The weirdest thing about all of the hoopla surrounding revelations of Heidegger's Nazism is that both defenders and detractors accept that "Heidegger wrote that P" is factive when P concerns the interpretation of Heidegger's own texts. You don't have to go along with Foucault's "Death of the Author" or agree with Wimsatt and Beardsley that there is an "intentional fallacy" to find this extraordinary odd.
Consider a representative passage from Rebecca Schuman's recent slate piece:
It’s not that history lacked all evidence before. Heidegger assumed rectorship of the University of Freiburg after Adolf Hitler came to power; he joined the Nazi party and remained in it throughout the entirety of World War II.* But only the Black Notebooks contain actual references to “world Jewry” or “a collusion of ‘rootless’ Jews in both international capitalism and communism,” references that, Trawny insists, tie Heidegger’s anti-Semitism directly to his philosophy. Unprecedented indeed.
What can this possibly mean? As so often happens, the italics obscure more than they clarify. I think I've read every article that Shuman links to, and I can't understand it at all. Even if the Black Notebooks contained a detailed interpretation of Being and Time as a recipe for mass murder, what would that show about the book? I just don't get this, but as far as I can see the Black Notebooks could only even possibly be a "smoking gun" if you a priori assume that Heidegger gets the last word on interpreting his own works. Many of his detractors and French defenders seem to me to be making just this assumption. But it's a frankly bizarre thing for anyone to believe, especially so for anyone who is sympathetic to Heidegger's history of philosophy, which almost systematically posits that philosophers don't really understand the meaning of their own works. Why would Heidegger himself be an exception? I'm missing something here.
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