Heidegger after

Liberalism?
Heideggerian influence from the AfD to
(elements of) the New Left, via Metapolitics
 divisio

1. Heidegger in brief, the Heidegger “affair”/”case” as of 2019.

2. Heidegger and the GNR
• AfD operatives and MH
• PEGIDA operatives and MH
• Generation Identity leader, Martin Sellner and MH
• Meta- or cultural politics: online, GNR magazines and MH*
3. Why MH and the GNR?
- Nonbiological nationalist/Europeanist essentialis, plus radical critique of modernity licensing overthrow of
parliamentary liberalism
4. Metapolitics:
- as philosophizing “of an historical people”
- As using and reframing terms from conservative revolutionary milieu as “ontological”
- As bridging NR and NL via total critique of “the West”.
5. Where are we, then?

* I fully acknowledge deb to Julian Göpffarth, “Rethinking the German nation as German Dasein: Intellectuals and Heidegger’s philosophy in contemporary German New Right
nationalism”, to which historical research of slides in section 2 is unabashedly and directly, gratefully indebted.
 1. (Early) Heidegger

• 1927, Being and Time

• All “daseine” (not human beings) have an understanding of Being which is historical
• “thrown” into historical cultures, members of particular peoples, we are purposive beings who
“care” for our being: which is “an issue for us”.
• But all daseine can be “authentic” or “inauthentic”, misunderstanding or indeed losing any sense
of the meaning of Being.
• Authenticity comes from encountering finitude, the inevitability of death.
• In section 74 of BT, it involves understanding oneself as part of a generation, to achieve a
gemeinschaft of the volk engaged in a struggle for Being and identity.
 The Heidegger “case”/”affair”
• By 1930, Heidegger’s sympathies for NSDAP are remarked by
acquaintances;
• by 1932, the same noted by his teacher the Jewish Protestant Edmund
Husserl (in fact, anti-semitic letters from as early as 1916); this, 1932, is
the year he sends Mein Kampf to his brother as a gift.
• 1933-36: joins NSDAP, as rector of Freiburg University; gives a series of
inflammatory, fiercely proNazi, proHiterite speeches;
• delivers highly political lectures and seminar series in which he depicts
Nazism as the means to recovering German identity and authenticity, as
well as the “spiritual renewal” of the West.
• MH here claims linguistic and ethnic linkage of Germans and ancient,
(preSocratic) Greeks;
• identifies Nazism with a “second inception” of Western culture, which
will undo the “first inception”’s devolution after Plato into rational
metaphysics which has “lost the meaning of Being”.
 • As we now know from Black Notebooks, identifies the
Jews as a landless, rootless, “worldless” and (yes, the
people of the Torah are a) history-less people (a
people needs a heimat to have a “history”);
• theJews profit from advent of liberalism and
socialism, which uproot peoples from their
homelands; modernity led by liberalism is par
excellence a Judaised condition.
Heidegger and • MH knows of Shoah no later than 1941-42: “the
highest political act consists in insensibly
the Shoah implicating the enemy in a situation where he
finds himself constrained to organise his own
self-destruction (GA 96: 262).”
• but will call Shoah in BN in 1948 a “so-called crime for
which no one snould apologise in future”*;
• An action which is as nothing also in comparison with
Germany’s failure to realise its transhistorical mission
of enabling the second Anfang/inception (the “inner
truth & greatness” of Nazism).
 2. Heidegger and the
AfD
• Björn Höcke, AfD leader in Thuringia.
• Germans need for the reinvention of traditions through
the (re)discovering of what he calls ‘authentic history’.
• At the AfD’s 2015 national congress in Hanover, Höcke
openly referred to Heidegger: ‘As Germans we have to
ask who we are. We need a “Yes” to the “Us”.’ The
German people has to step out of its ‘forgetfulness of
being (Seinsvergessenheit)’ and return to its ‘order of
being (Seinsordnung)’.
• ‘Yes’, he concluded, ‘this is Heidegger’.
• Also, regularly speaks at PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans
Against the Islamisation of the Occident (German:
Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des
Abendlandes
Heidegger and Marc Jongen
• Marc Jongen, former assistant to
philosopher Peter Sloterdijk;
• now MP and AfD speaker in the state of
Baden-Würtemberg;
• Initially seen as the AfD’s party philosopher,
Jongen wrote his PhD on Heidegger;
• Talks of ‘the great existential menace of the
perishing of German culture”;
• What is the menace?: “The danger today is
not so much that we will freeze our identity
and commit to an aggressive nationalism,
but rather that we lose what is proper
[eigen] to us.”
Heidegger and
PEGIDA/LEGIDA
• In the introduction to the Sezession Heidegger
issue (2015), Götz Kubitschek (a founder of the
Neue Rechte think tank Institut für Staatspolitik
(Institute for National Policy; IfS)) proposes a
Heideggerian interpretation of LEGIDA (Leipzig
variant of PEGIDA).
• Evokes the ‘meaningful history of our people … in
whose heritage we stand’.
• The aim is to ‘include the whole Volk in our
caring’, a key Heideggerian term.
• A common historical Dasein is presented as the
common basis for a collective being,
• even protesters against PEGIDA symbolise the
existence of the German Volk by expressing their
‘care’ about the German future.
The trans-European
identitarian movement

