Derrida’s remarks in “Philosophers’ Hell,” the Nouvel
observateurinterview that he gave shortly after the publication
of his book on Heidegger, are troubling. He announces his
wish to overturn the binary opposition between Nazism and
non-Nazism. Derrida wants to see what is “common to Nazism
and to anti-Nazism, the law of resemblance, the inevitability
of perversion” (Points 185 ). He adds that liberalism, just like
fascism, is predicated on a “voluntarist” and “metaphysical”
discourse.
When Heidegger uses the word spiritin his rectoral ad-
dress, Derrida remarks, “he engages in a voluntarist and meta-
physical discourse that he will subsequently view with suspi-
cion. To this extent at least, by celebrating the freedom of
spirit, its glorification resembles other European discourses
(spiritualist, religious, humanist) that people generally con-
sider opposed to Nazism. [There is] a complex and unstable
skein that I try to unravel by recognizing the threads shared by
Nazism and non-Nazism” (Heidegger Controversy 269 ). When
he treats Heidegger’s most famous moment of association
with Hitler’s regime, his Rektoratsrede, as showing that Nazism
is fundamentally similar to liberal humanism, Derrida rules
out of court the more pressing question of how Nazism and
liberalism differ from each other. Further on in Of Spirit,he
credits Heidegger in his later career with a movement away
from Nazism that Heidegger never in fact made.
The similarity between Derrida’s treatment of Heidegger
and his defense of de Man is apparent. In both cases, Derrida
endows the suspect thinker with a secret critique of the anti-
Semitic fascism to which he overtly subscribed. And his argu-
ments about Heidegger are just as logically dubious and oblique
as in the de Man case. Because Heidegger criticized humanism,
214 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger