Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 385
party membership card: ‘Then, there was the article by Hugo Ott,
etc. [.. .] Should we have done anything other than what we did do?
Perhaps.’ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe noted that these questions had
been debated at length during the Cerisy conference on ‘The Ends
of Man’, but none of this seemed to have counted for anything on
the media stage to which the polemic had recently shifted. Derrida
restated this position, in a more anxious manner than usual:
I felt it was more important [.. .], more urgent to try to read
Heidegger’s texts in the way I can, to teach Heidegger, seeking
in his text material on the basis of which I could try to under-
stand what kind of a relationship there might be between the
facts of his Nazi commitment and his text. And I thought that
this was what I could do best, and that this required patience, a
great deal of patience. [.. .] I don’t feel that I have forgotten the
sense of a responsibility that you would call ethical or political
in that area.Several German and French journalists attended the meeting,
which continued the following day with a press conference at the
Sole d’Oro, a famous restaurant in Heidelberg whose walls were
covered with photos of Gadamer. Then Derrida and Gadamer had
a conversation alone together, trying to move on from Heidegger
and open the space for a real dialogue.^13
While Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s position may have seemed
close to Derrida’s at this memorable debate, it had already started
to diverge. Shortly before, indeed, Lacoue-Labarthe had brought
out a text called The Fiction of the Political: this was a violent
attack on Heidegger, whose philosophy was analysed in terms of
‘arch-fascism’ and ‘national-aestheticism’. According to Philippe
Beck, who was then writing his thesis under Derrida’s supervision,
Lacoue-Labarthe’s growing anti-Heideggereanism was one of the
factors that led Derrida to move away from him increasingly, while
drawing closer to Jean-Luc Nancy.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe always regretted, in my view, that he
was never able to play a part in the Situationist International,
which was very active in Strasbourg. There was something
strategic about his alliance with Derrida, apart from the (real)
admiration that he shared with Nancy – and you would expect
this. He probably hoped to radicalize deconstruction, in the
political sense of the term. But not at any price: Lacoue did not
make any pious references to Debord. And we mustn’t forget
his reading of Benjamin, one he shared with Derrida. As for
Nancy, he thinks with rather than against, preferring, I think,
the critique of reason to critical reason.^14