Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference
About this ebook
In 1988, in the wake of the recent publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger’s readers, improvised in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and a complex sense of the questions at issue that have been often lacking in the press. Ranging over two days and including exchanges with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by these major thinkers remain highly relevant today, especially following the publication of Heidegger’s already notorious “Black Notebooks,” which have added another chapter to the ongoing debates over this contested figure. The present volume recalls a highly charged moment in this history, while also drawing the debate toward its most essential questions.
About the author
Jacques Derrida was the single most influential voice in European philosophy for the last third of the twentieth century. His many books include Of Grammatology, Specters of Marx, and The Animal That Therefore I Am.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His many books include Poetry as Experience; Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics; and, with Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism.
Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis, and the translator of more than a dozen books, by Jean Genet, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others.
Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including The Literary Absolute, Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Listening, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence.
