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A Bataillean Answer to the Heidegger Controversy University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School March 2020 Nostalgia and (In)authentic Community: A Bataillean Answer to the Heidegger Controversy Patrick Miller University of South Florida Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the Philosophy Commons Scholar Commons Citation Miller, Patrick, "Nostalgia and (In)authentic Community: A Bataillean Answer to the Heidegger Controversy" (2020). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/8256 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Nostalgia and (In)authentic Community: A Bataillean Answer to the Heidegger Controversy by Patrick Miller A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Joshua Rayman, Ph.D. Co-Major Professor: Stephen Turner, Ph.D. Lee Braver, Ph.D. Douglas Jesseph, Ph.D. Alphonso Lingis, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March, 26, 2020 Keywords: Bataille, Heidegger, Fascism, Community, Authenticity Copyright © 2020, Patrick Miller Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter I: Early French Reception of Heidegger ............................................................................7 Gurvitch, West of the Rhine ................................................................................................9 Levinas, an Insider’s Reading ............................................................................................20 Wahl on Kierkegaard and Heidegger .................................................................................35 The First Official Translation ............................................................................................42 Kojève’s Heideggerianism .................................................................................................45 A Brief Marxist Response and Sartre ................................................................................52 Chapter II: Bataille’s “Critique of Heidegger” ..............................................................................57 “The Anthropology of Exit” ..............................................................................................70 Chapter III: Bataille on Fascism and Heidegger ............................................................................79 “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” ........................................................................80 “Nietzschean Chronicle” ....................................................................................................85 “Propositions” ....................................................................................................................90 Consolidation .....................................................................................................................92 Claims of Fascism ..............................................................................................................95 Bataille contra Heidegger ................................................................................................112 Correspondence between Bataille’s Criticism and Views on Fascism ............................129 Chapter IV: The Black Notebooks and Concluding Remarks ......................................................137 The Black Notebooks and Anti-Semitism ........................................................................139 Denouement .....................................................................................................................153 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................162 i Abstract Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism has been debated since the 1930s. In the late 1930s, Georges Bataille wrote an incomplete text that would have added to these debates, “Critique of Heidegger: Critique of a philosophy of fascism.” I draw on this fragment and Bataille’s writings from this era in order to develop a fuller critique of Heidegger and his relationship to fascism. This expanded critique completes the promise of Bataille’s original fragment, offering a full Bataillean criticism of Heidegger and displaying the connections between his philosophy and Bataille’s understanding of fascism. This critique hinges on Heidegger’s concept of authenticity and community, as a Bataillean reading would interpret these ideas as mere inauthentic useful concepts in the name of a nostalgic vision of the ancient Greeks. Heidegger wanted to fight against modern technological alienation—exemplified by the modern sciences and founded on subject based modern metaphysics—by returning to a more originary relationship with Being, but, on Bataille’s reading, without the will to pervert modern ideology and the political system. This desire for a return renders his Destruktion of the history of metaphysics means to an end, further calcifying preexisting values. As a result of this inability to pervert, Heidegger’s return promotes the reconstitution of contemporary political structures with a strong centralized authority figure empowered to guide this nostalgic return. ii Introduction The debate around Heidegger and Nazism has been raging since he joined the party on May 1, 1933. The primary question is whether his magnum opus, Being and Time, lends itself to fascism or whether Heidegger’s time in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP for short) was merely an episode in his life—unrelated to his phenomenology. France has been debating Heidegger since the 1940s, at least. Periodically new publications reignite this debate beyond the confines of the academy: especially Victor Farias’ Heidegger and Nazism (1987), Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005) and Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (2014). One voice absent from this debate is Georges Bataille. In the latter half of the 1930s, Bataille wrote and partially edited a text that was likely intended as an addendum to one of his books. What makes this text noteworthy are the title and its topic—“Critique of Heidegger: Critique of a philosophy of fascism.” This is one of the few texts that Bataille wrote that directly criticizes or mentions Martin Heidegger. Bataille’s “Propositions” only mentions Heideggerian time. Inner Experience offers a multitude of explicit references to Heidegger, but none of these are more than mere references, and no substantial criticism is offered in “Propositions” or Inner Experience. Bataille’s later references to Heidegger are more substantial, but do not address the Nazi question. Thus, “Critique of Heidegger” offers the only sustained text on the thinker. It is obviously incomplete, containing summaries of themes to be explicated. The question then is, what is the benefit of focusing upon this incomplete and unpublished material? There are at least 1 three reasons to pursue this line of inquiry. First, there is little written on the relationship between these two figures. Heidegger is arguably the most important philosopher of the 20th century and Bataille, though often overlooked, had an important influence on arguably the next two greatest figures in twentieth-century continental philosophy—Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The absence of scholarship on the relationship between Bataille and Heidegger is problematic, because they represent two prominent contemporary traditions, proto- postmodernism and phenomenology, respectively. Second, this critique was written at a time of flux in the early French reception of Heidegger. The early 1930s saw cursory and celebratory readings of Heidegger. In the 1940s, Heidegger became a bigger name through the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s early novels, plays, and Being and Nothingness (1943), but then he was read exclusively through the lens of Sartre’s existential philosophy. Bataille’s fragment long predates the first public debates about Heidegger’s relationship to Nazis, the Denazification hearings. The only French criticisms to pre-date Bataille’s critique are by Emmanuel Levinas and a few Marxist philosophers. For the latter, there is no contemporaneous text, for these criticisms were recounted later. My reconstruction of Bataille’s critique, then, is an attempt to revive a train of thought and to contextualize an early critique of Heidegger in France. Third, a thorough explanation of this text presents the possibility of rescuing Bataille from his own problem of fascism by explicating his own much misunderstood understanding of it. Bataille’s critique of fascism is surprising and original considering the history of debate on the topic and later social philosophers’ definitions of fascism. Walter Benjamin once claimed 2 that Bataille “worked for the fascist.”1 This statement is indicative of just how abnormal Bataille’s political thought
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