• The Identitarian Movement was formed around the

year 2002; German basis, European scope.
• Martin Sellner, movement leader, a philosophy
student, leader of the Identitarian Movement,
describes his ‘path of thinking to Heidegger’ in 2015
special edition of Sezession magazine.
• Heidegger as ‘essential for a real understanding of our
time and the mission of our [identitarian] camp …’
• Heidegger as ‘spiritual King’;
• the concept of Dasein is the ‘only, true and last enemy’
of the ‘project of the planetary human state’,
‘imperialistic rationality’ and ‘totalitarian
enlightenment’.
Into the cultural,
new right (GNR)
• Michael Klonovsky, author of popular GNR
blog Acta Diurna.
• Direct AfD links: advisor to Frauke Petry,
former leader of the AfD, and is the present
assistant of Alexander Gauland, coleader of
AfD with Jörg Meuthen since 2017.
• 2017: Klonovsky calls Heidegger’s Being and
Time ‘one of my favourite books’;
• quotes Heidegger disciple Ernst Nolte (a
holocaust revisionist)’s hope that ‘our
descendants don’t fully dissolve in what …
Heidegger has called the World-civilisation’
 Metapolitics: GNR
magazines

• the Sezession’s Heidegger issue, F ebruary 2015: at height of

PEGIDA’s impact: authors from historian Ernst Nolte to the leader
of the Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner, as per below.
• the far-right populist magazine Compact: argues national
sovereignty is needed to ‘overcome the currently widespread idea
of historylessness (Geschichtslosigkeit)’ and rule of technology in
the shape of a global ‘digital totalitarianism’.
• Compact interview with French NR mastermind Alain de Benoist:
globalisation as a spread of ‘individualism, the religion of human
rights, the pre-eminence of self-interests, the regression of all
values for the profit of the market society and thus the permanent
spread of the capitalist Gestell’.
• Gestell is a directly Heideggerian term from the immediately
postwar works.
 NR Art criticism
• Magazine Tumult review of the exhibition ‘The Invention of Human Races’
in the Dresden Hygiene Museum.
• Exhibition criticised for suggesting that races are cultural constructs;
• as such, suggests equality of (equally constructed) races.
• The exhibition implies that ‘any form of thinking human Dasein like
Heidegger … as asserting and unfolding itself in a vertical way’ through
different kinds of being human is illicit.’

• T. Küchenmeister, ‘Rasse – die unheimliche und verdrängte Wahrheit –

Anmerkungen eines Ausstellungsbesuchers’, posted on the Tumult
Facebook page on 5 June 2018.
• ‘Die Erfindung der Menschenrassen’, Deutsches Hygienemuseum Dresden,
19 May 2018 – 6 January 2019.
GNR intelligentsia: Lorenz
Jäger & Martin Lichtmesz
• in Tumult magazine editorialising the 2017 German elections,
Lorenz Jäger quoted Heidegger’s alleged last handwritten words:
‘What is needed is a reflection if and how in the era of a
technological homogenous world civilisation a homeland can exist.’
• According to Jäger, the idea of such an era represents the ‘madness
that today enjoys highest recognition by the mainstream.’
• Author Can Only a God Save Us?; title refers directly to Heidegger’s
claim uttered in the famous 1966 Spiegel interview.; contributor to
Secession.
• Total criticism of modern ‘science and technology’; a planetary,
total and quasi-sacral religion, leading to ‘disenchantment’ and ‘the
vanishing of the mysterious, the mythical, the miraculous, the
sacral, the numinous—all those irrational sources’ that allegedly
nurture meaning.
• modern technological existence “enframes” humanity, enacting
“the uprooting of human life based on a meaningless shaping of
the planet through technology.”
 A GNR Mastermind?

