Heidegger's Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology

HEIDEGGER’S BLACK NOTEBOOKS AND THE FUTURE OF THEOLOGY Edited by Mårten Björk and Jayne Svenungsson Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology Mårten Björk · Jayne Svenungsson Editors Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and the Future of Theology Editors Mårten Björk Jayne Svenungsson University of Gothenburg Centre for Theology and Religious Gothenburg, Sweden Studies Lund University Lund, Sweden

ISBN 978-3-319-64926-9 ISBN 978-3-319-64927-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64927-6

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements

We wish to express our gratitude to Amy Invernizzi and Phil Getz at Palgrave Macmillan for their encouragement and support. Thanks are also due to Anders Karitz Foundation and Olaus Petristiftelsen, whose generous support facilitated this intellectual endeavour. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, who frst enabled this project by offering generous support to the symposium ‘Heidegger and Theology—after the Black Notebooks’, held at Lund University, Sweden, in December 2015.

v Contents

1 Introduction: Heidegger and Theology after the Black Notebooks 1 Jayne Svenungsson

2 Religion in the Black Notebooks: Overview and Analysis 23 Judith Wolfe

3 In the Spirit of Paul: Thinking the Hebraic Inheritance (Heidegger, Bultmann, Jonas) 49 Hans Ruin

4 Why Heidegger Didn’t Like Catholic Theology: The Case of Romano Guardini 77 George Pattison

5 Anarchist Singularities or Proprietorial Resentments? on the Christian Problem in Heidegger’s Notebooks of the 1930s 99 Ward Blanton

6 Monotheism as a Metapolitical Problem: Heidegger’s War Against Jewish Christian Monotheism 131 Christoph Schmidt

vii viii Contents

7 Love Strong as Death: Jews Against Heidegger (On the Issue of Finitude) 159 Agata Bielik-Robson

8 Apocalypse and the History of Being 191 Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

9 Gottwesen and the De-Divinization of the Last God: Heidegger’s Meditation on the Strange and Incalculable 211 Elliot R. Wolfson

10 Confessions and Considerations: Heidegger’s Early Black Notebooks and His Lecture on Augustine’s Theory of Time 257 Marius Timmann Mjaaland

11 The Irritability of Being: Martin Heidegger, Hans Driesch and the Future of Theology 277 Mårten Björk

Index 315 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Mårten Björk is a Doctoral Student in Theology and Religious Studies at Gothenburg University, Sweden. His dissertation is about the discussion on eternal life and immortality amongst Christian and Jewish German-speaking philosophers and theologians in the period from 1914 to 1945. He has published several essays and articles, for example ‘Plotinos’ in Agamben’s Philosophical Lineage (2017) and ‘Representation and the Unrepresentable: Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt and the Limits of Politics’ in The Contemporary Relevance of Carl Schmitt (2015).

Jayne Svenungsson is Professor of Systematic Theology at Lund University, Sweden. She is the author of Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit (2016) and co-editor of Jewish Thought, Utopia and Revolution (2014), Monument and Memory (2015) and The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility (2018). She has also published numerous articles on political theology, philosophy of history and twentieth-century Jewish thought.

ix x Editors and Contributors

Contributors

Agata Bielik-Robson is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Her publications include: The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Infuence (2014) and Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (2014). She is also a co-editor of Bamidbar. The Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy, which appears in English in Passagen Verlag, in Vienna. Ward Blanton is Reader in Biblical Cultures and European Thought at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, for which he also teaches in Paris and Rome. He is the author of A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (2014); Displacing Christian Origins: Philosophy, Secularity, and the New Testament (2007); and co- editor with Hent de Vries of Paul and the Philosophers (2013). Marius Timmann Mjaaland is Professor at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Norway, and President of the Nordic Society for Philosophy of Religion (since 2006). His publications include The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy and Political Theology (2016), Autopsia: Kierkegaard and Derrida on Self, Death and God (2008) and numerous articles on existentialism, theology, political philosophy and phenomenology. George Pattison is 1640 Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, UK, having previously held positions at the universities of Cambridge, Aarhus and Oxford. He is also a Visiting Professor in Theology at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively on the relationship between existentialism and theology, including the Routledge Guidebook to the Later Heidegger (2000) and Heidegger and Death (2013). He is also co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (2013) and is currently working on a three-part Philosophy of Christian Life. Hans Ruin is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Sweden. He is the President of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology and a member of the board of Nietzsche-Studien, Sats and Jahrbuch für Hermeneutische Philosophie. He is co-editor for Södertörn Philosophical Editors and CONTRIBUTORS xi

Studies and has published extensively on phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction and philosophy of history and memory. He is also the author of Enigmatic Origins: Tracing the Theme of Historicity Through Heidegger’s Works (1994), An introduction to Being in Time (in Swedish, 2004) and Freedom, Finitude, Historicity. Essays on Heidegger’s Philosophy (in Swedish, 2013). Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University, Sweden. She has previously worked as Associate Professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil. Her feld of specialization is continental philosophy, with focus on phenomenology, hermeneutics, German idealism and contemporary existential philosophy. She has authored and edited several monographs and volumes in Swedish, Portuguese and English, including Lovtal till Intet—essäer om flosofsk hermeneutik (2006), Att tänka i skisser (2011), Being with the Without, a conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy (2013), Dis-orientations. Philosophy, Literature and the Lost grounds of Modernity (2015), ‘History Today’, special issue of the journal Philosophy Today (2017) and most recently The End of the World (2017). Christoph Schmidt is Associate Professor at the Department of Comparative Religion and the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University, Israel. He has published four books and numerous articles on questions dealing with the problem of political theology in modern secular culture. He is presently working on a book on Heidegger’s ‘dramat- urgies of truth’. Judith Wolfe is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St Andrews, UK. She has written two monographs on Martin Heidegger: Heidegger’s Eschatology (2013) and Heidegger and Theology (2014). She has also co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought (2017) and published numerous articles on theology and philosophy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Elliot R. Wolfson a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of many publications including Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (2009), A Dream Interpreted within a xii Editors and Contributors

Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011), and Giving beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (2014). The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism and the Jewish Other, and Heidegger and the Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis, will appear in 2018. CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Heidegger and Theology after the Black Notebooks

Jayne Svenungsson

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the reception of Heidegger in several ways entered a new phase. These were the years during which the damning studies of both Victor Farías (1987) and Hugo Ott (1988) appeared. While Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies had been well known ever since his own explicit commitment in his inaugural speech as the Nazi-installed rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, Farías and Ott, using newly uncovered documents, laid bare the extent of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism.1 The shift between the 1980s and 1990s was also the time when Heidegger’s lecture series from the early Freiburg period began to appear in the Gesamtausgabe of his works.2 These now famous lectures revealed Heidegger’s intense interest in religious experience as a key feld for phenomenological enquiry. Even more so, it seemed that Heidegger frst discovered phenomenology as a method essentially through his engagement with religious experience, and more particularly, with ‘Christian’ (Pauline, Augustinian) experience.3

J. Svenungsson (*) Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Again, this was not entirely new knowledge. Just as Heidegger’s political preferences had been known through the very trajectory of his life, so the theological roots of his thinking had been indicated by himself, notably in a well-known and often quoted comment from the early 1950s: ‘Without this theological origin, I would never have embarked on the path to thinking. And our origin always remains our future.’4 Moreover, the theological undertones of Heidegger’s late philosophy had been a topic of debate all along the way, not least among theologians (a topic to which I shall come back in a moment). Yet the availability of the early Freiburg lectures raised the debate about the signifcance of theology for Heidegger’s philosophy to a new level. In addition, an array of ground-breaking studies on the theological genesis of Heidegger’s early phenomenology appeared during the same years, the most signifcant of which were Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1993), John van Buren’s The Young Heidegger (1994), and Kisiel’s and van Buren’s jointly edited volume Reading Heidegger from the Start (1994).5 In what ways did the newly uncovered material cast Heidegger’s philosophy in a new light? To gain an answer, we need to look closer at Heidegger’s venture, during the frst Freiburg period, to formulate what he termed a ‘hermeneutics of facticity’.6 His endeavour, more specifcally, was to retrieve the ‘factical’ or concrete experience of life that lay concealed beneath the sediments of tradition, be it of classical theological texts such as Paul’s letters, or of philosophical works such as Aristotle’s ethics. An embryo to this desire to break through the surface of traditional philosophy’s abstract categories can be found already in his Habilitationsschrift on Duns Scotus from 1915. In a paragraph of the postscript, Heidegger briefy discusses the relationship between Scholastic philosophy and medieval mysticism. While it has been commonplace throughout modernity to represent Scholasticism and mysticism as counter-currents in medieval ecclesial life, Heidegger marks a clear distance to such a view. Instead he indicates that it is only against the backdrop of the lived religious experience testifed to in the mystical sources that the abstract categories of Scholasticism in the frst place become intelligible.7 What is here expressed in embryonic form reaches its full-fedged form fve years later in Heidegger’s lecture series on the ‘phenomenology of religious life’, comprising readings of the New Testament, Neoplatonism and Augustine. It is famously the Pauline epistles that cap- ture Heidegger’s interest in the New Testament, in particular Galatians and Thessalonians. The signifcance of those letters for Heidegger lies in 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 3 the way in which they offer the very key to the ‘factical lifeworld’ of the New Testament communities: the expectation of the parusia—the fnal return of the Christ. In light of these eschatological expectations, early Christian life entailed an existence in constant uncertainty and insecurity, echoed in Paul’s caution ‘For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5: 1–2). Heidegger paints a sharp contrast between this disposition of uncertainty and the existential complacency characteristic of the speculative eschatologies of the surrounding world as well as of later Christian atti- tudes. Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians to keep ‘awake and sober’ should be seen in light of this contrast—his answer regarding the ‘when’ of the parusia is not a fxed time, but precisely an urging for watchful- ness. According to Heidegger, what is revealed here are two fundamentally opposed forms of ‘factical life’: on the one hand, a life in existential insecurity and ‘affiction’ (Bedrängnis), on the other, a life that remains caught in the ‘worldly’, complacent with a closed system of answers as regards the existential questions of ‘what’ and ‘when’.8 The argument brought forward by Kisiel, van Buren and others, was that Heidegger’s early phenomenological studies of religious experience in fact revealed the genesis of Being and Time. In other words, it was possible to discern a direct genealogy from his early hermeneutics of facticity to the ‘existential analytic’ of Dasein undertaken by Heidegger in his magnum opus from 1927. For instance, one could assume that the distinction between two fundamentally opposed forms of factical life in his readings of Paul expressed a preliminary stage to the distinction made in Being and Time between ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ existence. Of particular interest was the way in which authentic existence (characterized by ‘resoluteness’ and ‘being-unto-death’ and so on) seemed to correspond to the form of factical life that Paul prescribed to the Thessalonians, whereas inauthentic existence (characterized by an incli- nation to ward off the precariousness of existence and escape to a crowd mentality) seemed to correspond to the form of factical life that Paul turned against. In addition, as Jean Greisch painstakingly revealed, the concept of ‘care’ (Sorge)—one of the key determinations of Dasein in the existential analytic—found its prototype in Heidegger’s observation that the factical life of the early Christian communities not only meant a life in existential affiction, but also a life characterized by ‘absolute concern’ (absolute Bekümmerung).9 It was not only the existential analytic that seemed to be anticipated in Heidegger’s early phenomenological works. Also his more general 4 J. Svenungsson philosophical venture to dismantle the history of metaphysics could be traced back to his youthful engagement with theological sources. For instance, John van Buren pointed to the crucial role the young Luther played for Heidegger’s emerging critique of metaphysics and argued that his concept of a ‘destruction’ (Destruktion) of the metaphysical tradition found its prototype in Luther’s term destruere. Luther used this verb in the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, alluding to a prophecy related by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:19: ‘For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise”’. However, what Luther wished to ‘destroy’ was not wisdom as such, but the particular form of wisdom manifested in what he termed a ‘theology of glory’ (theologia gloriae), a theology that sought God only in his glory and majesty and was unable to see him in the suffering of the Cross. In a similar way, Heidegger’s project of a ‘destruction’ of the Western philosophical tradition—echoed a few decades later in Derrida’s déconstruction—was far from an attack on philosophy as such, but rather an attempt to restore philosophy to its true calling. It thus seemed, van Buren concluded, that Heidegger’s critical Auseinandersetzung with the history of metaphysics was at least in part inspired by the Reformer’s radical confrontation with Scholastic philosophy.10 While the discovery in the early 1990s of Heidegger’s ‘theological roots’ brought his thinking into a new light, it also put essential parts of twentieth-century theology in a new perspective. For if it was the case that Heidegger’s phenomenology in the frst place evolved as an attempt to adequately describe religious—even Christian—experience, then that undoubtedly brought a new dimension to the strong attraction his philosophy had exerted on generations of Christian theologians. This was not least the case with Being and Time, which had been a vital inspiration for Rudolf Bultmann’s ‘demythologization’ programme. To be sure, by the time Heidegger completed Being and Time, his interest in concrete examples of factical life (as for instance in the New Testament communities) had given way to an endeavour to ‘formalize’ the structures of factical life into a more general or neutral conceptualization. But the fact remained that these formalized structures were in no small part engendered by close studies of Christian sources. As John Caputo aptly remarked in his 1993 study Demythologizing Heidegger:

