with its use by Heidegger, the word "metaphysics" was itself in the process of becoming a term of the language of the Third Reich. In Heidegger, his relationship to metaphysics is very ambivalent.
18:01 Because there, all of a sudden, it's flattering, the creation of the Panzerdivisionen is a metaphysical act. And this is the period when he praises the Reich, when he says the enemy is the Asiatic, when he says that the country of Descartes — he worked a lot on Descartes, right — that Descartes's thought is the occasion for a great regression — later he'll try to make up for it after the war — but for a great regression, no, in the history of being.
18:35 A degeneration, to use his word. Now, his master, the great philosopher — that's not my position, but I have a lot of respect for the man who launched Heidegger at the university — that's Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, well, of twentieth-century phenomenology, because when one says phenomenology, some people think of Hegel, after all. But when one says phenomenology plain and simple, as a current of thought, it of course refers to what stems from Husserl, to go straight to the essential.
19:14 In Heidegger, the word is sometimes laudatory, as here, sometimes pejorative — that metaphysics, starting with Plato, who is the first, and some say the greatest of metaphysicians, that starting with Plato, for Heidegger, philosophical reflection abandons the concern for being. Already, the Platonic division between essence and appearance is unacceptable. We had already betrayed the great immediate contact with being that the pre-Socratics had, the Parmenides and others of that era.
19:45 There, I've already gone into this elsewhere, I won't come back to it. So, you see, sometimes "metaphysics" is a pejorative term, that is, abstracting away from what is irreducibly ontological in being, and sometimes "metaphysics" has its ordinary meaning, that is, what goes beyond nature, beyond physics, beyond science, that is, beyond positive knowledge — and that's the case here regarding the motorization of the Wehrmacht. End of quote.
Intellectual honesty: "I might have been worse" 20:15 I'm very glad to have the opportunity to add this appendix to the sequence you're kind enough to be watching. I'm going to start a sentence and I didn't quite land on my feet, let me explain when I say "After all, I might have been worse than Heidegger himself." I'm trying to show my honesty. It's not up to me to prove my honesty, I mean, one is always a scoundrel in the place one least expects to be, I'm not idealizing myself and I have, like everyone, a personal unconscious — that's of no interest.
20:46 Then I also certainly have a class interest, that's not at that level either, but I'm not talking about absolute, philosophical, metaphysical honesty, I'm talking about intellectual honesty. Some find that I'm sometimes a bit too obsessed with Nazism. It's extraordinary that at the very moment Nazism is making the biggest comeback in current affairs, in Europe, the far right in general, and then certain discourses openly claiming the worst positions of the Nazi era — I'm thinking in particular of a government with which the whole of NATO maintains the best relations, and I'm also thinking of Ukraine or the Baltic states, right, where there are statements and even insignia, a set of visuals, to use the language of a communications specialist, openly Nazi — I pushed honesty so far as to say I might have been worse than Heidegger during the war.
21:37 Here I'm applying my Marxist convictions, given the same milieu of origin, an expatriate bourgeoisie — imagine, right, that my father had been posted to the French colonial administration and that he had ended up in German South-West Africa, as it was called at the time, present-day Namibia, or in Tanzania, which was called Tanganyika at that time, or in Togo and Cameroon — there were a few little German patches like that within the immense French and British colonial empires.
22:13 I would have been straightforwardly cast as a sympathizer of the Reich, sociologically speaking already, but that's not what I hold most against him — having had Nazi ideas at that time. No one could be an officer of the Reich without belonging to the Nazi party, for instance, and not all of them were executioners, including those enrolled in the Nazi party. Very quickly, let me give you an example — it's rare for me to resort to personal anecdote, but I mean my ex-father-in-law, may the earth rest lightly on him as they say, who was a Luftwaffe ace, the German air force, during the war, who was therefore enrolled in the Nazi party like every officer — he was a minor officer — but who before the war was a gliding instructor, gymnastic gliders in secondary schools, and his specialty was gliding.