• In the Staatspolitisches Handbuch on GNR ‘Masterminds’ of GNR

metapolitical think tank IfS (Institut für Staatspolitik (Institute for
National Policy), Heidegger is presented as having a ‘direct …
influence on the intellectual Right.’
• his ideas are ‘providing arguments in the metapolitical debate’.
• Cf. E. Kositza and G. Kubitschek, Tristesse Droite. Die Abende von
Schnellroda (Schnellroda: Antaios, 2015).
 • Julian Göpffarth, ““Rethinking the German nation as German
Dasein”:

“GNR intellectuals use Heidegger’s vernacular terminology to legitimise

an exclusive nationalism based not on the illicit idea of race but on
history.”

3. Why is MH
• Nonbiological national essentialism
appealed to by AfD et • “the German essence” is “historical”, hence “cultural”
al? • It involves selbstbehauptung/self-assertion of the Volk as ein
Volk.
3.1 a nonbiological • Self-assertion is existential and “decisional”; as the Rectorship
speech puts it, “no one” can make us “will” this, we must do it
nationalist ourselves.
essentialism • not simply biological; but like biological conceptualisations, this implies
that people(s) who don’t share German historicity, like “semitic
(Göpffarth) nomads” (1934) or even “slavs” cannot ever be “German”.
• Julian Göpffarth*: “(Re)conceptualising an exclusive nationalism in
such a way may allow them to appeal to greater audiences and
intellectual circles alike”.
 1. Heidegger becomes increasingly critical, from within NSDAP,
of direction of NSDAP, like many Nazi intellectuals: divides
“inner truth and greatness” of the bewegung from its
actuality (a “turning” that can be dated from between 1934
and 1942, when it is complete).

2. Nazism for MH promises release from modernity, within twin

“Judaised”, “rootless”, “technological” poles of liberalism and
socialism.
Why? 3.2: critic 3. Germans, the “middle” “metaphysical” people caught in the
“pincers”, have world-historical responsibility to overcome these
of Nazism from twin avatars of modernity.
4. Requires a (post)philosophical “overcoming of occidental
the Right metaphysics”, which had “uprooted” peoples from “the truth of
Being”, from Plato to Nietzsche or Marxism.
5. Yet actual Nazism failed to do 4. Hence, it failed its world-
historical mission.
• Hence, Heidegger can be appealed to as:
a) “not a Nazi”;
b) A critic from the acceptable Right of Nazism.
Why? 3.3: Nazism as ‘modern’, so
legitimize AfD et al as antiliberal

• Heidegger associates Nazism after 1938 (definitively, at

earliest, it now seems) with “modern Technik” and
Judaisation (yes).
• Looked to as “exit”, it becomes “more of the same”—
hence, Heidegger gives an optic (called by critics
ontological denialism) which re-visions Nazi crimes which
have delegitimized the Right as products of modernity.
• Nazi biological racism as a modern “liberal” reality, even
the “culmination” of Western thought going back to Plato:
 It [Heidegger’s philosophy] questions all modes of nationalism … and
fascism as well as all conservative, religious or traditionalist ideas. …
The nationalist brotherhood wars, the biologic misconceptions of the

i.e. MH licenses ethnos, the fascist excess of statehood, the Führer cult, the
megalomania, the ecstatic political religions … and last but not least
the enterprise … to eliminate the alienation with modernity through
GNR for one the extermination of the biological Jew as modernity’s ‘demon’
[ironically an Heideggerian interpretation of the Shoah]—all this
more effort to appears … as the expression of the forgetting and the oppression of
the questions of being and truth which naturally leads to a ‘loss of

exit modernity, centre’, and to a spiritual and political extremism. “Eg: Martin Sellner

