41 M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. R. Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1973). p. 8.
42 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. tr. D. F. Kreil (San Francisco. Ca.: Harper & Row, 1984). p. 17. The work. Heidegger says somewhere, ‘escapes biography’ which can only ■give a name to something that belongs to nobody'.
43 It is remarkable, knowing how tenaciously he rejected and refuted all external or reductive readings of his work (see his letters to Jean Wahl. Jean Beaufret. to a student, to Richardson, discussion with a Japanese philosopher, etc.), that Heidegger had no hesitation in using against his rivals (Sartre, in the case in point) the arguments of a ‘clumsy sociologism’. Thus, if necessary, be was prepared to reinvest the topic of ‘the dictatorship of the public realm’ with the strictly social (if not sociological) sense which it undoubtedly had in Being and Time, and what is more, to do so in a passage where he is attempting precisely io establish that the ‘existential’ analysis of the ‘they’ ‘in no way means to furnish an incidental contribution to sociology’ (‘Letter on humanism', in Basic Writings, p. 197). This recycling of Heidegger I by Heidegger U bears witness to the fact (underlined by the emphasis on 'incidental' m the sentence quoted) that, if everything is re-denied, nothing is renounced.
44 J. Beaufret, Introductions aux philosophies de ('existence. De Kierkegaard ti Heidegger (Paris: Dendel-Gonthier. 1971). pp. 111-12.
45 O. Pdggcier. La Pensce de M. Heidegger (Paris: Aubier-Montaignc. 1963). p. 18.
46 From this point of view one might connect a certain interview with Marcel Duchamp (in VH 101, no. 3, Autumn 1970. pp. 55-61) with the ‘Letter on humanism’, with its innumerable refutations or warnings, its calculated interference with interpretation, etc.
47 One might object that this 'claim' is itself denied in the ‘Letter on humanism’ (pp. 215-17). but this does not prevent it from being reaffirmed a little later (pp. 235-6).
48 Richardson, Heidegger', p. 224 n. 29 (my emphasis); see also ibid., p. 410 on the distinction between ‘poesy1 and 'poetry'.
49 H. Marcuse, ‘Beitrage zur Phanomenologie des historischen Mater-ialismus*. in Philosophische Hefte, 1 (1928). pp. 45-68.
50 C. Hobert, Das Dasein in Menschen (Zeulenroda: Sporn, 1937).
51 It is the same logic which has led, more recently, to apparently better grounded ‘combinations' of Marxism and structuralism or Freudianism. while Freud (interpreted by Lacan) provided new support for conceptual puns like Heidegger's.
52 Cf. Heidegger in his ‘Letter on humanism' (p. 212) for the refutation of
an existentialist’ reading of Being and Tone, the refutation of the interpretation of the concepts of Being and Time as a ‘secular’ version of religious concepts; the refutation of an ‘anthropological’ or ’moral’ reading of the opposition between the authentic and the inauthentic (pp. 217-21); and the rather more laboured refutation of ’nationalism' in the analyses of the ‘homeland* (HeimatL etc.
53 Heidegger, ‘Letter on humanism’,
54 K. Axelos, Arguments dune recherche (Paris: MinuiL 1939), pp. 93ff; see also K. Axelos, Einfuhrung in ein kunftiges Denken Uber Marx und Heidegger (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1966).
55 What we see at work here - that is, in its practical truth - is the scheme of (he 'ontological difference’ between Being and beings: can it be a coincidence that it arises naturally when there is a need to emphasize distances and re-establish hierarchies, between philosophy and the social sciences in particular?
56 It is this blind understanding which is designated by the apparently contradictory declaration by Karl Friedrich von Weizsacker (quoted by Habermas, ‘Penser avec Heidegger coni re Heidegger’, p. 106): *1 began to read Being and Time, which had just been published, when I was still a student. Today 1 can state with a good conscience that at the time I understood nothing of it. strictly speaking But 1 could not help feeling that it was there, and there alone, that thought could engage with the problems that I felt must lie behind modern theoretical physics, and today I would still grant it that/
