[D66] A Politics of Silence

[A.OUT]

https://progressivegeographies.com/2019/06/26/adam-knowles-heideggers-fascist-affinities-a-politics-of-silence-stanford-university-press-2019/

Adam Knowles, Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence –
Stanford University Press, 2019
Posted on June 26, 2019	by stuartelden

    Reexamining the case of one of the most famous intellectuals to
embrace fascism, this book argues that Martin Heidegger’s politics and
philosophy of language emerge from a deep affinity for the
ethno-nationalist and anti-Semitic politics of the Nazi movement.
Himself a product of a conservative milieu, Heidegger did not have to
significantly compromise his thinking to adapt it to National Socialism
but only to intensify certain themes within it. Tracing the continuity
of these themes in his lectures on Greek philosophy, his magnum opus,
Being and Time, and the notorious Black Notebooks that have only begun
to see the light of day, Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities argues that if
Heidegger was able to align himself so thoroughly with Nazism, it was
partly because his philosophy was predicated upon fundamental forms of
silencing and exclusion. With the arrival of the Nazi revolution,
Heidegger displayed—both in public and in private—a complex, protracted
form of silence drawn from his philosophy of language. Avoiding the easy
satisfaction of banishing Heidegger from the philosophical realm so
indebted to his work, Adam Knowles asks whether what drove Heidegger to
Nazism in the first place might continue to haunt the discipline. In the
context of today’s burgeoning ethno-nationalist regimes, can
contemporary philosophy ensure itself of its immunity?