It was precisely because Being and Time was in part the issue of an attempt to formalize the structures of factical Christian life that it was greeted with such enthusiasm by Protestant theologians such as Bultmann. … When 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 5

Christian theologians looked into the pages of Being and Time they found themselves staring at their own image – formalized, ontologized, or, what amounts to the same thing, ‘demythologized’.11

However, to understand the strong infuence Heidegger exerted on generations of theologians, it is not enough to point to the intellectual indebtedness of his thinking to Christian sources. Equally important is to consider the particular predicament of theology in the twentieth century. This was a time when theology was pushed to the margins both cul- turally and academically, and infuential voices argued that the discipline simply did not live up to modern philosophical standards. In this precari- ous situation Heidegger offered recourse. With his sense for the radical historicity of all experience, his criticism of modern calculative thinking and his concern for the aspects of human life that cannot be rational- ized, Heidegger opened a pathway at a point where all other philosophical options seemed to lead to dead ends.12 This was the case especially on a methodological level. In his 1927 lecture ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, Heidegger himself had given his view on the status of theology as an academic discipline. Theology is here defned as an ‘ontic’ or ‘positive’ science, dealing with a positum or given region of beings (which in the case of theology is the content of Christian faith or what Heidegger terms Christlichkeit). As an ontic science, theology (like ‘chemistry’ or any other ‘positive’ discipline), stands in ‘absolute’ contrast to phenomenology, which is operating on an onto- logical level. The line of thought here is an elaboration of the argument in Being and Time which was published the same year: whereas phenomenology offers an analysis of the general or formal structures of human existence, the task of theology is to thematize the same structures within a ‘regional’ discourse founded on faith (as an example, Heidegger men- tions the theological concept of ‘sin’, which ultimately could be referred back to the more fundamental concept of ‘guilt’).13 What may appear as a reductive view of theology turned out to be exceedingly popular among theologians. The most well-known example, as already mentioned, is Rudolf Bultmann, who entertained a life- long friendship with Heidegger and took considerable inspiration from his endeavour to work out a formalized phenomenological structure of human existence.14 In tandem with Heidegger’s analytic of existence, the great New Testament theologian sought to uncover the uni- versal-existential message (the ‘kerygma’) of the canonical Gospels and 6 J. Svenungsson thereby relieve them—and above all their modern readers—of their ancient mythological worldview. As Caputo remarks, it is tempting to see in Bultmann’s demythologization programme a kind of reversal of Heidegger’s venture in Being and Time, a ‘de-formalizing’ of the existential analytic, as it was brought back and applied to the Christian sources it ultimately drew on.15 That being said, we need to remind ourselves, again, what made this methodological approach so attractive to theologians: in an era of grow- ing dechristianization in the Western societies, with fewer and fewer peo- ple being familiar with ‘thick’ Christian language, phenomenology made it possible to communicate theology to a secular world. Moreover, in the academic context, phenomenology offered theology a foundational narrative that enabled it to regain scientifc credibility. In this respect, one may fairly say that Heidegger contributed to salvage theology as an academic discipline at the modern university. Numerous were the twentieth-century theologians who adopted (in one way or another) Heidegger’s view on theology as indebted to a more general phenomenological description of the human existence, from existentialists such as Paul Tillich and John Macquarrie, to modern Thomists such as Edith Stein and Karl Rahner.16 Not all theologians accepted Heidegger’s division of labour between theology and phenomenology, however. Among the theologians who never became convinced about Heidegger’s signifcance for theology were, not least, Karl Barth.17 It is therefore something of an irony that one of the strongest theological spokesmen for Heidegger during the post-war era was Barth’s student and successor at the chair in Basel, Heinrich Ott. Yet this is not entirely incongruous. Ott had a profoundly Barthian conception of the task of theology and had little patience with Bultmann and other Marburg theologians’ existentialist appropriation of Heidegger’s phenomenology. In 1959, he published a book entitled Denken und Sein. Der Weg Martin Heideggers und der Weg der Theologie, in which he argued that Heidegger’s philosophy was in fact more com- patible with Barthian theology than with Bultmannian theology. Unlike Bultmann and the circle around him, Ott saw the real theological relevance of Heidegger not in his early phenomenology, but rather in his thinking after the ‘turn’ (Kehre) in the 1930s. More precisely, he found in Heidegger’s mature refections on humanity’s primordial relation to being and language an analogy—and thereby an enriching perspective— to the believer’s relation to God’s Word (understood in its full Barthian dimension).18 Interestingly, Heidegger immediately concurred with Ott 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 7 regarding the relevance of his later philosophy for theology. In a letter to Ott on the appearance of Denken und Sein, Heidegger wrote: ‘As long as anthropological-sociological conceptualizing and the conceptualizing of existentialism are not overcome and pushed to the side, theology will never enter into the freedom of saying what is entrusted to it.’19 The debate that followed upon the publication of Ott’s book in many ways became the starting point for the prolifc and long-lasting reception history of Heidegger’s late philosophy among theologians. In the autumn of 1959, the annual meeting of ‘the Old Marburgers’, a group of Bultmann’s former pupils, chose as its topic the relation of Heidegger to theology. Heidegger himself was invited to conduct a seminar, which he reportedly concluded by remarking that the door remained open for a ‘nonmetaphysical God’. He also proposed that the next year’s meeting should be dedicated to the theme ‘New Testament Exegesis and Systematic Theology’—which it was a year later, with Heinrich Ott as one of the key note speakers.20 In the years that followed, the debate about Heidegger’s relevance for theology was continued by Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling, Eberhard