5 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 348, Heidegger was to go further down this path as, with his growing authority* he felt authorized to engage in the peremptory verbalism to which all discourses of authority ultimately give rise.
6 This is one of the spontaneous strategies of politeness which can really neutralize the aggressive* arrogant or troublesome content of an order or question only by integrating it in a set of symbolic expressions, verbal or non-verbal, aimed at masking the raw meaning of the element taken on its own.
7 Heidegger. Being and Time, pp 163-4.
8 When writing this 1 could not recall exactly the passage in the essay on the ‘overcoming of metaphysics' (1939-1946) devoted to ’literary dirigism* as an aspect of the reign of ‘technology1: ‘The need for human material underlies the same regulation of preparing for ordered mobilization as the need for entertaining books and poems, for whose production the poet is no more important than the bookbinder’s
apprentice, who helps bind the poems for the printer by* for example, bringing the covers for binding from the storage room/ M. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, tr. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row* 1973), p* 106.
9 M. Heidegger. 4n Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 38. Another symptom of this aristocratism is the way all the adjectives which describe pre-philosophical existence are pcjoral ive ly colon red:' inauthentic1, ‘vulgar'. ‘everyday’, ‘public’, etc.
10 One would have to record systematically the entire system of symbols through which philosophical discourse declares its elevated nature as a dominant discourse*
J1 One thinks, for example, of the developments regarding biologism (cf. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols, esp. 'Nietzsche’s alleged biologism’ in vol* 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, tr. D. R Kreil (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp* 39-47*
12 Heidegger. Being and Time, pp. 83-4 (my emphasis)* These cautionary strategies might have awakened the suspicions of noo-German readers, if the latter had not been subject to conditions of reception which made it very unlikely that they would detect the hidden connotations, which are disowned in advance by Heidegger (all the more so since the translations ‘suppress’ them systematically in the name of the break between the antical and the ontological). Indeed, in addition to the resistance to analysis offered by a work which is the product of such systematic strategies of euphemization, there is also in this case one of the most pernicious effects of the exportation of cultural products, the disappearance of all the subtle signs of social or political origins, of all the marks (often very discreet) of the social importance of discourse and the intellectual position of its author, in short, of all the infinitesimal features to which the native reader is obviously most vulnerable, but which he can apprehend better than others once he is equipped with techniques of objectification. One recalls, for example, all the ‘adminis* trative’ connotations which Adorno discovered behind ‘existential’ terms like ‘encounter* (Begegnung), or in words like ‘concern’ (Anliegen), and ‘commission’ [Auftrag). a pre-eminently ambiguous term, both 'the object of an administrative demand’ and a ‘heartfelt wish\ which was already the object of a deviant usage in Rilke’s poetry (T, W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, tr* K* Tarnowski and F* Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 77-88),
13 We can see that the same logic applies in the use that other variants of priestly prophesying make nowadays of the ‘epistemological break’, a kind of rite of passage, accomplished once and for all, across the boundary laid down permanently between science and ideology*
14 Bachelard, Le matfrudisme rationnel. p. 59*
15 M. Heidegger* The Anaximander Fragment*, in Early Greek Thinking. tr* D* F* Kreil and F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 33.
16 For another, particularly caricatural example of the omnipotence of ‘essential thought1, one could refer to the text of the 1951 lecture 'Building, dwelling, thinking , where the housing crisis is ‘overcome* in favour of the ontological meaning of ‘dwelling* (Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 339).
