SUNYSUNY seriesseries inin ContemporaryContemporary FrenchFrench ThoughtThought SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought SUNY series in Contemporary FRENCH INTERPRETATIONS OF HEIDEGGER An Exceptional Reception Edited by DavidDavid PettigrewPettigrew and François Raffoul SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought Thought Thought French French French Contemporary Contemporary Contemporary in in in series series series SUNY SUNY SUNY FRENCH INTERPRETATIONS OF HEIDEGGER SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, editors FRENCH INTERPRETATIONS OF HEIDEGGER An Exceptional Reception Edited by David Pettigrew and françois Raffoul S tate U niversity of N ew Y ork P ress Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production and book design, Laurie Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data French interpretations of Heidegger : an exceptional reception / edited by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul. p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary French thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7559-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Philosophy, French. I. Pettigrew, David, 1951– II. Raffoul, François, 1960– B3279.H49F745 2008 193—dc22 2007044951 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction David Pettigrew and François Raffoul 1 One Toward the End of the “French Exception”? Dominique Janicaud 23 Tw o Levinas’s Heideggerian Fantasm Reginald Lilly 35 Three The Thoughtful Dialogue Between Martin Heidegger and Jean Beaufret:A New Way of Doing Philosophy Pierre Jacerme 59 Four Postscripts to the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”: Heidegger, Sartre, and Being-Human Dennis Skocz 73 Five Merleau-Ponty’s 1959 Heidegger Lectures: The Task of Thinking and the Possibility of Philosophy Today Wayne Froman 89 Six Self-Fashioning as a Response to the Crisis of “Ethics”: A Foucault/Heidegger AUSEINANDERSETZUNG Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg 103 Contents Seven Contamination, Essence, and Decomposition: Heidegger and Derrida Andrew Mitchell 131 Eight Between Deleuze and Heidegger There Never Is Any Difference Jonathan Dronsfield 151 Nine On a Divine WINK Jean-Luc Nancy 167 Te n Sticking Heidegger with a Stela: Lacoue-Labarthe, Art and Politics Gregory Schufreider 187 Eleven Dwelling with Language: Irigaray Responds Helen A. Fielding 215 Twelve Forgiving “LA DETTE IMPENSÉE”: Being Jewish and Reading Heidegger Allen Scult 231 Thirteen The Poverty of Heidegger’s “Last God” Jean Greisch 245 Fourteen The Reception and Nonreception of Heidegger in France Françoise Dastur 265 List of Contributors 291 Index 295 vi Acknowledgments We would like to thank Jane Bunker, editor-in-chief at SUNY Press, for her support of this project from its earliest stages. Our deepest gratitude to Mme Nicole Janicaud for her encouragement and for her permission to include Professor Dominique Janicaud’s lecture, “Toward the End of the ‘French Exception’?,” presented at the 2002 meeting of the North American Heidegger Conference at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven.This volume is dedicated to his memory. We would also like to recognize our colleagues from the North American Heidegger Conference for their contributions to this volume. At Louisiana State University,we would like to express our gratitude to the staff of the philosophy department, Jen O’Connor and Margaret Toups,for their help throughout. Our appreciation also goes to Troy Mellon, John Castore, and James Ryan for their assistance with the editorial preparation of Françoise Das- tur’s chapter. We would like to express our great appreciation for the support provided by a Connecticut State University Research Grant, and for the research-reassigned time provided by DonnaJean Fredeen, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences of Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU).We also thank Provost Selase Williams and former Associate Academic Vice President Ellen Beatty at SCSU for their encouragement and support of the project. We are indeed grateful to Armen Marsoobian, Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at SCSU and to Ms. Sheila Magnotti, Department Secretary, for all their support. Our thanks to John Dudley,of the Philosophy Department at Southern Con- necticut State University, for editing Dominique Janicaud’s essay for presentation at the Heidegger Conference, and to Dr. Cathy Leblanc, teaching and research assistant at the University of Arras (France), who provided valuable assistance for the translation of Françoise Dastur’s chapter. Special thanks to Jedidiah Mohring, of the Philosophy Department at SCSU, for his careful review of the final pages. Finally, our heartfelt gratitude goes to Mélida Badilla Carmona for her steadfast support. vii Introduction David Pettigrew and François Raffoul In May 2002, the annual meeting of the North American Heidegger Confer- ence took place at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven.The conference, entitled “Heidegger and France,” was inspired by Dominique Jani- caud’s opus magnum Heidegger en France, a remarkable work that chronicles the reception of Heidegger over the course of more than seven decades. Dominique Janicaud was one of two invited keynote speakers at the confer- ence. Tragically, he was to die unexpectedly in August of the same year. This book, drawn from many of the papers presented at the Heidegger conference along with other invited contributions, is dedicated to his memory. While Dominique Janicaud’s book Heidegger en France is a groundbreak- ing intellectual history of that reception, a radical and bold intertwining of Historie and Geschichte (much of Janicaud’s book is a reconstruction of the his- tory of the reception of Heidegger’s work, following a chronological order from the late twenties and early thirties until the end of the century1), French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception undertakes a philosophical engagement of the work of a number of the most significant and most cre- ative figures of that reception. Dominique Janicaud’s own essay,“Toward the End of the ‘French Exception’?,” delivered at the Heidegger Conference, serves as an introduction to this volume. Janicaud’s essay is then followed by chapters that address the work of the thinkers who have engaged Heidegger’s work, including Jean Beaufret, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean- Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Luce Irigaray, Marlène Zarader, Jean Greisch, and Françoise Dastur. In turn, and through these essays, this volume further explores the extraordinary impact that Heidegger’s thought has had on contemporary French philosophy. The French interpretations of Heidegger2 present the paradox of an encounter between the French Cartesian tradition of consciousness and reason 1 David Pettigrew and François Raffoul and a thought marked by the German phenomenological tradition. As Françoise Dastur explains in her chapter, “The Reception and Nonreception of Heidegger in France,”“We have, on the one hand, a Cartesian tradition that inaugurates the metaphysics of subjectivity that characterized modern thought, allied to a scientism and a positivism that give an exclusive privilege to the ontic, and on the other hand, the speculative summit of German idealism open- ing the way to both Husserlian transcendentalism and Heideggerian ontolo- gism” (FIH, 267).This is an unlikely relation, and yet this peculiar hermeneu- tic encounter has been extraordinarily productive and has given rise to a tremendously creative body of work.As Janicaud describes it,“there took place a series of dramatic, passionate, polemical attitudes or interpretations”: not a peaceful reception but a veritable polemical turmoil.This explains in part why this reception also led to major (creative) misunderstandings, not the least of which being Sartre’s well-known misappropriation of Heidegger’s vocabulary in Being and Time as an ontologized anthropology, an existential Cartesianism. Janicaud rightly reminds us that Sartre appropriates so many insights from Sein und Zeit that “it is almost impossible to sum them up: facticity, being-in-the- world, freedom as transcendence, the ontological role of anxiety, the phenom- enological description of the structures of inauthenticity and even the existen- tial openness to authenticity” (FIH, 26). In Sartre’s text,these motifs are used to mean something quite different from Heidegger’s intent,which at the time was nothing less than a project of fundamental ontology, whereas Sartre develops a philosophy of the human will as absolute. Janicaud thus observes that the French “reception” of Heidegger has been anything but passive; in fact, it led to quite diverse interpretations, appropriations, or misappropriations (even if these were brilliant and inventive, as in the case of Sartre).3 The fact remains that the phenomenon of