Jüngel and others. Steeped in a Bultmannian tradition, these theologians were highly critical of Ott’s appropriation of Heidegger, although they did not share Bultmann’s own reserve with regard to Heidegger’s late thinking. In 1961, Ebeling conducted a seminar on theology and Heidegger’s late philosophy in which Heidegger himself participated, and Heidegger was to remain a central inspiration to ‘the New Hermeneutic’ of Ebeling and Fuchs. By the same time, the debate moved overseas, as the American theologians James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb in 1963 launched a new volume series (at Harper & Row) intended to provide theological interaction between ‘the Old World and the New’. The frst volume was dedicated to ‘The Later Heidegger and Theology’, and the presentation on the front fap enthusiastically declared that ‘Heidegger’s publications since World War II reveal that his thought has taken a remarkable turn away from its earlier focus on the structure of human existence. This volume explores the special value and relevance of the later Heidegger for Christian theology’.21 A year later, in 1964, Heidegger was invited to give the inaugural lecture at a conference convened by Drew University, but eventually had to withdraw for reasons of health. The conference, devoted to the relevance of Heidegger’s thought to Protestant theology, took place as scheduled, with Heidegger’s (and Bultmann’s) earlier student Hans Jonas as a replacement. 8 J. Svenungsson

These historical episodes reveal not only the extent to which theologians took inspiration from Heidegger, but also the extent to which Heidegger engaged in a dialogue with the leading theologians of his time. Although the debate about ‘Heidegger and theology’ reached something of a pinnacle in the early 1960s, the theological reception history of Heidegger’s late philosophy has been going on, more or less unbroken, ever since. In 1979, a few years after Heidegger’s death, a colloquium on the relevance of Heidegger’s late thinking for ‘the question of God’ was held in Paris. Among the participants were an array of philosophers and theologians that would later be associated with the so called ‘theological turn’ within French phenomenology, notably Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion.22 It would take us too far afeld to begin to delve into the prolifc debate on Heidegger’s signifcance for ‘the question on God’ within French phenomenology from the 1980s and onwards. Suffce to say that this debate, in its turn, gave a vital impetus to the international theological debate in the 1990s, when the wave of ‘postmetaphysical theology’ began to surge.23 Although theologians involved in this latest wave of Heidegger’s theological reception history are generally highly critical of Heidegger, it is noteworthy that the theological debate to a very limited extent has refected the more general discussion about Heidegger’s political and ideological sympathies, especially since the early 1990s was also the period when Farías and Ott’s studies gained international attraction and brought Heidegger’s work into new light. The publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks from 2014 and onwards poses against this background a special challenge to theology. While the debate has been ferce and at times poisoned within the philosophical community, this has in many ways merely been an intensifca- tion of a debate that has been going on for decades. The same cannot be said of the theological community, which only more recently has begun to engage critically with Heidegger’s ideological sympathies. This is not, however, the only reason why the notebooks present a special challenge to theology. At least two more reasons can be given. The frst has to do with the most damning of the new facts revealed by the notebooks: Heidegger’s overt embracement of Antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Although the paragraphs in question amount to a dozen of instances out of hundreds of pages, these instances reveal in a breathtaking way how Heidegger’s privately held Antisemitism was in fact profoundly intertwined with his philosophical ideas.24 The longstanding 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 9 exculpatory narrative that his Nazi Party membership was an aber- ration with no deeper connection to his thinking thus has to be aban- doned once and for all. That being said, the notebooks also make clear that Heidegger’s Antisemitism was quite distinct from the crude Blut und Boden racism of the Nazis. But this hardly makes it less problematic, especially from a theological viewpoint. If Heidegger’s Antisemitism—replete with sinister clichés of the Jews as rootless, calculative and deceitful—can be inscribed in a long tradition of Western anti-Judaism, then this also brings to the fore Christian theology’s painful part in this history.25 The second reason why the Black Notebooks pose a special challenge to theology has to do precisely with Christianity. While remarks on Jews and Judaism are made only a handful of times (making them, as stated, no less chocking), Christianity and above all Catholicism is a constant theme of Heidegger’s critical refections during these years. To be sure, Heidegger pinpoints ‘World Jewry’ (Weltjudentum) as one of the main drivers of the modern will to master and control all beings. And yet Jews are ultimately depicted as only a symptom of a larger metaphysical curse that is traced all the way back to the biblical idea of a Creator God. It is this idea of a highest being that defnes all other beings in stable and intelligible categories that has paved the way for the modern tendency to reduce being to a series of objects that can be measured and calculated. However, it was only with Christianity that this idea was institutionalized and made into the ideological framework that came to defne the entire Western history.26 Whereas Christian theologians both earlier and later payed tribute to Heidegger for offering a bulwark against modern instrumentalizing reason, the Black Notebooks reveal that Heidegger himself—at least during these dark years—saw Christianity as essential to the kind of calculative thinking that had brought about humanity’s estrangement from being. At this point, however, one may remark once more that what the notebooks offer are not entirely new revelations. With regard to the relationship between Heidegger’s thinking and Christianity, we have in this respect an interesting document in the lecture that Hans Jonas delivered at the 1964 conference at Drew University. As already mentioned, Jonas was called in as replacement for Heidegger, who had withdrawn for reasons of health. The lecture that Jonas fnally delivered is intriguing in a number of respects. Refecting on the appeal of Heidegger’s thought to Christian theologians, Jonas frst drew attention to the extent to which 10 J. Svenungsson

