Aftereffect and Scandal: Martin Heidegger in France
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1960 that the case of Martin Heidegger was too complex for him to explain at the time. What Sartre did not--could not? would not?-address some thirty years ago returns today as aftereffect and scandal. Until recently, the reception of Heidegger's writings in France bordered on the reverential. As a cultural figure, he came to personify the philosopher-poet whose conception of language and practice of writing inspired a generation of artists and writers including Georges Braque, Maurice Blanchot, and Rene Char. This portrayal is meaningful when it is set against an alternative view of Heidegger more prevalent among British and American philosophers as "the best comic example of the philosophical quack."' Reference at the level of national practice often borders on caricature. But it also asserts that philosophy is not merely a tradition of texts and issues made up of "great books" and/or "great ideas." Philosophy is undeniably this, but it is also a set of practices, discourses, and institutions that regulate how ideas and books circulate in the public sphere. The pages that follow study the specifically French setting of debate over Heidegger. Despite my misgivings over the validity of reference at the level of national practice, my inquiry derives from a strong sense that the fate of a German philosopher in France points with particular urgency to questions related to philosophy as discourse and institution. National practice is thus a point of departure and a self-imposed constraint. To my knowledge, the first of Martin Heidegger's writings published in France was a 1931 translation of "What is Metaphysics?" that appeared in Bifur alongside "La Legende de la verit'" ("The Legend of Truth"), an early fiction--a philosopher's tale-by the young Jean-Paul Sartre! After World War II, the divergence between Sartre's 1946 Existentialism is a Humanism and Heidegger's 1947 "Letter on Humanism" revised a tutelage Sartre had