despite Nazism’s • Nazism as hypermodernity; modernity is to blame; hence, we

need “one more effort, Germans, to actually overcome
history of trying modernity.”
• The same motive that actually led MH to Nazism is hence
to do just that … repackaged now as “anti-Nazi”, at the same time as antiliberal—
since the categories of “technology” and “the principle of
[biological] race” supposedly unite Nazism and modern liberalism.
 • “The metaphysics of Dasein must become deeper in
accord with the innermost structure of that
metaphysics and must expand into the metapolitics ‘of ’
the historical people” (Black Notebooks, 1933-34: 91).
• Philosophy, as historical, is always political and never
solely theoretical or extra-political (1933-36, v. post-
4. metapolitics, 1945)
• It is tied to the identitarian project of a people, the
MH as bridge German people (who have linguistic kinship with the
archaic, preSocratic Greeks of “the first beginning” of
between NR the West).
• For the Germans to “own” their “ownmost” destiny, as
and NL seen by the “great thinker”, they must embrace his
philosophical understanding of Being, and of their
historicity.
• So, in 1933 lectures, he will talk of the “philosophising
of the German people”, in coming to “awaken” to their
sense of national mission, amidst the “distress” of the
loss of the Great War, and the Versailles Treaty.
 • Philosophical translation of political claims
characteristic of the conservative revolution into the
philosophical field (Pierre Bourdieu).
• Divides:
1. “merely ontic/existentielle” phenomena (of
Metapolitics as the kind we ordinarily encounter, and can
study empirically);
2. “ontological/existential” phenomena: these
esotericism: a provide the grounding “conditions of
possibility” for 1.
(lost in) • Then, describes ostensibly “ontic” and even political
terms (das Man, the public, idle curiosity, “chatter”,
anxiety) as 2, having ontological valences.
translation • Many of these terms are reactionary counter-
revolutionary, antimodern/antiliberal staples
issue? • This move:
a. makes them unavoidable, “disclosures” of
underlying structures;
b. Allows “plausible deniability”: if someone says “hey,
you’re just echoing Kierkegaard/Spengler/Lagarde …”,
the Heideggerian can answer: “but I mean these terms
ontologically….”
Cf. P. Bourdieu, E. Faye, F. Rastier
 • Heidegger has had remarkable success reaching
the New Left, despite being designated by Allied
authorities in 1945 as “100% Nazi”.
• Half-truths, publication of redacted 1936-1940
lectures, with directly political passages simply
excised.
Metapolitics, • suppression of 1933-36 material until mid-1980s
(MH dies in 1966), suppression of anti-semitic
letters and most militant lectures and advanced
as beyond left seminars until c. 2000.
• Suppression of Black Notebooks until 2014, 100th
and right? anniversary of World War 1, when Germany’s
efforts to “break out” began.
• Postwar writings almost completely cease
making any direct reference to political and
historical events—with at least two very notable
exceptions.
• on whether World War II “decided anything”: no.
• On the Shoah as “in essence the same” as
mechanised agriculture, the Berlin blockade, the
Hydrogen bomb.
How do we get a New Left
Heideggerianism?
1. Accept (whilst abstracting from historical context) MH’s pessimistic
epic of the forgetting of Being and uprooting of man, “culminating”
per 1940-42 in “the principle of race”.
• Functions to “equate” fascism with liberalism and socialism: “it’s all
modernity to me…”
• meant for MH himself and now the GNR etc. to animate urgent call to
German and European rebirth.
2. add it to postcolonial criticism of Western crimes against
nonwestern humanity from the 15th-20th centuries: West is
metaphysical and exclusionary.
• Thus, MH used by NL to animate notions of indigenous, and nonwestern,
indeed antiEuropean movements.
3. hence, see fascism, per MH, as just Western modernity in extremis,
which also means in its truth, which liberals avoid.
i.e. For NR, we must redo the West, and get it right this time;
for elements of NL, we should undo the West—the critique of “the
West”, from MH, can be more or less identical.
 • Prima facie, in a paradoxical, and critics says
compromised position.
• A position wherein a card-carrying Nazi, who
depicts the Shoah as Jewish self-destruction
(since Judaism is characterized by a self-
Where are destructive, uprooting principle),
• who wished for a German-led European civilizational
we? rebirth, to arrest modern nihilism, uprooting …
• Who is embraced as guide by AfD, PEGIDA,
Generation Identity (a white identity movement)
• is appealed to by elements of the intellectual
NL, as a way of challenging Western hegemony.
 • The NL faces the same echec as the GNR in using MH, the
whole Nazi issue, and it draws on the same apologetic
apparatus to continue doing so.
• In the meanwhile, by accepting MH’s grand narrative
(purged of German essentialism and overt antisemitism),
we have equated liberalism and socialism (modern, post-
1789 projects) with fascism (avowed attempts to use
modern means to reshape modernity and replace the
Left / Right / ideas of 1789 with those of 1914: martial masculinity, the
front experience as crucible of higher existential truths,
Left national community, total mobilization…)
• Hence, people who oppose NR authoritarian populism
find ourselves compromised by embracing MH premises.
• Mutatis mutandis, if we critique the NR/NL apologetics as
misguided, we undermine the basis of NR uses, or else
show the NRs more ambivalent relationship with interwar
past than apologists admit.
 Bibliography (1/3)
• Above all, Julian Göpffarth, “Rethinking the German nation as German Dasein: Intellectuals and Heidegger’s philosophy in contemporary
German New Right nationalism” academia.edu (for Journal of Political Ideologies)

• Altman, W. H. F. Martin Heidegger and the First World War. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012.
• Bambach, C. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks. Ithaca: Cornell, 2003.
• Caputo, J. C. “Heidegger’s Scandal: Thinking and the Essence of the Victim.” In The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics, edited by T.
Rockmore and J. Margolis. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992.
• Di Cesare, D. “Heidegger—’Jews Self-destructed’: new Black Notebooks reveal philosopher’s shocking take on Shoah.” Corriere delle Sera, Feb.
2015. http://www.corriere.it/english/15_febbraio_09/heidegger-jews-self-destructed-47cd3930-b03b-11e4-8615-d0fd07eabd28.shtml.
• Faye, E. Martin Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Yale: Yale University Press, 2009.
• Fritsche, J. “Heidegger’s Being and Time and National Socialism.” Philosophy Today 56, no. 3 (2012 Fall): 255–284.
• Fritsche, J. “Heidegger in the Kairos of ‘The Occident.’“ Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 21, no. 2 (1999).
• Givsan, H. Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”. Translated by Denis Trierweiler,
Préface by Emmanuel Faye. Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2011.
• Goldschmidt, G.-A. “Heidegger et la langue allemande. I-VI.” Articles tirés d’un séminaire prononcé au Collège international de philosophie, de
2004 à 2007. In Lendemains, no 117- 122/3 (2005–2006). http://classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/Goldschmidt_GA/Goldschmidt_ GA.html.
• Gordon, P. E. “Heidegger in Black.” New York Review of Books October 9, 2014 edition: online at www-site
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/heidegger-in-black/
Bibliography (2/3)
• Heidegger, M. Black Notebooks / Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938. Trans.
Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Heidegger, M. “Only a God Can Save Us: The Spiegel Interview (1966).” In Martin
Heidegger: the Man and the Thinker, edited by Thomas Sheehan and translated by
William J. Richardson. New York: Transaction Publishers, 1981.
• Heinly, B., and P. Gordon. “Heidegger and the Gas Chambers.” The New York Review of
Books, December 2014. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/04/heidegger-and-
gas-chambers/.
• Johnson, G. trans. Heidegger on World Jewry in the Black Notebooks online.
http://www.countercurrents.com/2014/03/heidegger-on-world-jewry-in-the-black-
notebooks/.
• Krell, D. F., “Review Essay: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941.” Research in
Phenomenology 45 (2015): 127–160.
• Losurdo, D. Martin Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West.
New York: Humanity Books, 2001
bibliography (3/3)
• Pégny, G. “Polysemie et Equivoque: Pour Une Philologie Numérique du Corpus Heideggerien (L’exemple du
Terme Dasein).” Études Romano de BRNO 35, no. 1 (2014): 123–139.
• Rastier, F. “Heidegger aujourd’hui: ou le movement reaffirmé.” In Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, la race,
edited by Emmanuel Faye, 267–306.
• Rastier, F. “Le rouge et le brun. L’heideggérisme clarifié par les Cahiers noirs.” Cités 61 (2015): 123–137.
• Rastier, F. “Philosophie et exterminations—en réponse à Alain Badiou.”
http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/essais/20140428.OBS5423/philosophie-et-exterminations-en-reponse-a-
alain-badiou.html.
• Ringer, K. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Hanover :
University of New England Press, 1990.
• Siegel, Zachary. “Seven new Translated Excerpts on Heidegger’s Anti-semitism.” http://www.critical-
theory.com/7-new-translated-excerpts-on-heideggers-anti-semitism/2/.
• Wolin, R. “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.” In
Jewish Review of Books. http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/993/nationalsocialism-world-jewry-and-
the-history-of-being-heideggers-black-notebooks/.