Heidegger’s philosophy in fact embodied elements from Christian theology; categories such as guilt, care, anxiety, call of conscience, resolution and authenticity were all derivative from a biblical language. Interestingly, Jonas thereby touched upon aspects of Heidegger’s thought that were to be debated more widely only in the 1990s, when his lectures from the early Freiburg period were made available in the Gesamtausgabe (see above). But Jonas was not primarily interested in revealing the presence of secularized Christianity in Heidegger’s thinking. Rather he wished to enquire what this meant for theology, especially for those Protestant theologians who had sworn intellectual fdelity to Heidegger. First and foremost, Jonas suggested, it meant that those theologians were in no small part reimporting their own original product. However, if this was indeed the case, then perhaps theologians ought to think a second time and ask themselves what they were in fact importing when reimporting their own product in Heideggerian shape.27 This question, Jonas made clear, was not for him as a Jewish philosopher to answer, but strictly for the Christian theologian. Nonetheless he left no one in doubt about his own position on the issue. Pointing to the fundamental incompatibility between Heidegger’s ‘fate-laden character of thinking’ and the biblical view on history and the human being, Jonas questioned the way in which the theologians had let themselves be seduced by Heidegger’s idea of thinking as the self-unveiling history of being itself. His sober but relentless polemic reached its pinnacle in a passage where he countered the theologians’ embracing of a Heideggerian conceptualization in their approach to the Bible, reducing the biblical texts to a linguistic record of humans’ ‘answer’ to the call of being:

[Q]uite consistently, is the Bible [according to these theologians] taken as one linguistic record of such answer, ‘the Biblical answer to the word of God’. But I fnd more than human answer in the Bible, taken by its own claim. I hear questions to man, such as these: ‘Adam, where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9); ‘Cain, where is Abel your brother?’ (Genesis 4:9): this is not the voice of being; and ‘He has told you, O man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: what else but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?’ (Micah 6:8). This requires more than a linguistic answer. 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 11

But as to Heidegger’s being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Führer and the call of German des- tiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger’s thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls—linguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call. But to the believer, ever suspicious of this world, depth may mean the abyss, and force, the prince of this world. As if the devil were not part of the voice of being! Heidegger’s own answer is, to the shame of philosophy, on record and, I hope, not forgotten.28

These gripping words tell us above all something about Jonas; as Richard Wolin remarks in his sensitive rendering of the episode at Drew: ‘by daring to confront Heidegger’s Nazism directly and—what was at the time even more controversial—by seeking to tie the philosopher’s political lapsus directly to the defciencies of his thought, Jonas displayed the unwavering moral integrity that would become the hallmark of his life and work’.29 However, the words may also be read as an invitation to theology to gain a more refective approach to its own long-lasting romance with Heidegger. Although the conference at Drew reportedly ended with the audience giving Jonas a standing ovation, theology by and large continued with business as usual with regard to its intellectual indebtedness to Heidegger. The premise of the present volume is that this is no longer possible. To be sure, what is revealed in the Black Notebooks is not that Heidegger’s philosophy in any simple way leads to totalitarian thinking. But as Adam Kirsch remarked at the publication of the frst volumes in English—echoing Jonas’s refection from 1964—Heidegger in an important sense leaves the door open for such thinking, ‘because he values the intensity and authenticity of a belief over its goodness or truthfulness’.30 This observation does not amount to a naïve appeal that Heidegger’s works should be shelved once and for all, as if these works were no longer of any concern for us. Indeed, if there is one thing we truly ought to learn from Heidegger, it is precisely his emphasis on our historicity—the critical insight that it is only when we recognize ourselves as part of a historical tradition that we can criticize this tradition without ending up in more subtle forms of repression. What the observation does amount to, therefore, is frstly, that it is perhaps more important than ever for theologians to engage critically with Heidegger’s writings, and 12 J. Svenungsson secondly, that there is a need to re-examine the critical potential of the biblical legacy—in both its Jewish and Christian interpretations—to offer counter-narratives to the totalitarian tendencies to which Heidegger’s own thinking offers little resistance. The following chapters take on this twofold task in various ways. Although all the authors share the basic premise stated above, they are far from being in agreement about the implications of this premise for the understanding of theology’s relation to Heidegger, as well as for the future task of theology. A brief summary of the structure of the book will give an indication of these different approaches to the overall theme of the volume. In Chap. 2, Judith Wolfe offers an overview and an analysis of the role of religion in the Black Notebooks. After a summary of Heidegger’s appropriation of Christian eschatological motifs in his thinking of the 1910s and 1920s, she turns to the strong anti-Chris- tian polemics of the notebooks and discusses them in their biographical as well as their philosophical contexts. While Heidegger’s animosity towards Christianity seems to have culminated in the 1930s, his later thinking displays a more conciliatory attitude. This posture of openness is not, however, to be interpreted as a return to Christianity. As Wolfe argues in the fnal part of the chapter, the radical apophaticism characteristic of Heidegger’s late thinking is at basic odds with the Christian orientation towards a revelation of God that has already occurred. Nevertheless, she concludes, ‘Heidegger’s last god represents a signifcant revision of his thought whose provenance and signifcance is the central puzzle of the Black Notebooks in their relevance for theology’. In the following chapter, Hans Ruin explores Heidegger’s relation to the biblical inheritance by looking closer at his early fascination with Paul’s epistles. As has already been indicated, Heidegger was not alone in fnding his own philosophical voice in and through a reading of the Pauline letters. This was a venture which he to a large degree shared with his colleague and friend Rudolf Bultmann, as well as with their student Hans Jonas. Focussing on their different appropriations of Paul, Ruin offers a moving rendering of the evolving relation between the three thinkers. While for Heidegger Paul was a voice of original facticity—but ultimately also a source for his choice of National Socialism—for Bultmann, Paul and Christianity rather served as a bulwark against totalitarian temptations. When Jonas late in his career returned to Paul, it was both in response to Heidegger’s betrayal and in order to reinvent Paul as a Jewish existential thinker. Paradoxically, this reinvention of Paul as an 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 13 ethical thinker had an unmistakably Heideggerian imprint. However, as Ruin argues, this seeming paradox ultimately only reveals the intricacy of Heidegger’s indebtedness to the biblical inheritance. In Chap. 4, focus is shifted from Heidegger’s deep entanglement with the Pauline-Lutheran reception history of biblical texts to his relation to Catholicism. Heidegger himself hailed from a profoundly Catholic milieu and spent the frst years of his academic studies with the prospect of becoming a Catholic priest. Against this background it may seem sur- prising that Catholicism in particular is the target of Heidegger’s hos- tility towards Christianity in the Black Notebooks. George Pattison’s subtle argument in this chapter is that the opposite may very well be the case, i.e. that Heidegger’s aversion against Catholicism rather should be seen in light of his own personal and intellectual trajectory as a Catholic. This becomes particularly clear in the case of Romano Guardini, the Catholic colleague whom Heidegger repeatedly names in the notebooks as exemplifying what he dislikes about Catholic theology. Through an exploration of the parallels between Heidegger’s philosophical venture and Guardini’s theological-philosophical project, Pattison reveals how Heidegger’s strained relation to Catholicism partly can be seen as a bat- tle with his own shadow. This line of thought is pushed even further in Chap. 5, where Ward Blanton suggests that Heidegger’s entire philosophy can be seen as an attempt to wrestle free not only from his own Christian past, but from Christianity in general. The Black Notebooks are marked with iterations of a desire for a ‘new beginning’, a new philosophy that will break free from its Christian limitations. However, as Blanton observes, in this very desire for a radically new beginning, Heidegger ends up repeating the standard suppersessionist motifs of Christianity versus Judaism, where the latter has to give way to the former in a dialectical zero-sum game. In this respect, Heidegger not only remained frmly within the structure he so forcefully wished to