Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 381
to understand ‘Heidegger’s absolute silence on the monstrosities of
Nazism’.
It was at this precise moment that two new works by Derrida were
published by Galilée: the short book Of Spirit: Heidegger and the
Question, as well as the huge collection of pieces, Psyche. In what
was probably an inevitable misunderstanding, Of Spirit was read
as a response to Farías, though it was not at all meant to be one.
However, Derrida had no intention of evading the issue. In a long
interview with Didier Eribon, he referred straightaway to Farías’s
work, and his remarks were scathing:
Concerning the majority of the ‘facts’, I have yet to fi nd anything
in this investigation that was not already known, and for a long
time, by those who take a serious interest in Heidegger. As for the
research into a certain archive, it is a good thing that its results are
being made available in France. The most solid of these results
have already been available in Germany ever since the work of
Bernd Martin and Hugo Ott, which Farías draws on extensively.
Beyond certain aspects of the documentation and some factual
questions, which call for caution, discussion will focus especially- and it is important that the discussion remain open – on the
interpretation, let us say, that relates these ‘facts’ to Heidegger’s
‘text’, to his ‘thinking’. The reading proposed, if there is one,
remains insuffi cient or questionable, at times so shoddy that
one wonders if the investigator began to read Heidegger more
than an hour ago. It is said that he was Heidegger’s student.
These things happen. When he calmly declares that Heidegger, I
quote, ‘translates’ ‘a certain fund of notions proper to National
Socialism’ into ‘forms and a style that, of course, are his alone’,
he points toward a chasm, more than one chasm, a chasm
beneath each word. But he doesn’t for an instant approach them
and doesn’t even seem to suspect they are there.^5
In Derrida’s view, there was nothing sensational in Farías’s book,
except for those unaware not just of the more rigorous of previ-
ous historians, but also of the refl ections on the subject of thinkers
such as Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Derrida stated that he himself had
registered reservations in all his references to Heidegger, from his
fi rst texts onwards. And he was now more than ever convinced that,
while condemning ‘unequivocally both Heidegger’s Nazism and his
silence after the war’, these needed to be analysed in a way that went
‘beyond conventional and comfortable schemas’.
Why does this hideous archive seem so unbearable and fasci-
nating? Precisely because no one has ever been able to reduce