23:02 And so, as planes came to be in short supply given everything the British, the Russians, the Allies shot down, gliders played an important role as preliminary training for apprentice pilots of the Reich. Before the war, in 1936, the Berlin Olympics — in 1936, my ex-father-in-law is asked by Berlin, following his regional selection, to take part in the Berlin Olympics. He's told, from Berlin, the performances are very good, ten point six, hundred meters, that's outstanding, but listen, the Blums, the Birnbaums, those, remove them for me — well, anyway, there were Jews on his selected team, and he's asked to remove them.
23:46 My father-in-law's response, enrolled in the Nazi party: I don't understand what sport has to do with politics, I'm sure that if the Führer knew about your letter, he wouldn't be pleased at all — you see, what Hegel already called German political misery. There, I won't say anything more, well, that man wasn't a scoundrel, fine. So, I'm trying to be intellectually honest, I might have been worse — what I don't forgive Heidegger for is the postwar period, you see, it's the role he played, in other words, if I may — since, because of the subject I'm discussing, I'm led toward metaphors revolving around the army and weapons — in my crosshairs, I especially have the postwar French school of philosophy, with a bunch of forgers, some of whom still now bar access to certain compromising Heidegger manuscripts, for example, and who maintain around him this guru-ification, forgive the barbarism, appalling as it is.
The post-war period, NATO, and the popes 24:49 What I don't forgive Heidegger for is that he kept putting technology on trial, keeping the same anti-communist ideas, and being the darling philosopher of NATO. NATO, which, in that period, in the immediate postwar years, was so absorbed by the anti-communist struggle, in this case anti-Soviet. I'll give only two examples of NATO's compromise with the worst of Nazism, namely the recruitments. The recruitment of the head of the West German secret services — now, it's not exactly held up as a model of democratic virtue.
25:28 Even though it's the German right that runs it, the most compromised with what I'm about to talk about, with Atlanticism. The Americans handed over to the West German Federal Republic's secret service — I'm now speaking of the postwar period — General Gehlen, known as the Grey General, who was in charge of anti-Soviet espionage and who hunted down, right, and it was better not to be in the shoes of the communists he took prisoner. And it's he, right, who would run West Germany's secret services until his death.
26:01 Second recruitment: Klaus Barbie, yes, the butcher of Jean Moulin, taken prisoner, like many, in the Western occupation zones by the Americans during the war, and handed over to the Bolivian dictatorship of Hugo Banzer, who was the executioner of Bolivia at the time, and whose primary concern was to fight the Castroist guerrillas. Always the same struggle, you see? And Klaus Barbie went back into service, went after the Reds, but in a bloody way, right, working alongside the Bolivian special police.
26:44 There, I mean, the fact that Heidegger did not denounce that camp, did not distance himself from it, but instead became the darling of that camp. The Pope — I'm not talking about John Paul II, whom the Canard Enchaîné called Jean-Paul Soski, but his successor, or actually both, John Paul II as well as his successor, Benedict, I believe — recommended reading Heidegger to their flock, to use a fitting term, and it's quite fitting indeed.
27:14 I'm not indulging in fantasy, I'm not overstating the case. How, on some occasion, should I tell you that I'm falling short of the truth? As if it were so painful to think that one has trouble going all the way each time. There, I wanted to add this to finish my reasoning. I might have been worse. So, it's not really the pre-war Heidegger. You don't need to be a genius to convince yourself of just how much of a Nazi he was. He was the most Nazi of the philosophers of his time. And if he had run-ins with his hierarchy and the university and the academic administration in Freiburg, it was precisely because he wasn't considered political enough and was too compromising.
27:52 He was too radical. Don't just take my word for it. Consult the documentation. We have it now. The archives are open, except for those to which access is forbidden to us by Heidegger's French and Parisian disciples. There you go. So, it's not that Heidegger so much, since I'm telling you that I might have been worse. How would you want me to be more honest than that? In terms of probability. Once again, we wonder whether it's the same "I," but that's another, almost metaphysical, problem.
28:22 When conditions are different to that extent, is it the same identity? But what I do not forgive is the postwar period. It's the relentlessness. There is no guilt whatsoever in that man. So, there you go. I mean, I wanted to make this point clear, and I thank Pierre-Alain for having agreed to play overtime to allow me to do so.