overcome, but also failed, Blanton concludes, ‘to keep pace with his own best insights about how to challenge inherited anti-Jewish fantasies about Christian origins’. A quite different approach to the same topic is offered by Christoph Schmidt in the following chapter. Rather than seeing the defciencies of Heidegger’s quasi-apocalyptic desire for a new beginning as itself part of the ‘Christian problem’ (to use Blanton’s vocabulary), Schmidt locates it within a tradition of aestheticized polytheism. Not unlike Hans Jonas— in the Drew University lecture referred to above—he paints a sharp 14 J. Svenungsson contrast between Heidegger’s theopoetics of the Greek gods, on the one hand, and ‘Judeo-Christian’ monotheism, on the other, arguing for a deep incompatibility between the two narratives. Schmidt ends his expo- sition by posing the intriguing question whether Heidegger’s antithetical approach to the biblical legacy as well as his idealization of an aestheticized polytheism continue to inform essential parts of European political philosophy today. An even more unrelenting reading of the Black Notebooks is offered by Agata Bielik-Robson in Chap. 7. Bielik-Robson opens the chapter by recalling Levinas’s remark, in Entre Nous, that Heidegger’s death-oriented vision of life left no place for being-with-the-other and that the only Mitsein he envisaged boiled down in the end to Zusammenmarschieren, ‘an army of isolated Daseins exercising their authenticity in their totally mobilised Todesbereitschaft’. But Levinas was not the frst and not the only Jewish philosopher who uttered his objection to Heidegger’s overestimation of death by drawing ‘out of the sources of Judaism’. After a brief discussion of how Levinas’s misgivings about Heidegger are corroborated by the newly available notebooks, Bielik-Robson turns to an array of Jewish thinkers—Franz Rosenzweig, Hannah Arendt and Harold Bloom—who all opposed the Heideggerian mode of doing philosophy solely under the auspices of death. Inspired by these thinkers, the rest of the chapter is devoted to an exploration of a different vision of fnite existence, one which takes its cue in the intellectual heritage of the Song of Songs and sees human existence as marked frst and foremost by passionate and loving relations with others. The two succeeding chapters both explore the theological undertones of Heidegger’s late thinking through close readings of specifc passages in the Black Notebooks. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback investigates the apocalyptic nature of the notebooks and argues that Heidegger’s idea of the end as an ‘endless end’ and his idea of the ‘other beginning’ are at the center of his confrontational relationship with theology and Christianity. Since Heidegger ultimately regarded the Christian and the Jewish traditions as part of the same metaphysical inheritance, she further argues, an understanding of the apocalyptic nature of Heidegger’s thinking is essential if we are to fully grasp the nature of both his Antisemitism and his anti-Christianism. In equally critical terms, Elliot R. Wolfson examines the recurring concept of ‘the last god’ in the notebooks. This enigmatic concept, which would remain central to Heidegger’s thought to the end, signifed to him the fssure of being that opens and closes 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 15 itself in relation to those who practice restraint. Most notably, the epoch of the last god signifed the time when the gods would be over and done. In response to Nietzsche’s death of god, the last god is the god after there are no more gods, the god depleted of godhood, the god that is neither transcendent nor immanent. Those who would use Heidegger as a foundation to construct a new theological edifce, Wolfson contends, have simply not grasped the collapse of the polarity of theism and athe- ism intimated by the intimation of the last god. The analysis of Heidegger’s ‘last god’ is further enhanced in Chap. 10. Marius Timmann Mjaaland here offers an intriguing parallel reading of the earliest Black Notebook and a lecture on Augustine’s Confessions that Heidegger gave in 1930 at St Martin’s Archabbey in Beuron. Heidegger’s fascination with the Confessions not only sheds light on the strongly confessional nature of the notebooks. It also adds interesting perspectives to Heidegger’s notion of a ‘future god’, which in light of this parallel turns out to be something of a counter- confession to Augustine’s belief in the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Like Wolfson, Timmann Mjaaland fnds in Heidegger’s last god a gnostic fg- ure, devoid of any content beyond the philosopher’s own poetical imagination. A more charitable reading would perhaps see in Heidegger’s quasi-apocalyptical confessions an expression of a trembling hope, despite the despair dominating his Black Notebooks. And yet, Timmann Mjaaland concludes, it is thoughtworthy that this confession to a radically unknowable god offered no foothold or guidance against the political and ideological perversions of the Nazi regime, just as it did not offer any grounding, comfort, or resistance at the day of the Untergang. In the eleventh and fnal chapter, the dual aim of this volume, both critical and constructive, is staged one last time. Mårten Björk here investigates the anthropology that underpins Heidegger’s endeavour to liberate Dasein from the ‘animality’ of humanity, and argues for a link between this anthropology and his embracing of Nazism as well as his theology of the last god. The ominous contours of Heidegger’s anthropology emerge as they are contrasted with the biologist and neo- vitalist philosopher Hans Driesch’s philosophy of the organism, which Heidegger himself used in his 1929/30 lecture series The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. These famous lectures give us privileged access to the unfolding of Heidegger’s thinking towards an Antisemitic and pro-Occidental mythology of the last god in the Black Notebooks. The contrast with Driesch’s holistic and strongly ethical concept not only of 16 J. Svenungsson human life, but of life in general, makes the defciencies of Heidegger’s mythopoetical thinking appear in yet clearer light. Even more so, with its strong sense for the sensuous character of all beings—a sense that also gives us the ability to see the senselessness of suffering and to hope for the redemption of all life—the forgotten neovitalism of Driesch may very well inspire the future path of theology. For, although theology neither could nor should take leave of Heidegger, it has become time to enter a new more critical phase in the theological engagement with his works, a phase that may also engender a rediscovery of thinkers that were out- shone by the mesmerizing ‘dark star’ of twentieth-century European thought.31

Notes 1. Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life trans. Allan Blunden (London: HarperCollins, 1993). Numerous studies on Heidegger’s political engagement and the political nature of his philosophy have appeared during the past decades; to mention but a few of the more signifcant works, see Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (eds), The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), and Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. Exp. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); NB the new preface added by Wolin to the 2016 edition, ‘The Politics of Epistemology: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks in Real Time’, ibid., xi–li. 2. See vol. 56–63 of the Gesamtausgabe. The volumes that in particular incited the scholarly debate were Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, GA 60 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995); Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, GA 61 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), and Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, GA 63 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1988). References to Heidegger’s works will be given as GA (Gesamtausgabe) followed by the volume number. Translations are by the author unless otherwise stated. 3. The issue of whether the religious experience expressed in Paul’s letters can legitimately be termed ‘Christian’ is a matter of intense debate, hence the scare quotes. Several of the chapters (see esp. Chaps. 3 and 5) in this volume touch upon this debate. 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 17

4. Martin Heidegger, ‘Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache’ (1953/1954), Unterwegs zur Sprache, GA 12 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), 91. 5. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); John van Buren and Theodore Kisiel (eds), Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Other signifcant studies from the same period include John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), Jean-François Courtine (ed.), Heidegger 1919–1929. De l’herméneutique de la facticité à la méta- physique du ‘Dasein’ (Paris: Vrin, 1996); Jean Greisch, L’arbre de vie et l’arbre du savoir: Le chemin phénoménologique de l’herméneutique hei- deggérienne (1919–1923) (Paris: Cerf, 2000). In the past decades, numerous studies have continued to explore the theological roots of Heidegger’s early philosophy; see e.g. Frederick van Fleteren, Martin Heidegger’s Interpretations of Saint Augustine (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005); Benjamin Crowe, Heidegger’s Religious Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Judith Wolfe, Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Duane Armitage, Heidegger’s Pauline and Lutheran Roots (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016); Sylvain Camilleri, Heidegger et les grandes lignes d’une phénoménologie herméneutique du christianisme primitif (Dortrecht: Springer, 2017). A good overview is given by S.J. McGrath and Andrzej Wierciński (eds), A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). 6. For an extensive study of this venture in its various aspects, see Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 7. Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus’ (1915), Frühe Schriften, GA 1 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), 410. 8. Heidegger, GA 60, 98–105. 9. See Greisch, L’arbre de vie, 204–205. See also Heidegger, GA 60, 98. 10. John van Buren, ‘Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther’, in idem and Theodore Kisiel, Reading Heidegger, 159–174. 11. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 173. 12. The best overview up to date—both of Heidegger’s complex relation to theology and of theology’s complex relation to Heidegger— is given by Judith Wolfe in Heidegger and Theology (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). The book was published the same year as 18 J. Svenungsson

the frst volumes of the Black Notebooks appeared in German, and the Notebooks were thus not taken into account in the study. Wolfe’s chapter in this volume can in this regard be seen as an important complement to the monograph. 13. Martin Heidegger, ‘Phänomenologie und Theologie’ (1927), Wegmarken, GA 9, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996), 47–78. 14. Bultmann and Heidegger established a close intellectual collaboration during Heidegger’s years in Marburg (1923–1928), and the appre- ciation seems to have been strongly mutual; see e.g. Heidegger’s letter to Karl Jasper on 18 June 1924, where he points out Bultmann as the only stimulus in an otherwise dull milieu: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jasper, Briefwechsel 1920–1963 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), 49. On Bultmann and Heidegger’s friendship, see also Hans Ruin’s contribution to this volume. 15. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger, 173. 16. It should be emphasized that there are considerable differences in the ways in which these theologians appropriated phenomenology; neither Stein nor Rahner, for instance, accepted Heidegger’s view on theology as operating merely on an ontic level. For a more extensive discussion of these four theologians and their relation to Heidegger, see Wolfe, Heidegger and Theology, 177–193. 17. The sentiments of disesteem were mutual; Heidegger dismissed Barth as a ‘lightweight’ theologian; see ibid., 153. 18. Heinrich Ott, Denken und Sein. Der Weg Martin Heideggers und der Weg der Theologie (Zürich: EVZ-Verlag, 1959). 19. Heidegger to Ott, quoted by Ott in idem, ‘What Is Systematic Theology?’, in James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb (eds), The Later Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 110. 20. The episode about Heidegger and the meetings of the Old Marburgers is related by James M. Robinson in ‘The German Discussion of the Later Heidegger’, in idem and Cobb, The Later Heidegger and Theology, 5–6. 21. Quoted from the front fap of Robinson and Cobb, The Later Heidegger and Theology. 22. See Richard Kearney and Joseph Stephen O’Leary (eds), Heidegger et la question de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1980). For an English introduction to the debate (including a translation of the study by Dominique Janicaud that initiated the debate), see Dominique Janicaud et al. (eds), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G Prusak et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 23. Uncountable examples of relevant works could be given here, depend- ing, of course, on the defnition given to ‘postmetaphysical theology’. Let me therefore only indicate a few examples of the theological reception 1 INTRODUCTION: HEIDEGGER AND THEOLOGY AFTER THE BLACK … 19

of the French ‘turn’ in various regions and theological traditions. In the United States, an important arena for the debate were the Villanova conferences convened by John Caputo in the late 1990s and early 2000s; the publications from these conferences give a good overview of the debates, see esp. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds), God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). In the UK, the Radical Orthodoxy movement, when launched in 1999, was in many ways inspired by the French discourse, see John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999). In the Benelux countries, an early contribution to the debate was given by Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate (eds), Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), and in the Scandinavian context my own study, Guds återkomst: En studie av gudsbegreppet inom postmodern flosof (Göteborg: Glänta, 2004) played an important role in introducing the debate. 24. For an overview and introductory discussion of the Antisemitism of the Black Notebooks, see Peter Trawny, Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). 25. For a thoroughgoing study of the relation between Christian theological anti-Judaism and modern philosophical anti-Judaism (and subsequently Antisemitism), see my study Divining History: Prophetism, Messianism and the Development of the Spirit, trans. Stephen Donovan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 26. Most chapters in this volume touch upon Heidegger’s anti-Christian polemics, but for an overview and discussion of the biographical background to his strong anti-Christian sentiments during these years, see esp. Chap. 2. 27. Hans Jonas, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 18, No. 2 (December 1964), 211–214. 28. Ibid., 218. 29. Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 104. 30. Adam Kirsch, ‘Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi’, Tablet, 26 Sept. (2016). Accessed by 24 June 2017: http://www.tabletmag.com/ jewish-arts-and-culture/books/214226/heidegger-was-really-a-real-nazi. 31. To borrow the apt metaphor used by Tom Rockmore in Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), xi.