Re: RE: Heidegger and Marx: Reply to Iain Thompson


Chris,

Thank you for this comment and sorry about taking so long to reply. Yes, I
think there is a lot to this, and this is the kind of datum people have to
look at when trying to understand Heidegger and the Holocaust. Aside from the
accusational framework, this issue is very important. Did you read the passage
from Delbo I recently posted. I thought I'd bounce off your post here into a
discussion of that passage by noting that the writer's "transcendence", her
dis-interest in "idle talk" was, of course, bought and paid for by her
subjection to torture in the camps. One might wonder whether this woman was
thereby given a priviledge of authentication, which would be quite the
opposite of the point Heidegger makes about deprivation. I would work to show,
instead, how her experience constitutes a series of ruptures to hero own
mortality. I understand how this is the case, but I can't find the words for
it right now! When I do, I'll post.

Regards,

Tom


Christopher Rickey writes:
>On Thu, 28 Sep 1995, Tom Blancato wrote:
>
>> Date: Thu Sep 28 00:14:52 1995
>> From: Tom Blancato <tblancato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> To: heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Re: RE: Heidegger and Marx: Reply to Iain Thompson
>>
>>
>>
>> Lois,
>>
>> I want to reply to this in detail. I think there are some serious problems
>> with your view here, though I think your intentions are good. I think
>> authenticity might need two components: death-possibilizing and freedom
>>from threat. Given the condition of threat, the Jews might not have been
>>able to "make it" to authenticity in certain senses. The kind of death that
>>Heidegger speaks of is not "counting the hours", but "death as death". The
>>preconditions for this are not simply to get death into view, but the kind
>>of thinking that does this. There are many ways to bring death into a
>>certain "view", but these do not all count as an authentic and "proper"
>>engagement. I want to develop this more if you are interested. Heidegger
>>doesn't develop the "freedom" theme, I think.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tom Blancato
>
>Oddly enough, in a line normally held as frighteningly cold-blooded and
>inadequate, Heidegger mentions how the death camps denied a proper
>appropriation of death; the Jews were not allowed to be "mortals." This
>means, if we follow the Heideggerian framework, that the Jews were not
>allowed to confront death humanly and thus deprived of their humanity, which
>is to say more or less that they were slaughtered like animals. Now what
>Heidegger means by a proper appropriation of death or to be a mortal is
>another matter.
>
>Chris
>
>
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---
Where there is peace, there is war.

Tom Blancato
tblancato@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Eyes on Violence (nonviolence and human rights monitoring in Haiti)
Thoughtaction Collective (reparative justice project)




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