Derrida: A Biography

380 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004

philosophical texts and in the famous ‘Rectoral Address’ which he
gave in 1933. As Derrida explained in an interview:

At the moment when his discourse situates itself in a spectacu-

lar fashion in the camp of Nazism [.. .], Heidegger takes up

again the word ‘spirit’, whose avoidance he had prescribed; he

removes the quotation marks with which he had surrounded

it. He limits the deconstructive movement that he had begun

earlier. He maintains a voluntarist and metaphysical discourse

upon which he will later cast suspicion.^2

A few weeks after this conference, the trial of Klaus Barbie,
reported widely in the media, put the Nazi question back at the top
of the current agenda. On 4 July 1987, after a two-month hearing,
Barbie was given a life sentence for crimes against humanity by the
Cour d’Assises du Rhône. In October the same year, the publication
of the book by Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, was something
of an event. The question, admittedly, was not new: in France,
Jean-Pierre Faye, for one, had dealt with the matter at length, and
Derrida had faced his attacks as early as 1969.^3 But the debate on
Heidegger, like that on Céline, kept resurfacing every fi fteen or
twenty years.
Although it had been written in Spanish, Farías’s book was
initially published in France. This was not due merely to the contin-
gencies of publishing. According to Christian Jambet, the author of
the preface to this French edition:

Heidegger has, since the war, become a French philosopher. It

is in France that his thought has aroused the most echoes, it is

here that it is viewed as the philosophy that is most adequate to

the events of modernity. [.. .] For many scholars, his work seems

obvious in a way that no other philosophy in France has managed,

apart from Marxism. Ontology reaches its consummation in a

methodical deconstruction of metaphysics as such.^4

Christian Jambet’s remarks almost eclipsed Farías’s biographical
investigation and were immediately taken up and amplifi ed in the
many articles published over the following days. ‘Heidegger, Nazi
activist and thinker’, wrote Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt in Le
Matin on 15 October 1987: ‘Victor Farías’s book will stop people
philosophizing in circles and force the “Heideggereans of Paris” to
face up to the questions that they have always known would at one
fell swoop empty of all content the things they had tried to put into
their writings.’ ‘Heil Heidegger!’ was the headline in Libération the
next day; here, too, it was the French Heideggereans who were under
attack, with Robert Maggiori accusing them of never having tried