384 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
and Nazism’, Mireille Calle-Gruber, in charge of university rela-
tions at the French Institute in Heidelberg, invited Derrida and
Lacoue-Labarthe to a meeting on the subject with Hans-Georg
Gadamer.
The debate was held on the evening of 5 February 1988 in front
of over a thousand people. In many ways, it was exceptional. After
a series of confrontations in France, the Heidegger question was
fi nally returning to Germany, and in a place fraught with memories:
it was in this very same lecture hall that, on 30 June 1933, Heidegger
had given a speech with the title ‘The university in the new Reich’.
The audience had come not just to see Derrida, but also Gadamer,
already a very old man and a local star; it was also the fi rst time
that Derrida and he had spoken to one another since their failed
dialogue in 1981. When the speakers entered the hall, the audience
applauded in German style, banging on the tables.^11
The encounter was held in French and lasted over four hours;
it was as serene as the subject-matter permitted. Gadamer was
initially able to provide an eye-witness account, as a contempor-
ary, of Heidegger’s ‘folly’. But this evening also gave him an
exceptional opportunity to emerge from his long discretion on the
period. Derrida started by saying how important Farías’s work
was: whatever reservations one might have about it, he said, ‘this
book has forced professional philosophers to explain themselves in
a more urgent and immediate way’. Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida
focused more on the question of Heidegger’s silence after the war,
in relation to his Nazi commitments and to Auschwitz. It was this
obstinate silence, maintained even in the presence of Paul Celan,
that remained, in the eyes of Maurice Blanchot and many others,
‘a wound to thought’. But could it have been otherwise? Would it
not have been too easy to seek to absolve oneself with a few conven-
tional words of apology? Derrida embarked on a hypothesis that he
himself admitted was risky:
I think that, perhaps, Heidegger said to himself: I’ll not be
able to utter any condemnation of Nazism unless I can utter it
not only in a way worthy of what I have already said, but also
worthy of what happened there. And this was something of
which he was not capable. [.. .] And I consider that the terrify-
ing, perhaps unforgivable silence of Heidegger, the absence of
phrases of the kind we wish to hear, [.. .] this absence leaves us
with a heritage, leaves us with the injunction to think what he
did not think.^12Questions from the audience tried to get the speakers to commit
themselves more clearly. Derrida emphasized that, in 1968, he had
already learned from Jean Beaufret that Heidegger had had a Nazi